I argue that for those who migrate to other countries for economic survival and political asylum, historical trauma wounds across geographical space. Using the work of David Eng and Nadine Naber on queer and feminist diasporas, I contend that homogeneous discourses of Filipino nationalism simplify and erase transphobia, homophobia, and heterosexism, giving rise to intergenerational conflict and the passing-on of trauma among activists in the United States. Focusing on Filipina/o/x American activist organizations, I center intergenerational conflict among leaders, highlighting (...) transphobic and homophobic struggles that commonly arise in cisgender women majority spaces. I contextualize these struggles, linking them to traumas inherited through legacies of colonialism, feudalism, imperialism, hetero-patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy. I inquire: how does historical and personal trauma merge and shape activist relationships and conflict, and what are activists doing to disrupt and work through historical trauma? I advocate for a decolonizing approach for “acting out” and “working through” trauma and healing collectively. By exploring conflict in organizations shaped by dominant Filipino nationalist ideologies, I resist romantic notions of the diaspora. Revealing the ways that dominant Filipino nationalism perpetuates a simultaneous erasure of nonnormative histories and bodies and epistemological and interpersonal violence among activists, I reject homogeneous conceptions of nationalism and open up possibilities for decolonial organizing praxis. (shrink)

This article argues that Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection lays out a theory that is not universal in its application, but rather details the violent emergence and defence of Eurocentric, colonial and orientalist subjectivities and related hierarchical social orders. The Eurocentrism found in Kristeva’s political and theoretical stances are referenced, with detailed attention paid to explicating how her theory of abjection describes a brutal, colonising, psychological and social mechanism. This framework is applied to transphobia and (...) its manifestations. It is centrally argued that gender diversity, trans rights and trans inclusivity may be the targets of multiple and compounding abjection processes. The essay concludes with looking at how young trans people are starting to refuse transphobic abjection to survive, to thrive and to revitalise gender diversity. (shrink)

This section includes eighty-six short original essays commissioned for the inaugural issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Written by emerging academics, community-based writers, and senior scholars, each essay in this special issue, “Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty-First-Century Transgender Studies,” revolves around a particular keyword or concept. Some contributions focus on a concept central to transgender studies; others describe a term of art from another discipline or interdisciplinary area and show how it might relate to transgender studies. While far from (...) providing a complete picture of the field, these keywords begin to elucidate a conceptual vocabulary for transgender studies. Some of the submissions offer a deep and resilient resistance to the entire project of mapping the field terminologically; some reveal yet-unrealized critical potentials for the field; some take existing terms from canonical thinkers and develop the significance for transgender studies; some offer overviews of well-known methodologies and demonstrate their applicability within transgender studies; some suggest how transgender issues play out in various fields; and some map the productive tensions between trans studies and other interdisciplines. (shrink)

This essay meditates on the short film American Reflexxx and the violent laughter directed at a non-trans woman in public space when she was assumed to be trans. Drawing from work on the ideological and institutional dimensions of transphobia by Talia Bettcher and Viviane Namaste, alongside Sara Ahmed's writing on the cultural politics of disgust, I reverse engineer this specific instance of laughter into a meditation on the social meaning of transphobic laughter in public space. I then look at (...) racialized transphobic laughter directed against Tyra Hunter and Miriam Rivera to emphasize transmisogynist laughter as a denial of contact, intimacy, and care. Building on Kate Manne's work on misogyny, I conclude that a key aspect of transmisogyny is the use of transfeminine people as a source of dehumanized, disavowed, and disposable care and intimacy. Laughter and accompanying violence against trans women serves to reinforce this dynamic. (shrink)

Deeply rooted structures of racism, ableism, misogyny, ageism, and transphobia hurt great numbers of people, exposing them to intolerance, economic exclusion, and physical harm around the globe. Billions of land animals suffer and die annually in concentrated feeding operations and slaughterhouses. Our planet and all who live here are in perilous straights as the climate changes. In the face of such grievous problems, people who want to find positive ways to respond often grapple with difficult questions about how to (...) make a difference. Effective Altruism has arisen as an attempt to help answer these questions, encouraging people to give as much money as they can in the most effective ways to address human and animal suffering. But the Effective Altruists’ answers support some of the very social structures that cause suffering, undermining its efforts to “do the most good.” The Good It Promises, The Harm It Does is the first book-length critique of Effective Altruism. It brings together a diverse group of activists and scholars to explore Effective Altruism’s failure to meaningfully address forms of human and animal suffering. (shrink)

Who are you to tell me what I should do? What gives you the right to order me around? How dare you call me a racist!? Many of us have heard these refrains over the course of the 2016 US Presidential campaign and since the election of Donald Trump. We try to talk to Trump supporters—family, former classmates, home-town friends, and online acquaintances—about the racism, xenophobia, sexism, transphobia, ableism, and authoritarianism that some of us have judged to be endemic (...) to his campaign and nascent administration. We try to hold them accountable for supporting him, and, almost inevitably, we meet with responses like these.In this essay, I aim to develop an understanding of these encounters by framing them as... (shrink)

There is already a long history of conversation between feminism and deconstruction, feminist theorists and Derrida or Derrideans. That conversation has been by turns fraught and constructive. While some of these interactions have occurred in queer feminism, to date little has been done to stage an engagement between deconstruction and transfeminism. Naysayers might think that transfeminism is too recent and too identitarian a discourse to meaningfully interact with Derrida’s legacy. On the other hand, perhaps Derrida’s work was too embedded in (...) second wave feminism, and in some cases implicit misogyny and transphobia, to meet transfeminism on its own playing field. And yet, I think both suspicions shortchange these discourses. In this article, I stage a conversation between Derrida and two writers working in the area of trans feminism: Paisley Currah and Julia Serano. I explore, in particular, how their conceptions of gender neutrality or gender pluralism are complementary and together change the so-called “question of woman,” from a philosophical and political perspective. (shrink)

This is the first book to offer a philosophical engagement with microaggressions. It aims to provide an intersectional analysis of microaggressions that cuts across multiple dimensions of oppression and marginalization, and to engage a variety of perspectives that have been sidelined within the discipline of philosophy. The volume gathers a diverse group of contributors: philosophers of color, philosophers with disabilities, philosophers of various nationalities and ethnicities, and philosophers of several gender identities. Their unique frames of analysis articulate both how the (...) concept of microaggressions can be used to clarify and sharpen our understanding of subtler aspects of oppression and how analysis, expansion, and reconceiving the notion of a microaggression can deepen and extend its explanatory power. The essays in the volume seek to defend microaggressions from common critiques and to explain their impact beyond the context of college students. Some of the guiding questions that this volume explores include, but are not limited to, the following: Can microaggressions be established as a viable scientific concept? What roles do microaggressions play in other oppressive phenomena like transphobia, fat phobia, and abelism? How can epistemological challenges around microaggressions be addressed via feminist theory, critical race theory, disability theory, or epistemologies of ignorance? What insights can be gleaned from intersectional analyses of microaggressions? Are there domain-specific analyses of microaggressions that would give insight to features of that domain, i.e. microaggressions related to sexuality, athletics, immigration status, national origin, body type, or ability. Microaggressions and Philosophyfeatures cutting-edge research on an important topic that will appeal to a wide range of students and scholars across disciplines. It includes perspectives from philosophy of psychology, empirically informed philosophy, feminist philosophy, critical race theory, disability theory, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, and social and political philosophy. (shrink)

Some authors in disability studies have identified limits of both the medical and social models of disability. They have developed an alternative model, which I call the ‘composite model of disability’, to theorise societies’ ableist norms and structures along with the subjective/phenomenological experience of disability. This model maintains that ableist oppression is not the only source of suffering for disabled people: impairment can be as well. From a feminist, queer, trans activist, anti-ableist perspective and using an intersectional, autoethnographic methodology, I (...) apply this composite model of disability to trans identities to consider the potentially ‘debilitating’ aspects of transness. I argue that transness, like disability, has too often been perceived from two perspectives, medical or social, without the benefit of a third option. From a medical perspective, transness is reduced to an individual pathology curable with hormonal/surgical treatments, a conceptualisation that erases structural oppression. From a social point of view, transness is conceptualised as a neutral condition and variation in sex/gender identity. In this model, structural oppression (transphobia/cisgenderism) is seen as the only cause of ‘trans suffering’. I argue that, just as the medical and social models of disability provide limited opportunities for reflection on the complex experience of disability, medical and social understandings of transness, respectively, are insufficient to describe the complexity of trans experience. I explore the possibilities presented by the application of a composite model of disability in trans studies. By both problematising cisgenderist oppression and acknowledging trans people's subjective experiences of suffering through some of the debilitating aspects of transness, this composite model avoids the pitfalls of the medical and social models. The application of tools from disability studies to trans issues uncovers cisnormativity in disability movements and denounces ableism in trans movements. This will, I hope, solidify alliances between these communities and fields of study. (shrink)

An audacious and accessible guide to feminist philosophy—its origins, its key ideas, and its latest directions. Think Like a Feminist is an irreverent yet rigorous primer that unpacks over two hundred years of feminist thought. In a time when the word feminism triggers all sorts of responses, many of them conflicting and misinformed, Professor Carol Hay provides this balanced, clarifying, and inspiring examination of what it truly means to be a feminist today. She takes the reader from conceptual questions of (...) sex, gender, intersectionality, and oppression to the practicalities of talking to children, navigating consent, and fighting for adequate space on public transit, without deviating from her clear, accessible, conversational tone. Think Like a Feminist is equally a feminist starter kit and an advanced refresher course, connecting longstanding controversies to today’s headlines. Think Like a Feminist takes on many of the essential questions that feminism has risen up to answer: Is it nature or nurture that’s responsible for our gender roles and identities? How is sexism connected to racism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, and other forms of oppression? Who counts as a woman, and who gets to decide? Why have men gotten away with rape and other forms of sexual violence for so long? What responsibility do women themselves bear for maintaining sexism? What, if anything, can we do to make society respond to women’s needs and desires? Ferocious, insightful, practical, and unapologetically opinionated, Think Like a Feminist is the perfect book for anyone who wants to understand the continuing effects of misogyny in society. By exploring the philosophy underlying the feminist movement, Carol Hay brings today’s feminism into focus, so we can deliberately shape the feminist future. (shrink)

StyleLikeU is a hugely successful online social media platform that presents itself as a social justice movement related to body acceptance. Presenting moving personal stories, it offers a site for what it calls ‘diverse individuals’ to share their experiences as part of promoting individual self-acceptance in the face of a world that prioritizes one kind of body over another, which take the form of ableism, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ageism, sizeism and prejudice against disfigurement. Drawing out the discursive script (...) carried across the platform, we show how, beneath the rhetoric of progressiveness, social justice becomes a kind of personal therapy, related to empowerment and transformation, which erases actual differences in personal circumstances and the very forces of injustice. We place StyleLikeU into broader scholarly concerns about the neoliberal colonization of identity politics, diversity and intersectionality in institutions and in branding, drawing attention to how this can form one part of what are now presented as social justice movements. (shrink)

This article takes up the commonplace antagonism between ‘second wave’ lesbian feminism and ‘third wave’ queer theory and politics, and argues that the antagonism itself is both historically and politically reductive. First, I make the case that ‘third wave’ queer theory actually shares its central concern – namely, accountability for intra-group inequalities – with lesbian feminism. However, I argue that ‘third wave’ queer theories ultimately founder in their bid for a more reflexive political praxis by tending to hold others – (...) lesbian feminists – accountable for ongoing inequalities rather than grappling with them directly. By contrast, I show that lesbian feminists from the late 1970s to the late 1980s developed a reparative politics that succeeds where ‘third wave’ theories stumble by developing relationships of mutual accountability around issues of race and racism, and by establishing processes by which to repair these relationships when they founder. I conclude by arguing that a fuller attention to the history of lesbian feminism, in fact, offers important resources for feminists and queers dealing with issues of intra-group marginalization, such as transphobia, in the present. (shrink)

The rapper Mykki Blanco is lauded as a trailblazer in the contemporary queer hip hop movement, and it is this reputation that, in part, makes the single of her debut album so curious. The song ‘Loner’ is unequivocally pop and explores health, loneliness, love and sex, echoing Blanco's shifting relationship to gender, genre, sobriety and serostatus. Amidst three key performances of this song, Blanco's consciousness was at various stages of development and they reflect her journey into trans womanhood and through (...) HIV seroconversion. As such, her relationship to gender and disability comes in and out of focus as the legibility of her art and affect jockey across black gay, gender fluid and trans modes of self-determination. This confluence of Blanco's affect, genders, music and performances leads to certain questions. What constellates loneliness during a black trans process of becoming? What collateral genealogies and intellectual and expressive cultural formations come to bear on the affective attachments of black queer, trans, feminist art? In this article, I offer an account of the antagonistic relationship between affect studies and black studies in order to contextualise the stakes of thinking affect alongside gender and race. I also forward a theory of ecstatic loneliness which attends to the ways in which anti-blackness, HIV stigma and transphobia produce negative affects that function as the basis for imagining a trans-inclusive care practice that is empathetic to the experience of seroconversion. Through analysis of three performances of ‘Loner’, I find that wayward commitments to gender lead to various emplacements of the song in black cisgender, transgender and gender-fluid discourses of affect, community and performance, resulting in an interdisciplinary method of black and queer self-making that is underexamined in affect studies scholarship. (shrink)

Queer theorists have considered the problems concerning the political strategy of using LGBT rights to justify racist xenophobia and using homo/transphobia to consolidate heterosexist nationalism. Their timely interventions are important in exposing state violence in the name of human rights and sovereign equality, but they have offered no alternative. They may also have reinforced the assumption of state science. This assumption is based on a trinity structure of the nation-state-sovereignty of ‘modern, self-determining men’, who are against each other and (...) thereby co-built the so-called ‘international’. State-centric internationalism produces exclusionary effects that undermine the rights of sexual and gender minorities. To address this, I first consider the debate over ‘LGBT rights as human rights’, and identify two types of cultural relativism (epistemological and political) as the categories to formulate a decolonial response to the debate. In this article, queer political theorising is pushed forward to: 1) critically evaluate universalism, 2) differentiate cultural relativism (opposing the political version of it) and 3) revise the epistemological version with decolonial-queer praxis. I propose a pluralist approach to sovereignty and human rights; informed by this approach, the lack of international consensus is remedied by recognising the polyvocality within transnational queer activism beyond the monopoly of states’ representation of their own peoples. This proposal also aims to decentre modern statecraft from the political imagination of contemporary international studies scholarship. (shrink)

Trans of Color inclusion is not simply a gesture of affectionate commitment to María Lugones's theory of impure communities. Rather, it is required for the enactment of her liberatory theory within and across communities of color. While María Lugones's historico-theoretical analysis of the colonial/modern gender system relies upon anthropological citations of Native gender and sexual diversity, she argues that we must bracket gender for the benefit of [cis]women of color feminisms. However, if this bracketing does not first carefully uncover cisgender (...) histories of violence, then this decolonial feminist praxis reinscribes the invisibility of transphobia, racism, and colonialism's violent intersections, performing another mode of erasure and silence on Trans, Two-Spirit, and Nonbinary Native, Black, and Latinx peoples. In placing Lugones's texts into conversation with the voices of Two-Spirit and Trans of Color theorists, I argue that the mutilation of trans flesh makes possible the integration of [cis]People of Color into the gender–sex binary even if as failures. More important, this essay offers the beginnings of a phenomenological account of Trans World-Traveling, where the unruliness of Two-Spirit and Trans of Color bodies cocoons decolonial worlds from within the spiraling folds of abject flesh—always already in infra-communication with ancestral pasts, presents, and futures. (shrink)

Male-dominated and sex segregated elite professional and amateur sport1 in North America constitutes a "sport nexus" (Burstyn, 1999; Heywood & Dworkin, 2003) that combines economic and cultural influence to reinforce and perpetuate gender injustice. The sport nexus is an androcentric sex-segregated commercially powerful set of institutions that is highly visible and at the same time almost completely taken for granted to the extent that its anti-democratic impetus goes virtually unnoticed. The sport nexus’s hegemonic role in defining sporting norms (Coakley & (...) Donnelly, 2004) means that its role in shaping lower level amateur and recreational sporting institutions and cultures is highly significant. Fraser (2007) defines gender justice, and hence democracy, in terms of "participatory parity," that is, material and cultural equality for women. The sport nexus itself is characterized by highly gendered occupational segregation (Coventry, 2004). It further contributes to gender injustice, homophobia and transphobia by promoting the ideology of the two sex system (Fausto-Sterling, 2000) and gendering citizenship as fundamentally male (Burstyn, 1999). Feminist strategies for sport reformation attempt to reduce or eradicate the role of the sport nexus in legitimating and perpetuating gender injustice. In this article I consider the potential of these strategies and conclude with a set of recommendations for transforming organized sport at both elite and recreational levels. (shrink)

In this essay, I sketch the contours of a critical phenomenology of walking. I begin by briefly characterizing the critical phenomenological project and marking some of its invitations to think method and movement alongside one another. Then, I explore two modes of doing a critical phenomenology of walking: attending to how one walks and when and where one walks. I revisit and reread, in particular, the stories of Charlie Howard and Latisha King, whose walks not only signaled a unique comportment (...) in the world, but a comportment so offensive as to be extinguished by a fatal admixture of homophobia, transphobia, and racism. Finally, I close by considering the conditions under which a critical phenomenology of walking can be ameliorative—that is, how it can participate in liberatory projects of thinking and making. Drawing on Michel de Certeau and María Lugones, I argue not only that a critical phenomenology of walking can diagnose how structures of oppression constrain walking chances in the world, but also can witness how walking critiques those very structures. Walking is a movement of resistance and reimagination against the constraints of embodiment and subjectivity so singularly inherited and enforced. Traversing the space of this inquiry, I aim to complexify my understanding of walking as a practice, but also to deepen my appreciation of critical phenomenology as a method. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article offers an account of cis sense in order to draw attention to the relation between meaning-making and cisnormativity. By drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s notion of institution and phenomenological considerations of habit, it is argued that cis sense is a mode of perception that institutes and sediments an individual and social habit of the third-person conferral of gender that occludes gender variance and creates the social conditions necessary for transphobia. This consideration of cis sense challenges the mainstream conception (...) of cis as an identity category, highlighting instead that it is a habitual disposition, and gestures to the significance of trans sense as an alternative institution of gendered meaning. (shrink)

Some of the most virulent public trans-exclusionary radical feminist discourse in the UK follows the grammatical form of the third conditional: if I had grown up now, I would have been persuaded to transition. This articulation of the hypothetical threat of a transition that did not happen but is imagined, in retrospect, to be not just possible but forcibly enacted plays an important role, both politically and psychically, in a contemporary political landscape that is threatening the livelihoods of trans children. (...) Interrogating this discourse via an analysis of an open letter by J.K. Rowling, and a documentary by Stella O’Malley, this article asks: what might we learn about contemporary transphobia in the UK if we took seriously the grammar of TERF discourse animated by trans childhood? It argues that while the third conditional grammar of TERF discourse could articulate a politics of solidarity between cis and trans positionalities and politics, its potential for a shared political standpoint is routinely interrupted by the defence mechanisms that are oriented by the psychic life of the child. Interrogating these defence mechanisms at the level of the cultural, the article traces out paranoia as well as projection, as two main modes of TERF engagement with trans childhood. The article thus engages with the range of real and fantasmatic impossibilities that haunt the trans child both in the present and the past, and it contributes to the growing body of scholarship on trans childhoods. In doing so, it makes the case that public discourse on trans children should desist from hypothetical third conditional claims, and instead find ways of embracing trans childhoods unconditionally. (shrink)

This paper seeks to make “racism” strange, by exploring its invocation in the sociolinguistic context of LGBTQI+ activism in Greece, where it is used in ways that may be jarring to anglophone readers. In my ongoing research on the conceptualisation of interwoven oppressions in Greek social movement contexts, I have been interested in understanding how the widespread use of the term “racism” as a superordinate category to reference forms of oppression not only based on “race,” “ethnicity,” and “citizenship” (e.g., racism, (...) nationalism, xenophobia) but also those based on gender, gender identity, and sexuality (e.g., sexism, transphobia, and homophobia) relates to the increased adoption of “intersectionality” in movement discourses. In ordinary parlance, this commonplace usage of “racism” as an “umbrella term” nevertheless retains its etymological link to “race,” while its scope is extended to other regimes of superiority/inferiority or privilege/oppression. If intersectionality presupposes that oppressions are ontologically multiple and analytically separable, the use of “racism” as an umbrella concept seems to point in the other direction, implying that all forms of oppression originate from a common source, have a similar ontological basis, or generate privilege for the same social agents, who deploy similar tactics vis-à-vis oppressed groups. My research examines how intersectionality—widely understood as a multi-axial theory of oppression, which contends that power relations are multiple, distinct, and irreducible to one another, yet converge simultaneously in the experiences of multiply oppressed social groups—relates to the use of “racism” as a struggle concept in Greek, but also in other languages commonly used in Greece, such as Albanian (racizmi) and Arabic (eunsuria). In this paper, I examine how these two vocabularies—of racism and intersectionality—are operative in movement discourses, but also how they shape, and are shaped by activists’ perceptions, analyses, and theories of oppression. (shrink)

BackgroundNormality is both a descriptive and a normative concept. Undoubtedly, the normal often operates normatively as an exclusionary tool of cultural authority. While it has prominently found its way into the field of medicine, it remains rather unclear in what sense it is used. Thus, our study sought to elucidate people’s understanding of normality in medicine and to identify concepts that are linked to it.MethodsUsing convenient sampling, we carried out a cross-sectional survey. Since the survey was advertised through social media, (...) we employed an online survey. We performed descriptive and inferential analyses. Predictors were chosen in a theory-driven manner.ResultsIn total, 323 persons from 21 countries completed the survey. Analysis revealed that the overall acceptance of normality in medicine was associated with notions of injustice, authority, discrimination, and with having a medical profession. More precisely, for the field of mental health, injustice insensitivity, genderism and transphobia, and authority were positively associated with a person’s acceptance of normality; and, for the field of physical health, injustice insensitivity and having a medical profession were positively associated with a person’s acceptance of normality. Finally, participants’ acceptance of the use of normality in the area of mental health was lower than in the area of physical health.ConclusionsWhat is considered normal has implications for clinical practice, both at an individual and at a policy-level. Acknowledging its normalistic condition, the discipline of medicine has to confront itself with its own contribution to the augmentation of social inequalities through the excessive reliance on the concept of normality. Research that centers the lived experiences of those who are being systematically marginalized because they are deemed abnormal is needed. By empirically elucidating the conceptual relationships between normality in medicine and other variables, we provide points of leverage to deprive normality of its normative power. For medicine, this is needed to first do no harm. (shrink)

Statistics circulate with ambivalence in governance settings and mass publics—both extolled as authoritative knowledge and the object of distrustful scrutiny. In the field of human rights activism, where the means to create authoritative knowledge operates asymmetrically between activists, organizations, and state actors, this makes statistical production and circulation subject to an intense politics of knowledge. LGBTI human rights actors in Brazil, for instance, constantly produce numbers that endeavor to make homophobia and transphobia epistemically and affectively real to various audiences. (...) From community surveys of personal experiences of violence or discrimination, to civil society reports of homicides, to federal government reports from human rights hotline complaints, LGBTI activists are awash in figures where they find themselves the producers, consumers, and subject material of such data. This article documents how activists and civil servants count violence, constructing homophobia and transphobia as knowable objects. These counting practices emerge from activists’ counterpublic circulations of knowledge about objects as well as epistemic infrastructures (police, journalistic coverage, hotlines) through which LGBTI peoples’ experience becomes refracted. Aware of these complications, activists deploy epistemic doubt and affective certainty to the field of statistics—utilizing the knowledge they offer while questioning whether violence can be measured at all. (shrink)

For individuals pursuing medically assisted gender transition, gender-affirming surgical treatments, such as oophorectomy (removal of the ovaries) and orchiectomy (removal of the testicles), cause sterility, and gender-affirming hormone treatment with medications (i.e., testosterone and estrogen) may negatively impact infertility. The major United States (US) medical associations already endorse fertility preservation (FP) through cryopreservation (i.e., “freezing” egg and sperm) for transgender individuals. Despite these endorsements from the relevant medical societies, medical insurance coverage for FP remains very limited in the US. Given (...) the high out-of-pocket costs for FP services, fertility preservation remains financially out of reach for many transgender individuals who may desire it. We present an ethical justification for universal FP coverage for all transgender and gender diverse (TGD) individuals who request this option during medically assisted gender transition. First, we argue that gender-affirming medical care is analogous to other medical interventions and treatment regimens that compromise fertility, such as cancer care, and that both types of interventions need to be afforded the same medical benefits and assistance in pursuing fertility goals. Second, we argue that the lack of FP for transgender individuals contributes to the ongoing and profound transphobia and anti-trans bias that has been exacerbated in the past several years across the healthcare landscape in the United States. We argue that the provision of FP coverage for transgender individuals is necessary for clinicians and third-party payers to state their unequivocal support for TGD patients and their healthcare needs. (shrink)

Looking from a critical race perspective at Wittig’s lesbian, in this article, I draw two conclusions. First, I suggest that it is actually trans exclusionary lesbians' own transphobia that makes them cis-gendered. And second, it becomes clear that the politicisation of choosing and refusing gender needs to acknowledge racism’s shaping role in the construction of gender. My approach not only intervenes in transphobic feminisms that are obsessed with simplistic understandings of sexual violence, but also questions rigid cis/trans binaries and (...) rejects accounts of trans/gender that ignore the role of racialisation for the emergence of gender. The main question that I address is: how to conceptualise the complex im/possibilities of refusing and choosing in relation to gender? It is my aim to connect seemingly disparate knowledge productions on genderqueer, trans and other ‘impossible’ genders and sexualities. I am particularly interested in a phenomenon that can be described as ‘lesbian haunting’: the ambivalences one will find in tracing lesbian theory in relation to transing gender. With this, it is my attempt to rethink lesbian, queer and trans feminist approaches on violence, and to investigate the role of sexual violence within broader concepts of violence. More specifically, in order to understand both ‘gender’ and ‘transing gender’ as always already racialised, my approach builds on theories that identify ‘ungendering’ as an effect of normative racial violence (e.g. Spillers, 1987; Lewis, 2017; Snorton, 2017). (shrink)

In this paper, my aim is to develop a phenomenological understanding of discrimination from the perspective of the discriminator. Since early existential phenomenology, the phenomenon of discrimination has received a great deal of attention. While much of this work has focused on the experience of the discriminatee, recent scholarship has begun to reflect on the intentional structures on the side of the discriminator. In a contribution to this trend, I argue that our sense of what is (ab)normal plays a constitutively (...) significant role in the reiteration and reinforcement of harmful discriminatory practices. More specifically, I argue that Husserl's distinction between two forms of normality, namely, concordance-normality [Einstimmigkeit] and optimal-normality [Optimalität], is an important tool for illuminating otherwise overlooked aspects of the discriminator's experience. I achieve this by demonstrating how these two notions of normality play distinct constitutive roles when comparing deliberate acts of discrimination committed with malintent, compared with more primordial, habitual, and prereflective expectations which are already discriminatory in nucleo. I argue that at the heart of discriminatory practices there is a naïve, normalizing attempt to stabilize concordance at the expense of critical self-reflection, normative revisions, and enriched horizons of expectation. In doing so, this paper provides a novel and important contribution to philosophical discussions surrounding discrimination. (shrink)

In this essay, I reply to critiques of my article “In Defense of Transracialism.” Echoing Chloë Taylor and Lewis Gordon’s remarks on the controversy over my article, I first reflect on the lack of intellectual generosity displayed in response to my paper. In reply to Kris Sealey, I next argue that it is dangerous to hinge the moral acceptability of a particular identity or practice on what she calls a collective co-signing. In reply to Sabrina Hom, I suggest that relying (...) on the language of passing to describe transracialism is potentially misleading. In reply to Tina Botts, I both defend analytic philosophy of race against her multiple criticisms and suggest that Botts’s remarks risk complicity with a form of transphobia that Talia Mae Bettcher calls the Basic Denial of Authenticity. I end by gesturing toward a more inclusive understanding of racial identity. (shrink)

This study delves into the manifestation and characteristics of hate speech in the Greek online public sphere, specifically exploring its most prominent forms, namely racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, nationalism, sexism, and homophobia/transphobia. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, the research analyzes popular Greek online news media. It aims to uncover the visibility and operational patterns of hate speech, addressing key questions about its prevalence and presentation on these platforms. Findings reveal the normalization of discriminatory speech, particularly sexism and nationalism, in the (...) digital landscape. Moreover, distinct themes and linguistic elements associated with different forms of hate speech highlight the intertwined nature of these discriminatory expressions. This research sheds light on the pervasive nature of hate speech in Greece’s online realm, emphasizing its implications for democratic principles. (shrink)

This paper examines Harold Garfinkel's notion of the natural attitude about sex and his claim that it is fundamentally moral in nature. The author looks beneath the natural attitude in order to explain its peculiar resilience and oppressive force. There she reveals a moral order grounded in the dichotomously sexed bodies so constituted through boundaries governing privacy and decency. In particular, naked bodies are sex-differentiated within a system of genital representation through gender presentation—a system that helps constitute the very boundaries (...) between the public and private. (shrink)

Trans Philosophy: Meaning and Mattering will be the first authoritative collection to establish trans philosophy as a unique field of inquiry. It defines trans philosophy as philosophical work that is accountable to and illuminative of transgender experiences, histories, cultural production, and politics. The book will showcase work from a range of fresh and established voices in this nascent field. It will address a variety of topics (e.g. embodiment, identity, language, law, politics, transphobia), utilize diverse philosophical methods (e.g. analytic, continental, (...) and pluralist; theoretical, experimental, and applied), and attend to significant intersections between trans identity and class, disability, race, and sexuality. Across language and politics, feminism and phenomenology, decolonial theory and disability studies, trans philosophy concerns itself with trans worldmaking in all its excruciating beauty and mundanity. (shrink)

Childbearing trans and nonbinary people are confronted with the heteronormative and cisgender frameworks that underpin “maternity” services. We explored the educational needs of 108 perinatal staff in the United Kingdom as related to the needs of trans and nonbinary service users. Participants were most confident in formulating care plans and least confident about the provision of colleagues’ perinatal care in this context. While the majority of participants were positive toward the trans and nonbinary communities, they considered that those communities remain (...) marginalized in perinatal services. Transphobic, anti-trans, and nonbinary attitudes were highlighted by our respondents. Our findings suggest that caregivers witnessed transphobia among colleagues and were apprehensive themselves about providing care to childbearing trans and nonbinary people. They reported a cisheteronormative model of care that lacked awareness of trans and nonbinary issues. The educational needs identified included information about the practicalities of childbearing as a trans or nonbinary person, how to use inclusive language effectively, and creating policies and processes for supporting childbearing trans and nonbinary people. These caregivers’ preferences included hearing from trans and nonbinary people and sharing best practices among themselves, with open discussions about how to be inclusive. (shrink)

In the summer and autumn of 2015, I met with activists in Athens and Thessaloniki, with the aim of collaboratively producing a conceptual mapping of LGBTQ social movement discourses. My point of entry was the use and signification of “racism” in LGBTQ discourses (and more generally in common parlance in Greek) as a superordinate or “umbrella” concept that includes “homophobic” and “transphobic” but also “misogynist,” “ageist,” “ableist,” and class- or status-based prejudice, discrimination, and oppression, in addition to that, of course, (...) based on “race” or “ethnicity.” As a political theorist whose work over the past decade has focused on the concept of intersectionality, its origins in US Black feminist thought, and its transnational travel beyond the Anglo-American context in which it originated, I wanted to examine how this use of “racism” relates to the concept of “intersectionality” which is now emergent in the Greek social movement context, in particular in LGBTQ and feminist discourses, yet which has not been engaged by academics, neither in the nascent and struggling field of gender studies, nor in legal theory. How do LGBTQ activists define the referential scope and semantic contents of these concepts, based on what knowledges grounded in lived experiences, and on what kinds of social movement strategies? How do these concepts and their theoretical underpinnings reflect or direct activists’ political resistance to the widespread violence that they identify within and on the borders of Greek society? Do they enable coalition-building with other minoritised groups targeted by institutional and interpersonal “racism”? In approaching these questions, I wanted to trace the ways in which my interlocutors produce theories, through which social conditions of racial and heteropatriarchal power are made visible, are explained, and are contested—conditions that they identify with the institutions—“nation, religion, and family”—that make up what they termed the “triptych” or the “syntax of power.” What emerged in my conversations with activists were vivid accounts of the atmospheric violence facing LGBTQ people in Greece, its institutional and interpersonal manifestations, both banal and extreme. Indeed, many activists defined violence as the quintessence of oppression as such, and as what links various systems or forms of oppression—or, “racisms”—to one another. In what follows, I draw on these conversations not to answer the questions with which I set out, but, primarily, those that my interlocutors generated, which concern, ultimately, the unlivability of queer and trans lives—the violence LGBTQ people face and resist, particularly at the intersections of youth, poverty, disability, rurality, racialisation, criminalisation, and patriarchy. (shrink)