Reimagining Trans Politics, Power, and Peoplehood in (Trans) Crisis Times –

In-Person Roundtable

Participants:

• (Chair) Zein Murib, zmurib@fordham.edu; Fordham University-Lincoln Center
• (Presenter) Callan Hummel, calla.hummel@ubc.ca; University of British Columbia
• (Presenter) Addye Susnick, addyesusnick@alumni.ubc.ca; University of British Columbia
• (Presenter) Elizabeth Baisley, keab@queensu.ca; Queen’s University

Session Description:
In 2014, Laverne Cox was featured on the front page of Time Magazine under a headline celebrating the “Transgender Tipping Point.” The intervening years have failed to deliver on this promise as anti-trans sentiment diffuses globally. Hundreds of anti-trans bills have been introduced and approved in state legislatures across the US, teaching about gender diversity has been banned in the UK, and several leaders have gained power in Latin America by running on platforms promising to restore “traditional gender roles.”

This roundtable brings together leading and emerging scholars of trans politics and life to discuss the alarming rise of anti-trans rhetoric, laws, and sentiment in the US, Canada, Latin America, and Western and Central Europe. Of particular importance in these developments are the ways that anti-trans bigotry — smuggled into democratic discourse through the language of opposition to “gender ideology” — works hand-in-glove with xenophobia, racism, and imperialism to prop up and support far-right ascendancies worldwide. Participants will raise and answer questions related to these developments, including: how purportedly scientific logics drive the dis/misinformation that fuels anti-trans mobilizations, the mechanisms that link the unlikely coalitions of religious, far-right, and corporate actors behind efforts to politicize “gender ideology,” strategies for resistance that are on-going and taking shape in the face of these assaults, and how political science can approach this moment of crisis.