Transgender studies emerged as an academic field following the publication of Sandy Stone’s 1991 essay “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.” 1 In the decades that followed, work by writers both within and beyond the academy—such as Viviene Namaste, Jay Prosser, Julia Serano, and Emi Koyama, among others—shaped the field’s initial scope and fundamental concerns.
Since the 1990s, the field has grown and changed considerably. Susan Stryker contributed significantly to this development—acting as co-editor for the Transgender Studies Reader (TSR) 1, 2, and Remix (2006, 2013, 2023), launching the journal Transgender Studies Quarterly (2014), and creating the Transgender Studies Initiative at University of Arizona (which has since evolved into the Trans Studies Research Cluster). As the field has grown, its scope and concerns have necessarily shifted; these shifts can be witnessed in the changing descriptions of the field found in Stryker’s introduction to each edition of the TSR. Stryker writes that the TSR 1 was an account of field formation focused on the field’s first iteration, much of which centered “the kind of identity politics necessary to gain speaking positions within discourse.” 2 This phase of trans studies also “called attention to the unmarked whiteness and Eurocentrism of the field” but, because the field was limited by its emergence from academic institutions in the US, it did so “without remedying those limitations” [emphasis added] 3 . In the TSR 2, Stryker writes that, since the publication of the TSR 1, the field had reshaped itself in response to material conditions unimaginable during its first iteration such as heightened state surveillance and border securitization. This second iteration of the field reflected critically on the first, taking direct aim at its implicit whiteness and US-centric bias among other things. The third iteration of the field, indexed by the TSR Remix, shows a deepened engagement with these concerns such that we might now understand trans-ing, in a scholarly sense and beyond, not as a form of gender-based identity politics but as “an exploratory and experimental practice for surviving within, and pointing beyond, the biocentric world order constructed in the wake of European colonization and racial chattel slavery.” 4
Today, the field of trans studies is no longer emerging but has arrived. Whereas many early scholars in the field were self-trained in trans studies, many of today’s early- and mid-career trans studies scholars were mentored and trained by other trans studies scholars. The volume of original scholarship in the field has grown exponentially and insights arising from the field can be found in the work of disciplines across the academy, ranging from the arts and humanities to STEM. Since its inception, trans studies scholars have understood the field as fundamentally interdisciplinary. Recent scholarship has pushed beyond this framing, hinting instead at a notion of transdisciplinarity as in Eliza Steinbock’s challenge to trans studies to “stay with the indefinite period or moment in suspension from the gridded paradigm” 5 thus moving beyond or across the paradigm of disciplinarity altogether.
1 Sandy Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” in The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 2006), 221–35.
2 Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura, "Introduction: Transgender Studies 2.0," in The Transgender Studies Reader 2, ed. Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura (New York: Routledge, 2013), 3.
3 Ibid.
4 Susan Stryker, "Foreword," in The Transgender Studies Reader Remix, ed. Susan Stryker and Dylan McCarthy Blackston (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2023), xi.
5 Eliza Steinbock, Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Change (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 12.
That transgender studies is a relatively new field poses challenges for trans studies scholars at NYU and beyond. First among these is a lack of mentorship. At many institutions there are no trans studies faculty available to train and mentor students or, at best, only one or two. Because trans studies is an inter/transdisciplinary field, those faculty may have little disciplinary overlap with the students seeking training in trans studies at their institution. This places burden on students seeking mentorship and trans studies faculty who may have higher-than-usual advising loads.
Another challenge is a lack of access to trans studies-specific research materials. Although the volume of published scholarship in trans studies has grown considerably since the 1990s, the body of work that has been produced to date is still relatively small. At NYU, this means that scholars seeking physical books on trans studies-specific topics will often find that those books have already been checked out. Moreover, there are only a handful of trans-specific archives in existence. And in archives not focused specifically on trans histories, it is often difficult to find traces of transness either at all (e.g. in the case of gender nonconforming people who were misgendered on death certificates, etc.) or beyond documentation of state-sponsored violence against trans people (e.g. police reports documenting arrests for crossdressing, etc.).
Lastly, trans studies scholars are currently placed in the fraught position of doing such work during a time when transness is under legislative and social attack in the US, UK, and other places around the world. This can take a toll on trans studies scholars both professionally and personally. Publishing, teaching, and speaking publicly about trans topics can create the risk of harassment such as doxing and disingenuous complaints from actors both within and beyond the academy. Moreover, many trans studies scholars are themselves impacted by anti-trans legislation making it difficult to balance community- and self-care with research and writing.
