Trans* lives, histories and activism
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Welcome to the LSE Events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences.

Hello everyone, welcome to our event. Those on livestream, you are welcome as well. Thank you so much for joining us tonight. It's a great pleasure for me to chair this event and for us to have you all for this important conversation which is co-hosted by Department of Gender Studies and Department of International History at our LSE.

A special welcome to our incredible panelists who will be sharing their valuable insights on trans lives, activism and histories, Professor Susan Stryker and Dr. Onigast.

I am Emrah Karakush, an LSE fellow in Gender and Human Rights in the Department of Gender Studies, and I am delighted to chair this event alongside our wonderful speakers.

Sadly, our beloved Dr. Essem Rodriguez will not be here with us tonight due to urgent travel. But we will be sharing their article live stream. So, yeah, we love you, Essem. Before introducing our speakers, I want to take a moment to reflect on the team of this gathering.

Many of us are witnessing, living through the accelerating rise of far-right politics and anti-gender movements and their relentless attacks on marginalized communities across the world. More powerful, more strategic. Wielding extensive capital, new technologies and public support, shaping public desires seeking to push us further to the margins, silence dissent and criminalize resistance.

The already violent colonial politics of both liberal and authoritarian orders are being transformed into something even more brutal.

In the face of this resurgence of revanchist fascism, so-called critical observers, public figures and scholars tell us that targeting trans, queer, black and brown lives by the name of new right and anti-gender movements is either a mere populist strategy, a slight handoff distract from real politics or sheer nonsense devoid of logic and sense.

At first glance, the latter seems to fit the absurdity of the public figures we see today. But to accept either claim is to misunderstand the stakes. I think our trans comrades, friends, lovers, mothers, sources of inspiration, those whose struggles leave us indebted,

whose lives, resistance connect us across time and space, shaping the very contours of our fight for liberation. And it is from this place of indebtedness and shared histories that I want to push back against these claims. What we see today is not merely the work of state mindset, seeking to preserve white supremacist, cis-heteropatriarchal norms. Neither is it completely new.

It is something more visceral, more violent, a right-wing ideological bombization enacted through intimate interventions, reformulating not just how we live but also how we are allowed to die. Let me rephrase this Foucauldian statement: it's not a question of who can live or die. Those deemed disposable were determined centuries ago.

From the horror that Palestinians have endured for the past 75 years to the violence a trans woman who was gone missing with her unknown name,

I'm sure that was a beautiful name. Last week, after she was violently taken into custody in Syria and to the operationalization of anti-trans attacks across the world, we have witnessed enough of these atrocities that are cast as ordinary events. We are forced into numbness, forced into a state of having no sense, no feeling toward what's happening to our people.

lands, our comrades, our friends, our lovers, our mothers, and sources of inspiration. Declared senselessness by those who are claimed to make no sense.

But tonight we refuse these fascist logics and senses. Tonight we gather to make sense of the times we are living through, to center the lives, histories, and activisms of those to whom we are most indebted, as we carve new forms of activism and resistance. Now let me introduce our wonderful speakers.

Onni Gass is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Nottingham. Onni is a cultural and intellectual historian of the British Empire in the long 18th century. Their research asked what it means to be human and how the boundaries of human and non-human animal were constructed in the 18th century. In particular, they look at

the relationship between European colonial expansion, ideas of a male and female sex binary, and the meaning of the human. Welcome and thank you so much for being with us. I am just going to... You can come.

And Susan Stryker is a professor at Emeriti of Gender and Human Studies at the University of Arizona. She's the author of Transgender History, co-editor of the Transgender Studies Reader, co-founder of TSQ, Transgender Studies Quarterly, as well as the co-editor of the Emmy-winning documentary film Screaming Queens, The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria.

She currently holds a distinguished visiting professor appointment at Stanford University's Michel Kleinman Institute of Gender Research. She was also my PhD advisor and my source of inspiration throughout my career. Welcome, Susan, and thank you so much for being with us tonight. So the order of events. Thank you.

So the order of events is going to be as follows. Oni is going to speak for 20 minutes and then Susan will talk for 20 minutes. And then I will ask two broad questions, then we will return to you for Q&A session. Please welcome with me our wonderful speakers.

I don't want to do it twice, so I had to make sure I could definitely go this time. Thank you very much for inviting me, Imre, and having me here at LSE. LSE is Department of International History.

taught me a long time ago the joys of precarity and the importance of a good union rep for which I am forever grateful. And of course the Gender Institute is one of very few in this country has produced some of the most important scholarship that has certainly informed my thinking

and ideas, so I'm very grateful to everyone who's been involved with that and for the invitation today. So I want to begin by acknowledging the way that the multiple states of emergency that we're in stifle our creativity and our ability to think.

Yesterday, another ruling against migrants and refugees. Today, day of action for Palestine. And genocidal violence and threats of violence continue. Ceasefire appears to crumble. The days before, puberty blockers banned for trans kids here and in the US. Athletics banned for trans women. Even the most vague and minimal protections for trans people challenged and crumbled.

higher education, which for some of us has felt like a place of hope or at least a way to carve out a space of hope, is imploding.

Now, none of this is new, and none of it is surprising. Not the campaigns of violence, not the diminishing of trans life, not the erosion of HE, not even Trump. It's relentless, and it's boring, and it's dull, and it's headache-inducing. It's emergency, and it's the new normal. It's exhausting, and it's depressing, and it's difficult not to...

melt into a puddle of despair. And I speak as someone who's so intensely fortunate to be in a space of relative comfort and security. I can't imagine what it's like for those of you who are at the sharp end, multiple sharp ends, of these wide-ranging acts of violence, none of them reducible or comparable to the other. So in the midst of this moment of

toxicity and despair, I think why history? What's the point of that? They say, you know, oh, we're supposed to learn from the past, but we know that never happens. So what? So I'm going to talk about, to try and get myself up somewhere, only for me, I'm going to talk about the three moments in trans history and why they matter, and why thinking historically might help in an inhospitable age. So we're going to start.

the obvious, of course, mermaids, merfolk, and other beings of natural history, the octopus, the platypus, the swallow, beings that sowed confusion and disorder into the minds of natural historians, white men, mostly, in Europe, but not exclusively, beings that have longer and wider histories than the Linnaean categories into which they did not fit.

Why? Come on, they're beautiful, but be serious, these are terrible times. Why are you being so frivolous as to talk about mermaids? Because they're wonderful and beautiful to think with. And what I love the most about the history of merfolk is that nobody knows what exactly they are, what they really are. It's an unanswered question across time.

So-called civilized societies have relegated mermaids to non-existence because they cannot bear the fact that there are no certainties, including about their sex. And yet they resurface again and again. And I love that look of confusion, that moment of complete incomprehension towards me, as a historian of mermaids,

towards mermaids, towards all of us who are trans and non-binary, from people who just want to know the innocent question, but what are you? And they don't get an answer. And I love that. That's why I love mermaids. That's why I'm studying mermaids. One of the things I used to be more involved than I am in local Nottingham trans community, and I was part of a

founding group of Notz Trans Hub and we had a trans support group and one of the things I absolutely loved was about that monthly support group was that we didn't really know what each of us really were and it didn't matter and by thinking with mermaids and these questions I feel like

I'm re-resonating with this history of what are you really as a question that doesn't really matter but seems to matter to everybody outside.

So I bring to you another character from the 18th century, perhaps better known to more of you. This is the Chevalier d'Yonne. I usually put Chevalier with the E as well, but every time I tried to do that, it turned it into a pound sign for some reason, so I couldn't do that. So just imagine that that's it.

So this is the Chevalier d'Ion, probably the most well-known proximate to trans character of 18th century Britain and France. A double agent to spy, a petty French aristocrat, a fencing champion, a spiritual thinker. Now according to many historians,

The Chevalier d'Yonne was, I quote, "a man in a dress" or really a male. And according to contemporaries of the Chevalier's own time, she was really a woman in a man's dress. Now, Julia Ftacek has written brilliantly about the Chevalier as a trans character. And I teach the Chevalier every year in a course for second year undergraduates.

as part of a broad umbrella of trans history. And what I love the most about teaching the Chevalier d'Yonne is that students so desperately want to know what she, he, they were really, and the answer isn't there. We look to their own words, the Chevalier's own words, and we find a tangle of contradictory statements about themselves, about desires that could be about gender,

but also go way beyond what we think of as gender. One of my students once suggested that we dig up the Chevalier d'Yonne's bones and we do a DNA test, and then we would definitely know what the Chevalier d'Yonne really, really was.

As archaeologists well know, bones can tell you stories, but they're never going to tell you as much of the story that you really want to know. And so as we grapple with the Chevalier Dion, we have to start unravelling this desire for certainty to really know.

The Chevalier and so many like them, such as the unnamed lovestruck maiden reported in the Leeds Intelligentsia in 1760, who wore masculine attire, who, I quote, "feigned a feminine voice," and who was discovered to be really what? Nobody could quite agree on what they really were. And to me, these stories, these stories that don't have a resolution,

because we're asking the wrong questions of them. These stories are history lessons, not just trans history lessons, but lessons in embracing what we don't know, what we'll never know for sure, on the radical incompleteness of the past. Now, personally, this winds certainly some of my students, others love it, some of them hate it, winds them up. For me, I find it a huge relief to acknowledge that we'll never fully know.

I find that space of not knowing offers up a space to breathe, to be creative, to think. And given that the insistence on knowing was an integral part of the European imperial project, I think that embracing not knowing and teaching our students to embrace not knowing for sure is a fundamental part of decolonial praxis. So this leaves me with my third question.

theme, I suppose. This is part two of the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871. The British Raj criminalized, and I'm quoting, "carnal intercourse against the order of nature against any man, woman, or animal" in section 377 of the Indian Penal Code of 1861, which was only finally overturned in India in 2018. The Criminal Tribes Act was different.

and it comes in a very different type of legislation which I think is also a lesson in looking broadly at where we might find the sources of undoing and of forms of prejudice. So the Criminal Tribes Act targeted groups of people, often migratory, mendicant and/or displaced, and labelled the whole group criminal and subjected them to state surveillance and settlement.

Part two of the Criminal Tribes Act, which is on your screen, well, part of it is on your screen here. Part two criminalized anyone, and I quote, of the male sex who admit themselves or who upon medical inspection clearly appear to be impotent, although it doesn't really give us a definition of impotency. And I think there's a project to be done, which I'm not aware has been done, of what exactly the British imperial state meant by impotency across empire.

It refers to those people as eunuchs, which is a catch-all phrase that encompassed Hidra, Kwajusura, in a slightly different way actually, Koti, Koja, Durrani and many others. And Jessica Hinchey has written extensively about this, about the Criminal Tribes Act. For the group of people that they named eunuchs, the Criminal Tribes Act criminalized dressing as a woman or wearing feminine clothes,

dancing and singing in private houses or in public, gifting, adopting and raising children, making wills. In other words, it criminalized the activities that outwardly defined this group, and it refused them a future by restricting any form of legacy. It made life extremely hard long after the Criminal Tribes Act was repealed in 1949 or 47 in Madras Tanai,

but it certainly did not succeed in eradicating hijras and other gender diverse feminine identified groups in India. Aniruddha Dutta's new book, Globalizing Through the Vernacular, explores rural and small town Kuti, Hijra and Durrani identity. And I think it's going to be a really important book for thinking about the ways that communities, particularly rural and kind of small town communities, have embraced

the global language of LGBT, but also forged their own paths aside from it. So I wanted to flag that book. It's just come out. Or it's coming out. I can't remember. Anyway, these three moments in trans history, mermaids, Chevalier Dion, Criminal Tribes Act, none of them are really or fully trans.

What they have in common is that they reveal traces of lives or lives legislated against that refused or were not legible to those in positions of power. And I think that as this particular 21st century brand of fascism gains greater momentum, holding on to that history not just for its oppression but also to remember to think through in the interstices of it as possibility,

I think is important because we will be forced, we're forced already, to make unequivocal statements about who we are in a bid to resist the lies and bigotries and violence. And we will do it. We must do it as a strategy of resistance. We must say non-binary people are valid.

But it is one strategy, and we must at the same time hold on to other strategies to hold open the million possibilities of who we are and what we can become if we're to survive. We must teach and embrace the complexities, the unknowability, the impossibility of reconciling the past to the present, or ourselves to impositions of the state. We must resist the demand to make sense.

History, for me, is an act of creativity, a form of storytelling in which the sources are our tools. It's an imaginative leap into the unknown and the unknowable. Creativity must thrive for us to thrive, and when it feels almost impossible to survive, I think it's when we need creativity the most. Maybe it is frivolous to study mermaids. What I love about studying mermaids

and it's no coincidence I think that the trans children's charity has named itself Mermaids, is that mermaids feel so close to us as a trans community. As I said, I love the fact that I don't know who was born with what parts, what their name or pronoun is today, whether it'll be the same next time we meet.

I love the unknowability of our community. And I love that we get to rediscover each other every time we meet. And I don't understand why cis people in the colonial state find that such a problem. For me, that's where the joy is. And for me, studying mermaids is a way of embracing that unknowability. I'll leave it at that.

Well, hello everyone. First of all, my thanks to the Gender Studies Department for inviting me here and to Nele for all of your help in getting me here, to Imrah for extending the invitation. It's so...

meaningful to me to have like seen you at an earlier stage in your career and to see you in this stage of your career it's like I'm quite quite proud of what of what you've done you know like really you know you know part part emoji

I'm going to speak a little more improvisationally than Oney did. I have the notes that I want to speak from. And I'll also just say, it's like I'm here on very short notice, it's like my little jet lag, so if I'm wandering, just give me that sign. You know, this is like speed up. But where I wanted to start today

was with what prompted my thoughts for what I will say today is something that happened in the US just last week. And you know, if you've been paying attention to the news, you'll realize we've got a situation going on over there. And in the second week of the Trump auto gold bear, I will say, the self-coup that is going on in the US right now, and everything that's being pointed

at trans people. Last Friday, the National Register of Historic Places, which is like the official government list of sites that have been deemed of historic interest for US history, they listed the site of the 1966 Compton's Cafeteria riot.

which I'm assuming many people in the room know absolutely nothing about, which is fine. But it's something that I had done a lot of historical research on. And what happened at the Compton's Cafeteria, it was an all-night cafeteria, you know, diner, eatery, restaurant, in an impoverished neighborhood in the center of San Francisco in the Tenderloin District.

And three years before the more famous Stonewall riots, there was a riot where trans women banded together to fight back against police harassment. You know, that what had happened was

There was one queen, as they were called in the day, back in the day, who had gotten into some kind of altercation with a police officer and that she had left the site of that altercation and gone to Comptons, which was this place that was a hangout for unhoused street youth and hustlers and trans women who lived in the neighborhood, who were kind of confined to living in that neighborhood as kind of like a sex work ghetto.

and that the police came in to raid Comptons. And that this one queen threw coffee in the cop's face, the place erupts, and hundreds of people wind up fighting in the streets with the police. It was the first known instance of trans and queer militant resistance to police violence in US history, which I think is quite significant. The fact that

People who had been doing work on the history of Compton's had had filed paperwork three years ago to have this site listed as a historic site and it had just been languishing and languishing and languishing that in the second week of the Trump second presidency somebody

pushes that through and there's this announcement that Compton's has been listed as a historic site. The first time there has been a historic site in the U.S. so landmarked because of its direct relationship to trans movement social history. And it's just like I thought that was an act of resistance, right? There's like somebody in the bowels of the deep state in there who's saying like, it's like, all right, I'm going to do a thing.

And they did that thing. And what that prompted for me was like, I mean not to overstate things, but just like, I was the person who, like 30 some odd years ago, found a slight mention of this unremembered event in the archive of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco.

And it's like I sort of more than anyone else sort of helped bring the story into public memory and public knowledge. It's like this was the topic of a film that I made. So for me, it's like I've had this very intimate relationship to the process of remembering the past, like literally putting back together a disarticulated event that was not part of anybody's memory.

putting that story together and then telling it in public in a way that it has become something that some people have remembered. I mean, obviously not everyone, the world's a big place, but that there has been a greater awareness of Comptons to the point that it is now listed on this historic register. But that

The flip side of doing the work to help something be remembered publicly as part of a collective story, the flip side of that is like there has to be a process through which things became unremembered or forgotten. It's like you wouldn't need a historian to like put the past back together if we'd never forgotten that something had happened in the first place. And it's those acts of erasure that I think are as important as the story of remembering.

I can tell you the history of how something was forgotten, too, how the Compton's Cafeteria riot was forgotten. I can tell you about how the police suppressed knowledge, like they suppressed media coverage of the event when it happened, because they got their asses handed to them on a plate by a bunch of really enraged drag queens, and they did not want that story in the press.

the police records were disappeared at a certain point. Members of the gay community, literally like the gay male community, were not happy about uppity Queens and the poor neighborhood of the city like bringing a bad, like if they were invested in respectability politics, they didn't want this story told and aired publicly.

Even though the person who wrote the first original account of that riot, this gay man named Ray Brochures, he had organized the first gay pride parade in San Francisco. He told the Compton story, like this is the origin of gay pride in San Francisco. But nobody liked him because he dealt with poor people and trans people.

The gay community of San Francisco, it's like they rejected the work that Ray Brochures had done and started a new pride parade that did not mention its roots in trans-radicalism. So there's many ways that the story of the riot was forgotten. And it's that, it's these acts of erasure that to me I wanted to talk about today.

My go-to lecture that I do, and I'm asked to give a talk at a university someplace, I do this thing that I call "What Transpires Now? Trans History in the Present."

And I've kind of got a formula that I use. It's like I will start with some broad brushstroke quote about the importance of remembering the past. I will end with some exhortation to the audience about how, remember, we can all be historical actors in the present. And then I will find a couple of things in the news that have just happened and say, actually, it's not the first time this has happened. Then I'll tell a historical story about it.

One of the examples that I've done in recent years, like I'll talk about the drag bans that have been passed in the United States and say, well, you know, actually in the mid 19th century, there was a whole wave of municipal ordinances in the United States that criminalized cross-dressing. It's like we have seen this kind of thing happen before. And so

If I were to give an abbreviated version of that talk here today, it's like what I would want to concentrate on are the moments of historical erasure of trans people that are happening right now. And that when Trump was elected,

when Trump took office on January 20th, one of the things he did on the very first day in office, I don't know if you have heard the name of this executive order that he issued, it was called Protecting Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Reality to the Federal Government. That was the actual name of an executive order from the president. And so that,

Sorry, I'm losing my train of thought here. So it's like this was like an official expression of like the sort of the outlying of gender ideology. There were other bans on trans women participating in sports. There were executive orders on where trans people had to be housed in prison, banning them from military service, you know, so many.

I think there were like five executive orders that came down addressing trans people. But the one that I want to mention today is to say that in the second week of this new regime we have in the United States, a government order went out that had a list of banned words, of words that were forbidden to be

published on government websites or to appear in scholarly publications that receive public funding from the government. And those words included not just transgender, transsexual, non-binary, or assigned male at birth or assigned female at birth, but it included the word gender itself.

Gender as a social scientific term has been used both social scientifically and in the vernacular for three quarters of a century at this point to refer to the biopsychosocial complexity and variability of embodied personhood.

And now in the US, acknowledging that complexity rather than reducing it to a crude biological determinism, that biological reality idea, has now actually become a thought crime.

And so when I look back in time to find an apt comparative to what is happening right now, to what transpires now, nothing comes to mind more quickly than those indelible images of Nazi book burnings in the 1930s. And if you've seen those images, what you might not know is that the books being burned

in Berlin in 1933 came from the archives and library of a social scientist named Magnus Hirschfeld who was one of the early sexologists. He had this place called the Institute for Sexual Science. It was one of the places where medical research on trans people was being carried out. There were trans people who were

hired on the staff there, there were public lectures on the history of sexuality and gender, and it is that library of social scientific knowledge of the existence of sex and gender diversity that is being burned.

And what I think we are seeing today in the U.S. is the 21st century equivalent of Nazi book burnings. We are seeing the literal striking of information, the destruction of knowledge in government publications. To turn quickly to...

critics of mid-20th century fascism and totalitarianism. It's like there are some famous quotes that I want to share with you that to me speak very presciently to our current moment. And the first is from Walter Benjamin, who many of you might know is an important German Jewish intellectual thinker, a member of the Frankfurt School.

and that Benjamin had become a refugee in the later 1930s. He was fleeing Germany, he became stateless, he had no identity documentation, he had gone to Paris, but then the Nazis come to France, he's trying to flee.

to Portugal to get on a boat to come to the United States. He's apprehended by Spanish fascists. We're going to send him back to Germany. And it's like it's in this period where Benjamin is like thinking about everything that is happening in the world, what is happening to him, to his own precarity. He writes,

in this famous essay called Theses on the Philosophy of History. He says, "The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the emergency situation in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this."

then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency and our position in the struggle against fascism will thereby improve. The writer of history with the gift of setting alight the spark of hope to be found in the embers of the past knows that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.

And it's like, that is what we are seeing right now. Not even the dead are safe from the destruction of knowledge about the existence of trans life. And then of course there's George Orwell, 1984, who writes, "Whoever controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered, and the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the party is always right.

And again, this seems to me a very prescient account of what is happening today in the United States and elsewhere. So to begin wrapping up in this sort of exercise of trying to create touches between different historical moments across time, I just want to say that history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. It's like there are these moments of connection between the past and present.

And what I would like to suggest is that the way that anti-gender ideology works in our present moment, it fulfills the same role for contemporary fascisms as anti-Semitic ideology played for 20th century fascisms. And the question is why? Why does anti-gender ideology serve so effectively

as an ideology that masks some of the violences of the present. What is it that makes a tiny minority of actual trans people so useful as a scapegoat for extending authoritarian power? And I think it has to do with what I would call the ghettoizing or incarcerating of a potential

for confounding the biopolitical logics of Eurocentric modernity. Particularly ways that a biocentric ideology, the way that we invest meaning in the flesh,

fastens upon actual physical differences between bodies to anchor them in socioeconomic casts or ethno classes that are imagined to be immutable and natural. And that this way of thinking about bodies within the modern world post 1492, this is rooted in the imperatives of the chattel slave trade on which the formation of a colonialist global system depended.

that there's a carceral imaginary at work there that trans people are criticized for perpetuating the trope of feeling trapped in the wrong body. But what I would want to suggest is that it's wrong to imagine embodiment as a trap rather than as the lived, sensuous locus of a possibility for freedom that we live. And it's like we have been taught

to think of the body as a prison because of the way that imagining embodiment as fixed and immutable and something that binds you, shackles you in place in a social order is one of the legacies of chattel slavery and the establishment of a colonial world. What I want to end on is the idea that transness, if we think about it in that context,

is not the special property of a tiny minority of people that we call transgender people. A capacity that's often dismissed or ridiculed by others as an impossibility or a delusion. I would like to suggest that transness is a capacity for socio-symbolic and material transformation that is available to all of us.

Transness ultimately is a practice of freedom driven by desire to be elsewhere that carries us away from all of our unchosen starting places in life, the world that we are born into, the positions that we are assigned to. And that transness moves us across the social boundaries, the psychological, political, metaphysical boundaries that are thrown up around us to hold us all in place.

I understand feminist efforts to expand the scope of female existence beyond gestational capacity to be an expression of what I would call transness. It is carrying women beyond the confinement promised by a biology is destiny framework.

I understand racial liberation struggles to be a form of transness. It is a refusal to concede that certain phenotypes or ancestries reduce one to the status of property or render one fit only for subordination, rather that it is an insistence that collectively we can assign new meanings to our flesh. For transgender, transsexual, and non-binary people to live

is a palpable demonstration that carceral ideologies of embodiment, of which modernity depends, are in fact lies. We can in fact all become otherwise than we are now. Together we can all become something new together.

That is a knowledge that repressive power must deny, suppress, and eradicate at all costs. And that is why transgender people imagine to bear this special capacity for transformation are being targeted as a relatively politically powerless minority. All right, I will look forward to continuing these thoughts and conversation with you all. Thank you so much for your time today. Thank you.

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Now, back to the event. Thank you so much for this wonderful presentations. I actually revised my questions while listening to you both. But we have limited time, so I'm going to ask one broad question and one specific question.

You both answered this question briefly, but I was wondering what is new about this moment?

when looking at the histories of trans lives, but also racial capitalism, but also colonialism, what is new that actually makes this moment really popular, well accepted by millions of people? My second question is about the strategies that we can actually think of when challenging these

anti-gender ideologies. Only you mentioned about unknowing.

I think it's really insightful to think about unknowing as a person coming from Kurdish national cause, we often think of these terms as politics of radical invisibility in ways in which we resist actually the surveillance regimes.

I'm thinking of my own research that I actually think about

as a form of remembering and community building in a kind of like communitarian ethical sense that actually keep people together and give them power to struggle against oppressive regimes. So my question is actually how can we think of today's movements against these right wing ideologies and anti-gender movements

in new ways that can actually prevent us to fall back onto conventional human rights discourses that have become dysfunctional, but also individualism that has been really apparent everywhere in the West world.

given that we are actually facing the collapse of liberal order of norms and rights. So what kind of tools do we have in our hands to challenge these oppressive regimes? Would you like to start first?

Thanks for those wonderful, very small, easy to answer questions. Thank you. Can I take the first one? What is new about this moment? I've been grappling with this, particularly in relationship to Trump's onslaught against

all the discourse of DEI and his specific focus on trans people in that context. Because from a UK perspective, actually, it doesn't feel that new. The rhetoric is more violent, it's more explicit, but the actions are actually not that new. When you look...

at what's been going on over the last couple of years here in Australia, those are the places I know best, but I think it's happening in all sorts of other places as well, that actually what Trump is doing is not really dissimilar to what even the Guardian has been saying they want done around trans athletes

the "protecting of trans children" by refusing puberty blockers. That's been going on for years. So I'm really struggling with that question that the rhetoric is new. It's far more explicit. It's far more violent.

It's easier to identify the hatefulness, and I'm not suggesting that the hatefulness and the violence of the rhetoric does not have very real consequences for hate crimes and for trans people on the ground, but at the same time, from the UK perspective, the policies don't feel new at all. So, yeah, I don't know.

I genuinely, I'm struggling with that one a lot. I think it's where discourse analysis and the power of discourse to shape new worlds and new effective modes is very important. And then we have to balance them with the policies and the things and the material facts that are going, that have been ongoing for a long time.

Yeah, I don't, I haven't got an answer to that. I just got more questions and a sense of bewilderment actually and a bit of a sense of disorientation and dizziness around this. One of the things that feels new to me is actually something that you alluded to which is the explicitness of hateful affect. You know, that rather than couching an anti-trans set of policies,

in accordance is like oh there's like some rational reason that you know we we should do this and there's you know care for somebody you know involved here and a balancing of you know rights and you know what not of course you know trans people should be protected

protected in some ways by the law, but women need to be safe and children need to be safe. Rather than that, there's just like, there is an absolutely unvarnished expression of hatred and animosity. That is a new thing in the US context, that there's not even an appeal to any kind of raison d'etre there.

But even that is not new. What I see happening in the US is actually things that have happened in Hungary, have happened in Russia. I remember back in the '90s with the collapse of the Soviet Union, there were many people in San Francisco who had more of a techno-utopian libertarian view of the emergence of the tech industry and social media.

He said, "What people don't realize is that communism was only the first to go. Capitalism will be next, and then we're gonna have this utopian future." But there was a way that I think they were right in saying that the collapse of communism in many ways ushered in a new post-communist

oligarchic state, you know, that's exactly what we're seeing things that happened in Eastern Europe in the 90s and 2000s are now happening in the United States. It's like that that is the path that the United States is following, a kind of a Putinification of the United States. You asked about

I think the profundity of the change that we're seeing in the United States, it's like for better and worse, the United States has played this role in the post-World War II world order, that it has been the linchpin of a liberal Western model of the state of governmentality.

And for the United States to like no longer be that, it's like it enables...

I mean, it's like there was a world order that is falling apart right now and it's not exactly clear what the new world order will be. It's like it is in the, you know, it's in the process of birthing right now. But to me, like the idea of making any kind of appeal to the idea of civil or human rights that come out of a Western liberal tradition, it's just, I don't think that's the way to, it's like that's over.

So then what do you do? And it's like, the future is yet to be written. We don't know, but I have this faith or hope that the direction to move in is a more

experimental one. It's like that we will, you know, I have this sort of image of like people meeting in the crossroads and it's like all we know is that we're vulnerable together and we don't know which direction it's gonna go, but it's only through a kind of communalism of some kind, some kind of mutuality. It's like where we who need something

find each other and make a new kind of sociality with each other. It's like whose shape is yet to be known. But it's like that very tenuous kind of hopefulness is the only thing I think we have available to us right now. You know, and there's a way that I, you know,

we all know that liberalism, in the classical sense of Western liberalism, it privileges some people and dis-privileges others. It's like it is not, there's that appeal to the universal human rights, but it always creates its other who is excluded from that.

And so if there is a silver lining in this moment of saying like, you know what, liberalism actually has failed. So now we need something that's better. And it's like, I have faith that we will either find it or die trying. I do. Yeah.

Thank you so much for your presentations and answers. I think we can move to Q&A session. I will first take three questions, then we can move and get answers. Please, you in the back. Yeah, you. And you can go ahead afterwards if there is any more.

Hi, I guess I just wanted to ask another strategy question. So I've seen a discourse more and more prevalent in trans spaces recently, which is basically like visibility has failed as a project. We should treat visibility as a tactical misstep. And our next move is like that we ought to, as a community, like go underground in some fairly nebulous sense. Like, I wonder, like, what do you make of that? How do you respond to it? Do you think that's the right way? What thoughts?

Thank you very much for that. That was very informative. But I want to offer a, like, isn't the problem with trans athletes in women's sport an issue over the inability for female athletes to use chemical means to enhance their own bodies in order to compete with trans athletes, which would then be considered cheating? Isn't the problem

with the athletics associations who have confused the whole issue around biology and shouldn't you use historical examples of women who have been trained to actually combat men who are bigger than them? So for instance, Second World War, the special operational executives, they trained women to be able to kill men who were much bigger, much stronger than them.

Why hasn't anybody made a statement about that? Because it is... I just want to say it's appalling what's happened to trans women. It's not fair, it's not right, it's murder. And as a man, I find it appalling that something that could be explained thoughtfully and constructively with nuance and unfortunately women aren't being served because there have been people who don't know anything about working

to become sports athletes is a very hard, very committed thing to do. I mean, you spend a lot of time sacrificing a lot of things and people who have never done sports in their lives are not involved. Why aren't you telling them to mind their business and just talk directly to female athletes and say,

and understand where they're coming from and understand where trans people are coming from so we don't have this. I think it's a fundamental failure of activism to try to talk to ordinary people to understand this is that there are some valid points that need to be made. It's just please tell these people who don't know anything about sports, mind their own goddamn business. It's nothing to do with them. Please go ahead. Here. Hi, I'm a trans American myself and I've been having a very hard time these past couple years, understandably.

And you, Susan, and Ani, what you talked about harkening back to that in terms of our history. I want to, Susan, thank you personally for giving us Lou Sullivan. And I was just wondering how the process of uncovering his archive made an impression on you and what you were intending to get out to the public with uncovering his archives. Thank you. Thank you.

- I'll answer that last question first since it's short. Back when I was finishing my PhD in history at Berkeley, was coming out as trans, it's like back in the late 80s, early 90s,

coming out as trans is like kind of a death knell for having any kind of academic career. And so it's like, well, you know, okay, like I'm trans, I'm trans historian, I will like show up and do work at the community based queer archive. And I showed up and said like, hi, I'm transitioning, I'm trans, just like, I don't have a job, put me to work. And they said, great. One of our founders, Lou Sullivan, this, this

trans man who was like one of like the leading organizers of trans masculine community in the U.S. in the 1970s and 80s. It's like he had recently died, like all of his papers were there, and I thought great I'm going to learn how to be an archivist by working on Lou Sullivan's papers. Lou had these really amazing journals. He started journaling when he was a 10 year old

schoolgirl, you know, Catholic schoolgirl in Milwaukee. And he kept journaling until actually days before he died of AIDS-related illnesses living as a gay man in San Francisco. And it's just like this remarkable chronicle of a life. And I feel like getting to know Lou through reading his journals and working on his papers, it's like he was like my transition buddy. You know, he was, it's like,

He was in the process of coming out as a gay trans man as I was in the process of coming out as a lesbian trans woman. And I just was able to do this like compare and contrast exercise with him at this very intimate level. And I had always

hoped to get his journals into print and many false starts there but finally these two young you know, trans guys took up that project and I was just so happy that they did it. I'm so glad that like Lou's inner life has become available to a larger public. I'm going to attempt

I want to answer two of the questions, is it okay? So I'm going to attempt to answer your question with the caveat that I don't think I can. I'm not an expert on sports or anything like that, but I would say have a look at the work of Claire Tebbert, who's a historian of...

athletic bodies in the past and has worked on this issue of athletics. I would also say that the boundaries and nature of the female body has been a debate and a dispute and a

complicated issue since, you know, I looked at this in the 18th century, what is the boundary of the nominally female body? And I think that that is just reoccurring right now, but beyond that I simply have, I don't know quite what you're asking, and I don't think I'm the right person to offer an answer in that respect of what's happening now.

The failure of visibility, I don't know. I hadn't seen that one actually. To my mind, through the activism and community building that I've been engaged with has always sort of been underground in the sense that we're doing our thing for ourselves to build each other up.

And I have a whole list here of amazing community, grassroots organising, radical therapist network founded by my wonderful friend and queer fan, Sage Stefano, which has raised money for free therapy for QTPOC people.

That grassroots practical activism, the Transfemme Electrolysis Project in Glasgow, small acts of resistance that are community building, I think are the most powerful acts, which is not by any means to say that

being out and proud on Sunday we had in Nottingham the joy of Posey Parker or whatever her other name is coming to visit us to talk something hateful and she'd come in 2022 and there was a group of about 15 of us kind of protesting we ended up having a little bit of a conversation with her which well I ended up having a conversation with her and she said to me

did the suffragettes, were they discriminated against because of their identity or because of their sex? And I tried to be like, well, there's a historical thing, they weren't always, and she was like, do you have periods? Do you have periods? Do you have periods? It was weird. But this time on Sunday, I fortunately didn't have that again because there were 250 of us

and a drum band, and nobody could hear her. And it was amazing. So I'm totally up for that. I love that. I think that's really important. But I don't think... Those are moments, right? Those are events. But the work we do is for each other, to build each other. That's... Yeah. That's how I approach it, anyway.

So on the sports question, it's like I appreciated the way you wanted to ask these questions about the complexity of what counts as fair and how competitions are structured and the meanings that we assign to biological difference and what counts as fairness in a competition.

To me, it's kind of mind-blowing to me that trans women in competitive sports became the absolute hot button issue in the recent elections in the US. That there were studies that were done after the election that in the six or eight weeks before the election,

Republicans and aligned political action committees spent $215 million on television advertising featuring trans women competing in sports, painting Kamala Harris as like in support of this, ending with the tagline, Kamala Harris is the president for they/them. Donald Trump is the president for you.

And that in post-election polling, it seems that among undecided voters, it's like those ads, it's like swayed something like 40% of them to vote for Trump. And it was responsible for about a 2.7% shift in the electorate towards Trump. It's like the sports issue was off the hook important in terms of

manipulating public opinion. I want to give a shout out to a recent book by a guy named Michael Waters. It's called The Other Olympians. And kind of in keeping with the theme of like history of like sports and fascism, this book about The Other Olympians looks at three trans athletes who were competing in the 1936 Olympics in ways that dealing with trans athletes

was actually central to how international sporting competitions manage the question of sex difference and the way that it got caught up in geopolitical struggles about

between fascism, communism, and liberal democracy. So there's a long history there. And I think one of the things that makes sports so contentious is that we imagine the body, or the capacities of the body to be somehow natural, that there's a natural sex difference, but if you look at the way sporting competitions are organized,

the things that count as sports are actually things that like favor

bodies that went through a, you know, an androgen-driven adolescence. It's like that the kinds of physical capacities that are deemed, you know, more athletic, it's like they're predicated on privileging certain kinds of like quote-unquote male, for lack of a better word, you know, difference. And that things that

bodies that went through an estrogen-driven adolescence. It's like those capacities are not as valued, right? And so there's all kinds of ways that the very organization of sports replicates social ideas about male supremacy and privileging masculinity over femininity. And so you just, I mean, as a policy matter,

I mean, it really looks like if you follow the science that if a body that had an androgen-driven adolescence is on puberty blockers, hormone blockers, or estrogens for about a year, there is no measurable difference in capacity between assigned male and assigned female at birth.

mostly what's happening here. It's just a very ideologically driven, hot button way of manipulating people's assumptions about the naturalness of sex difference in a way that is actually like totally socially constructed. On the visibility question, it's like yeah, I think there is a way that it's like it might be important to go more underground. I really do.

I think about it, it's like, oh, it used to be people would say, "Nobody's paying attention to trans." It's like, woohoo, trans over here, pay attention to us. We're nice people. Help.

And now it's like that's like making noise in a zombie movie that like it just tells us like it tells the zombies where you are You know, it's like shut up. Just like you don't want them coming for you That

back to the Screaming Queens movie about the Compton's Cafeteria, right? I screened that recently at a Russian film festival in exile that was online. And there was like a live panel discussion afterwards.

And this one trans activist in Russia who's like, can't be visibly, publicly a trans activist in Russia, was saying the thing that blew my mind about that film is that there was a place where trans women who were sex workers could gather together in public. You know, like, let alone that they fought back against the police, just the very capacity to gather that way was something that this guy says, like, this would be impossible in Russia. We've never had a

public trans culture we've only had apartment-based cultures like people meet in privatized spaces and that is what counts as community and i you know i wonder what will happen

in the post-liberal US. It's like as trans people are increasingly deliberately targeted by name, as trans people, as our lives become more impossible administratively, as there's hateful public rhetoric around this, how much will it just serve us

to say like, you know what, whatever the state thinks of me, however I need to look on the streets, it's like that's how I'm gonna be and I will be trans in a more private space. One last thought on that, I mentioned this to Imrah last night when we went out for dinner, it's like I am just profoundly

struck by something that a friend and colleague of mine from Canada said to me in a conversation a couple of years ago. She is an indigenous First Nations person who identifies as Two-Spirit, is also like identifies as a transsexual, you know, sort of in the Western epistemology, and she was saying like, "We're kind of worried about y'all down there. It's like, you know, you're doing okay."

you know, and I said, "You know, you know, he has had the conversation." And she said, "You know, it's like we already know."

what it's like to have your children taken away from you, to be institutionalized in certain ways, to be told by the government which clothes you can wear, what language you can speak, how you cut your hair, what name you can call yourself. It's like this isn't our dystopian future. This is our actual lived history, and many of us survived.

Yeah, that's the thing that I hold on to. However hard it becomes, just like many of us will survive, and that it is our task as people in the present to leave a mark that will be found by people in the future to say we were here.

Thank you so much for these amazing answers. We will have one round of questions. I will take three people's questions. Maybe we should also have some online questions from live stream audiences.

Yeah, after you, we can have both of your questions. So we've had two questions online that kind of relate to the same theme, which is we spoke today about kind of anti-gender movements as very connected to right-wing movements, as very connected to Trumpism, and just like the right-wing as it is developing all over the world. However, especially in the UK, a lot of anti-gay,

gender sentiment or gender critical activism has come from people who would describe themselves as left-wing, who would describe themselves as feminist, or who might be reasonably described that by other people. And the question is how do we reconcile that? - Two people who's going to ask questions, please go ahead. - Yeah, I have a question about

In your talks you said about, you described a trans history that is beautifully chaotic

a trans history that is beautifully chaotic and I think that in the past years we've been relying increasingly on institutions to measure progress and well-being of trans people. So which parts of that old trans chaos would you bring back into our reality? Like what

What is your favorite trans chaos from the past that you would take into this frightening future? Thanks very much. Such a timely panel, so many questions, but I just, in the list of all the words that have been banned,

I suppose the other interesting word is protect because the banning of the words is being done in the name of protection. And I suppose we do know historically that when the words, you know, protecting women are used, it's often protecting the people who are saying they're doing the protecting to have the right of protection, which is actually a right of power.

a right of entitlement and nothing to do with women at all. And as the banned words are stripping the US citizens of science and civil service and so many public goods, an important question would be, do you feel more protected? Do you feel more protected now that all the protections are being removed? And I wonder if you have thoughts about

what the trans community knows about not being protected to follow what you just said Susan and how incredibly relevant that is now that all the protections are being removed in the name of protection. I can take the first one about in the UK anti-gender movements, anti-trans, transphobic coming from

I don't really think it's our job to reconcile it. I think it's theirs. I don't know what's going on amongst those people and the discussions that are happening. I hope they're happening. I hope they're looking at and thinking, hang on a minute. We were saying this and now...

these fascists who take in a way like Roe versus Wade saying this so how do we figure this out and I hope they figure it out and good luck to them and if they want to talk about it I'd quite like to talk about it with them but yeah but I think I think it's them it's for them to reconcile I don't think it's our role to reconcile we've got other work we need to do um

- Just to jump in here before you answer the second question. I think feminism is not an unalloyed positive good. Feminism is not one thing. You look at global transnationalist feminisms, feminisms of color, there's so many ways that

there are some feminisms that critique liberal white northern western feminism as part of, it's not like the cliche was like, imperialism was about saving, you know,

it's like, what was the guy who spit that quote? It's like, it just becomes, it's like white women saving, you know, Brown women from Brown men. And it's like, it's still, you know, it's still, um, an expression of, of colonialism or like you look at so much of what the, the suffragist movement was doing and the,

late 19th and early 20th century, some of it is explicitly eugenicist. So much of it is predicated on the idea of, well, in the US, well, if black men have the vote, why not white women? It's like, because we're superior anyway. So there's plenty of ways that feminism can be allied with nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, racism.

And I resist the idea of saying, well, that's not real feminism. It's like, yes, it is. There are ways that there are feminationalisms, there are fascist feminisms. And so I think we need to be aware of, well, feminists of what kind in the name of what? And I think...

that the more a feminist practice is predicated on ideas of biological distinction and it's about centering the idea of gestational capacity, the more biologist feminism is.

the easier it is to become associated with racism. And the more feminism is about looking at structural oppressions of people who are subjugated by heteropatriarchal capitalism, the more liberatory feminism becomes. And so it's like pick the kind of feminism that you believe in and exercise that kind of feminism.

Okay, that's... There was the other question that I was not remembering, but do you want to go to the next question? I can. I love the question. My favorite trans chaos from the past. What I'm trying to do is write a trans history that goes beyond species boundaries and questions and thinks about a kinship with beyond...

because I think that that is... We're in the middle of a climate emergency and we need to rethink our relationship to... Our, as in we're human, relationship to the world that has been deemed natural. And so I think my favourite...

trans characters may not look trans at all. They're those on the very boundaries of the human-animal boundary, the small bodies in glass jars in natural history museums, in giant squid and octopus, and anything that confounds white men, really. I think that's... I like that chaos.

I love what you were saying there about the climate crisis because if we live in a world historical moment of anthropogenic lead driven climate change, it's like one way of addressing that situation is to transform what the Anthropos itself is. Right. And it's like, and if you know, you follow Sylvia Winters, you know, formulation of, of, um,

One of the problems of the world is the over-representation of the human by the enlightenment figure of man. It's like if you knock that man with a capital M off its pedestal, that puts itself above

everything that is not like the white masculine Eurocentric figure. It's like that is a way of moving towards a more egalitarian relationship with the rest of non-human material being. And so that's a kind of gender change. It's like there is a trans politics in that of refiguring the human.

favorite moment of like trans chaos. It's like I have a real fondness for all of the like genderfuck performance art from the early 1970s. I mean like the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the Cockettes, the Angels of Light. I mean all of that just like really anarchic sense of like disruption. It's just fun, you know? And so I, yeah, have a soft spot for that.

We have two minutes. I can have one question. Do you have any answers? Just one minute each.

- Some people claiming they're protecting other people is often just used as a way of harming somebody else. I mean, that's the takeaway point. It's like there's no real protection involved there. It's just a dodge, it's a lie.

So, we can talk more after. What was she saying? Thank you so much for being amazing. And thank you, Susan. Thank you, Amanda, for being with us.

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