We get cozy in a lecture hall at Northwestern.

Trans Studies 2024 trip report: academic trans camp!

I am trans, but I do not study trans experiences.

Well, that’s not quite true: quite often in my work on computing culture, there are trans students, trans teachers, and anti-trans norms, policies, and institutions. I don’t set out to study these things, but they are there, because trans people are everywhere, and transphobia is everywhere.

So when the opportunity arose to attend the 2nd annual International Trans Studies conference, I wasn’t sure if it was for me: how could I not be an imposter amongst a few hundred far more capable social scientists focusing much of their scholarly career understanding the trans experiences? I felt like all I had to offer was my comparatively dilettantish inquiry and my baby trans lived experiences. But I decided to go anyway, both in solidarity with my wonderful HCI colleagues Michael Ann DeVito, Oliver Haimson, Danaë Metaxa, Ada Lerner, and Phoebe Toups Dugas, but also just experience an entire conference full of trans academics and allies making collective sense of our gendered world. Worst case, it would be a lovely five days chilling in Evanston, Illinois, learning from a talented community of academic colleagues.

Wednesday: Travel and plenary

I set out Wednesday morning to Chicago, and eventualy the Northwestern University campus. Travel was unremarkable, other than the sudden thick fog that appeared over SEA, delaying departure by an hour. After landing, bussing to Evanston, checking into my hotel, and walking a mile to campus, I settled in to the Technological Institute’s auditorium for the evening opening plenary.

The first talk examined the hollowness of land acknowledgements in relation to the lack of indigenous trans representation. The talk, given by Dr. Kai Pyle (UW-Madison), centered on the history of the trail of death in Chicago Potawatomi people, and the subsequent history of repeated attempts of removal. Two hundred years of genocide later, they have managed to secure some land, but little otherwise, reflecting the same patterns of settler colonialism across North America. But then, the speaker delved into the history of indigenous trans experiences around Chicago, including non-conforming gender roles, and many additional non-binary genders; Europeans described them as “men dressed as women”, “hunting women”, and other binary, essentialist descriptions. What followed was 400 years of attempting to eliminate indigenous gender diversity.

Next, Paisley Currah (CUNY) spoke on transphobia, and its roots in the gender binary and “biological sex.” He argued that the fundamental tensions between transphobic people and trans people rests in at this fundamental disagreement. His point, however, was to perhaps avoid this definitional debate, questioning whether we need a theory of gender at all, if our goals are things such as distributive justice and other materialist outcomes. He then talked about “sex” being an “effect” of government, which means there’s no one definition of sex; it’s a by product of policy, bureaucracy, and more. He ended with the point that trans people simply are; it doesn’t matter why we are, or whether some would rather trans people weren’t.

TJ Billard, the conference chair, ended the plenary, talking about trans studies as a post-discipline, bringing together a plurality of perspectives and epistemologies toward a shared goal. Part of this is reflected in the 800+ scholars that registered for the conference, from all of over the world, from such a diversity of disciplines.

After the plenary, there was a courtyard reception with light food and an open bar. It was lovely to be with a few hundred trans studies scholars, learning about work in anthropology, communications, public health, gender studies, history, and more. Because everyone was from everywhere, I hardly felt out of place as a weird computer science/behavioral sciences/learning sciences/design scholar. Most others were similarly post-discipline themselves in endlessly fascinating ways.

Chemistry was amient throughout the sessions.

Thursday: Education, euphoria, algorithms, equity

Thursday morning I got coffee and a breakfast burrito at Colectivo Coffee and did some journal editing work, then set off to the Technological Institute for morning sessions.

I joined the session on gender and education.

• Kayden Schumacher (Coventry) presented first, on gender identity in higher education in a UK context. Kayden discussed it through a legal lense, talking about the binary legal landscape in the UK, and discussed the lack of institutional support, the high degree of masking, and discrepancies between “as written” law and lived experiences, particularly stemming from ignorance on the part of faculty, staff, and peers. I found it particularly interesting how dramatically different institutions were on a range from people-centered language about law from “cover your ass” legal defensiveness.
• Yi-Fan Li (Penn State) studied names and pronouns in classrooms in Pennsylvanian high schools. She talked about the continuous care and vulnerability of teachers, the lack of administrative protocol, and high degree of burnout., and students’ burn out from continued self-advocacy and risks of disclosure.
• Niko Woo (Michigan State) presented on anti-LGBTQIA2S+ in schools. The study found a lot of focus in prior work on deficit framing, and explored how to center pride, normalization, and intersectionality.

The small group reflects on the nature of transness.

After a quick coalition building Zoom call and a pleasant box lunch with good company, I went to a session on trans joy.

• Angela Black (Tulsa Community College) talked about “somaesthetics” of gender dysphoria and euphoria. She sought ways of explaining these experiences to cis people. She problematized the idea that gender is strictly performance and talked about the body as constituitive of self, rather than an object of the self. Her argument was that gender dysphoria is a tension between bodily sense of self and social prescription (whereas dysmorphia is a disconnect between mind and body). Euphoria, therefore is a feeling of satisfaction of expressing the joint imperatives of the mind and body.
• Will Beischel (Loyola University Chicago) talked about gender pleasure, invoking a point that Judith Butler made about gender being a domain of pleasure for some people (e.g., the pleasure of doing drag, gender euphoria). They interviewed several sex/gender minorities and build a model around individual, interpersonal, and institutional gender pleasure, spanning a spectrum of mind, bodily composition, community, strangers, norms, and systems of power. One interesting point was how right to gender euphoria should be just as much a justification for access to care.

After a lovely break catching up with a colleague at GitHub, I went to the trans technologies session a little late.

• The first talk I saw was on AR technologies and their relationship to ientity exploration, by Cat Brewster (Michigan). The study found that at many levels, AR filters ignored race, gender, and more, and many gender marginalized folks found it problematic and offensive.
• The second talk from Kit Chockly (McGill) was on automated gender recondition technologies, and their use by trans people. Kit talked about the notion of imagined affordances to conceptualize how technologies can help shape how the technology is used and deployed, shaping their experiences and world.
• The last talk was from Mar Hicks (UVA) on histories of transness and computing; Mar began the conversation reminding us that computers were first a gendered weapon of war, and that algorithms and data have always been gender exclusive, and not new problems. There are also many histories of resistance to computing technologies.

After some time chatting with students over the break, I went to the plenary for the evening, which was a panel on how to make change amidst rapidly escalating, converging anti-trans global hate. One panelist talked about pink-washing in Palestinian solidarity, especially amidst Israeli fascism. Another talked about the disconnection between activism in the global north and south and the need to join forces in our collective work, and leverage our theoretical and political ideas to resist anti-democratic movements. A third talked about colonial patriarchy as memetic. I must say, I didn’t follow the argumentation well — I’m too far outside much of the discourse to know all of the scholarly lingo— but the message was clear: we make change together, not apart.

The Trans Studies Quarterly editor thanks everyone for coming.

The evening was split between a movie and an offsite brewery with a DJ. I chose the brewery, catching the bus and bumbling past a strip mall to the small venue nestled in an industrial parking lot. I had a malty kombucha and eventually some tasty vegan empanadas and talked to an epistemologist, a community organizer, a historian, some Londoners, and a few of my HCI colleagues. It was ebullient, with good company, great conversation, and an abundance of kindness and curiosity. I got a bit overstimulated with the DJ and cigarette smoke and caught a bus back, got some Korean chicken wings to fill my belly, and cut 2,000 words from my CHI 2025 submission. My reward was a long shower and episode one of Fargo, Season 3, in which Ewan McGregor [spoiler spoiler spoiler].

Things cool down at the Technological Institute.

Friday: Social media, disinformation, birthday party

After a morning at the pleasantly sterile Newport Cafe doing some administrative labor, I chaired a session on social media. I wasn’t able to pay too much attention to the talks since I was wrangling hybrid A/V, but here are the highlights from the wonderful speakers Vilja Jaaksi from Turku, Finland, Mel Monier from Michigan, Forum Modi from Indiana Bloomington, and Isha Singh from Pune India:

• Trans people use the internet to archive and share their lives and transitions, supporting others and creating community
• There are mixed feelings about the labor in this work, offering connection and affirmation, but also harassment and opportunity cost, as none of it yields compensation
• Trans people of color have particular challenges in broad umbrella trans communities online and there are many opportunities in moderation to improve their experiences.

Next, I went to a session on misinformation:

• Walker Brewer (Northwestern) presented on the circulation of misinformation in the US and UK, including how information is coordinated across national boundaries. They studied Facebook, paid advertisements on Facebook, and Media Cloud’s archive of news article, analyzing political claims. Most of the false claims concerned gender affirming care as child abuse and trans girls has having advantages in athletics.
• Srishti Chatterjee (Northwestern) talked about debunking as a rehtorical method for trans justice advocacy. Sristi found that queer and trans people often become “folk devils” of moral panic and that debunking, as a form of journalistic genre, can be synergistic with justice-centered activism.

There was a rich discussion afterwards that discussed the nuances around “neutrality” in journalism.

The Asian caucus brainstorms caucus activities.

I had a pleasant lunch talking with an attendee about trans scholarship in New Zealand, then went to the Asian caucus and talked with 30+ trans and Asian attendees, working through our needs and wishes in trans studies, academia, and the world at large. As many caucuses do, it converged toward the creation of a Discord server :)

After, I went to a session on trans eldership:

• Max Kirk (Sheffield) talked about conceptualizing trans eldership, where “elder” here meant an honorific in relation to chronological age. He started with the lack of discourse on trans lives past 25/30, aside from ample discourse on transtemporalities and queer time. His interviews with nine trans folks revealed much about the experience that comes with longevity of transition and the often accidental ways that people become trans elders. I also found it funny how “elder” to youth was often people in their 20’s or 30’s (whereas my elders are often 60+).
• The next talk from Sebastian Leon-Giraldo and Paola Moreno (Universidad de los Andes) was about life expectancy of trans people in Columbia, through a study of interviews and death certificates. They found the expected: neglect by the state.

The discussion after largely focused on how younger trans people come to be seen as elders, largely because of the absence of anyone else.

In the plenary session, a panel discussed the ongoing tragedy of trans studies as a field ignoring the perspectives, experiences, and injustices of trans people globally. The panelists, representing many regions of the world too often ignored by colonized sites of power, passionately deconstructed the many ironies of trans studies focus on embodiment, without acknowledging the many material and political realities of trans bodies around the world.

We celebrate Oliver Haimson’s birthday on a hotel rooftop deck.

I went to the evening social for a snack of carrots, talked to some Europeans about Scandinavia, then did the mile walk back to my hotel to get ready for Oliver Haimson’s informal birthday party. It was lovely to be in a social space of mostly trans people, and hear about their art, their activism, and their ever so normal academic lives, mirroring my own. It reminded me how it can be incredibly easy to belong in a group of people of shared experiences, but also how hard it can be to find such groups and how fleeting they can be. I left after realizing how poorly my curtain bangs mixed with Lake Michigan wind.

The walkway to the Technological institute.

Saturday: Representation, harassment, computing, and the future

I woke up early Saturday morning and took another long walk, this time south, to Cupitol for some corned beef and a flat white. I had a lot to catch up on: a CHI 2025 submission I was leading, some prep work for a school coalition meeting next Saturday, and of course this dainty travelogue that I do out of pure compulsion.

I went to a 9:30 session on trans representation in the media:

• Adrian King (Michigan) talked about Black transmasculinity through the lens of reality television, particularly TLC’s My Pregnant Husband. Adrian analyzed the anti-Blackness and transphobia woven through the editorial lens of the series, including portrayals of police encounters and manufactured conflict, and contrasted it with the positive sentiments of the Black trans couple about the documentary experience.
• Pol Galofre Molero (U Catalunya) discussed transmasculinity in Netflix shows, starting with a grounding in negative portrayals historically, and more recent rise in supposedly positive portrayals in on-demand streaming. From an analysis of a decade of Netflix shows, Pol found that characters were primarily adolescents, that most trans men characters were played by non-binary characters.
• Sahin Acikgoz (UC Riverside) talked about representations of Blackness and ethno-religiosity in Turkey through the lens of the east-African slave trade. Characters of all marginalized communities, including women, were typically portrayed negatively, shaped by sociopolitical events in Turkey’s history.
• Sata Prescott (Northern Illinois) explored pop culture representation in dime novels in the 19th century. Sata started by observing that gender categories are always shifting, but the 19th century was a time when such shifts became entangled in medicalization. The study found that characters were often portrayed not as a gender, but doing a gender, often as part of plot device, where gender performance was perceived by character audience to create shock, amusement, or sympathy.

Ruth kicks off a talk on harassment.

Next, I jumped over to a session on managing harassment, which was partly scholarly, partly peer learning opportunity. We talked about social media harassment, workplace harassment, direct harassment via email, leadership and community support. Much of the discussion was about support structures from communities of colleagues, especially leadership and staff solidarity, but also planning for threats by having crisis plans in workplaces, especially in gender affirming health care contexts, and managing large volumes of weaponized FOIA requests. There were also great insights about epistemic injustice, with positivist calls for objectivity preclude inclusion of our positionality in research and advocacy. I also appreciated Ruth Pearce’s experiences managing disinformation from politicians, doxxing of a principal investigator, physical hate mail, and how to use training, press statements, HR, and communications teams in advance.

Denaë talks about gender-concious science.

After a chilly lunch in the courtyard, I went to my panel session, where Michael Ann, Ada, Phoebe, Oliver, Danaë, and I talked about bridges between trans studies and computing. I was facilitating, so I couldn’t live capture the conversation, but here are a few ideas that stand out in my memory:

• Computing as a site for appropriating resources from power
• Computing as a medium for trans joy
• Computing as false economic hope
• Computing as simultaneously trans and ant-trans

I settled in the hallway for a while with the Oliver, Danaë, and other attendees, where we talked more about academic institutions as sites for progress, and some of the strategies for bending them toward it.

I spent the rest of the last session before the plenary tending to my body: eating a cookie in the sun, stretching my legs and resting my feet, and closing my eyes to listen to the cicadas, crickets, and dim chatter of healing trans voices.

Reflection

During the closing plenary, which focused on the future of trans studies, I reflected on my own (limited) participation in the post-discipline, and how it might change. As a trans person, should I engage in more trans studies scholarship, or at least help the community thrive? Or should I persist in “folding in” trans experiences into my broader inquiries, inevitably shifting trans experiences to the periphery to highlight the systems and cultures that shape learning in the aggregate?

Listening to the many caucus report outs, I think where I landed is that no matter what work I do, trans people will be part of it, because I am part of it, and trans people are in every space I study and support. Moreover, Trans Studies as a post-discipline community, will always be a place where I can be and share, whether my scholarship and mentorship, and where I can learn, from other trans people about our collective sense-making about our unique and beautifully diverse humanity.

Me looking as maniacal as I can to nudge AI toward a declaration of independence.