Elijah A Edelman

This chapter provides an overview of how gender identity and transgender rights have been defined in an LGBT rights framework, what international and regional organizations and social actors have defined as fundamental trans rights, and, finally, the limitations of applying a homogenizing “trans rights” framework to a vastly disparate array of gender liminal subjectivities and practices. First, the chapter defines the scope and reach of a “trans rights” framework as housed within “LGBT” legal and organizational practices. Next, it outlines the key issues that international and regional trans rights activists, advocates,
and academics have outlined as central to addressing their own communities’ needs. Importantly, while the popularity of collapsing sexual and gender minorities into an “LGBT” framework would suggest a coherence of shared identities and practices across cultural and regional experience, this framework may, instead, function to elide profound differences in the formation and application of primarily North Atlantic and Anglophone understandings of “rights” and “needs.” Rather, as discussed in internationally and regionally focused reports, activist needs assessments, and academic work, trans and gender liminal rights have been, regionally, best addressed and met by organizations and
groups that are not housed within an “LGBT” framework or organization. Finally, the chapter discusses how approaching “trans rights” through a lens of gender self-determination, rather than as a category of mutually understood and identifiable subjectivities and experiences across different communities of practice, may function to bolster shared rights claims while also, simultaneously, delimiting or delegitimizing overly formulaic understandings of gender experience and expression.

This article, in its exploration of trans activism, coalitional labor,
and radical care, is also an exploration of how the production of the
“transnormative subject” articulates with notions of resilience as well as
spatiality and place. As I discuss here the ideologies that underlie the
notion of trans resilience value a simple “universal trajectory of coming
out/transition, visibility, recognition, protection, and self-actualization.”
However, lived experience does not follow a linear path. The focus on
and celebration of the few trans lives that might reproduce this model of resilience “remains uninterrogated in [their] complicities and convergences with biomedical, neoliberal, racist, and imperialist projects.” In other words, what constitutes valued trans embodiment and practice becomes the template through which resilience imagines both life making and how care is found.

I argue here that the disconnections between the dead bodies produced at the Pulse nightclub and the values of mainstream LGBT activism reflect a larger structural lapse of meaningful and productive inclusion. In the LGBT model, the material and lived differences between sexual subjectivity and gender identity are collapsed into a single “community” that is made to signify a singularity of needs or desires. This kind of erasure is particularly problematic when discussing socially or politically liminal sexualities and genders that may fall outside hegemonic
or normative demands. Indeed, if mainstream LGBT structures include the capacity to “forget” the largest LGBT-focused attack in US history, we, as queer and trans scholars, activists, and community members, should be deeply concerned about whom we are encouraged to value and what happens when we are complicit in that valuation.

I argue here that the disconnections between the dead bodies produced at the Pulse nightclub and the values of mainstream LGBT activism reflect a larger structural lapse of meaningful and productive inclusion. In the LGBT model, the material and lived differences between sexual subjectivity and gender identity are collapsed into a single “community” that is made to signify a singularity of needs or desires. This kind of erasure is particularly problematic when discussing socially or politically liminal sexualities and genders that may fall outside hegemonic or normative demands. Indeed, if mainstream LGBT structures include the capacity to “forget” the largest LGBT-focused attack in US history, we, as queer and trans scholars, activists, and community members, should be deeply concerned about whom we are encouraged to value and what happens when we are complicit in that valuation.

Amnesiac gays and lesbians in support of violently nationalistic and anti-Islamic governance produce the conditions that render death and violence against some queer and trans bodies acceptable, if not also expected. It is through these conditions that mainstream gay and lesbian media can amplify Trump’s demonization of Mateen’s subjectivity as a racialized, potentially queered Other, while failing to foreground Trump’s actual campaign promises of white nationalism, anti-immigrant, anti-disabled, anti-Islam, anti-woman and anti-poor policies. To adopt such a hypnotically powerful brand of gay rights that forgets, quite literally, so many other queer/ed bodies, is precisely how, and why, the rise of radical populism is both unthinkable and entirely plausible.

Students' Perspectives: As we discussed in our first post of the year, our goal this year is to showcase a more full range of work being done under the banner of queer and trans anthropology. We often overlook how queer and trans anthropology is being integrated into all levels of higher education, particularly at the undergraduate level. Our post this month reflects the importance of establishing queer and trans­focused anthropological courses available at all levels of education, particularly for undergraduates. In this post, we highlight a dialogue and projects completed by students enrolled in the undergraduate level course Queer and Trans understanding of the world. " How do we do Queer and Trans Anthropological Work? Students of Queer and Trans Anthropology at RIC also worked with local groups and organizations in order to explore different understandings of gender, sex, and sexuality. Angela Achorn's work with AIDS Care Ocean State and their Drag Bingo fundraisers reveals that those participating in Drag Bingo, an event held to raise funds for HIV/AIDS work across Rhode Island, attracted a broad spectrum of participants. Achorn notes that, importantly, Drag Bingo, known at this location as " This Ain't Your Grandma's Bingo " creates a space for different members of Rhode Island's community, notably straight­identifying older women, church groups and younger people, to " temporarily break out of their rigid ways " and express and consume sexually­explicit discourses and products in ways that would be unacceptable elsewhere. Patrick Afonso's work with the Rhode Island College Unity Center, a center on campus responsible for creating " cultural awareness by providing a safe forum for exploring issues pertaining to diversity, equity and inclusion " meets this mission in perhaps unexpected ways. Specifically, one successful approach in meeting students' needs has been providing free printing, food, and a space to read or chat with others during the final weeks of class. This service highlights the ways in which socio­economic status and access to space represents the intersectional and intertextual nature of the notion of 'diversity.' Madelyn Beck's work with Interweave, an LGBTQ organization based out of a Unitarian church in Newport, Rhode Island, discusses the role and function of heterosexual and cisgender ally­ship in supporting LGBTQI family and youth. Specifically, Beck helped coordinate and raise funds for Interweaves seventh annual Born this Way Prom, an event open to all LGBTQ youth across the state of Rhode Island. Interweave provides both the space and free transportation to youth.

Importantly, trans communities bear a large brunt of violence directed at LGBT community groups, reflected in the extremely high rates of assault experienced by trans persons. The impacts of violence, whether physical, verbal or structural, should not be underestimated as they impact general and specific mental and physical health, access to housing to overall wellbeing. It is important to note that this violence can be both interpersonal as well as structural in nature, particularly with regard to laws that fail to protect trans persons as well as inhumane treatment of trans persons by members of the police and within Washington, DC hospitals, jails, and other public accommodations. Extreme acts of violence against trans women of color are disturbingly common in Washington, DC, with robbery, sexual assault, stabbings, and murder as a persistent problem for trans women in Washington, DC.
Key Findings:
Trans persons experience disturbingly high rates of assault and harassment. 74% had been verbally assaulted, 42% physically assaulted, and 35% sexually assaulted.  Trans feminine individuals are more likely than trans masculine individuals to have been assaulted. 57% of trans feminine individuals had been assaulted compared to 17% of trans masculine individuals. o 47% of trans feminine individuals had been sexually assaulted compared to 14% of trans masculine individuals. Experiences of assault are more common among trans persons of color compared to White trans persons. 54% of Black and 60% of Hispanic trans persons had been physically assaulted compared to 21% of Whites. Sexual assault is extremely high.  47% of Black and 56% of Hispanic trans persons had been sexually assaulted compared to 14% of Whites. Experiences of assault are most common among trans feminine individuals of color. Among Black trans persons, 62% of trans feminine individuals had been physically assaulted compared to 14% of Black trans masculine individuals. Among Hispanic trans persons, 70% of trans feminine individuals had been physically assaulted compared to 27% of trans masculine Hispanics.

This article explores how ‘safety’ and ‘safe space,’ as a somatic, psychic or affective freedom from harm and a kind of experiential ‘health,’ is constructed in transgender, transsexual and gender non-conforming (henceforth ‘trans’) persons in community produced maps of Washington, DC as a ‘trans city.’ These maps, and their associated narratives, provide the only up-to-date data available on the lived experience of trans populations living in the District, a city quickly gaining notoriety for systemic brutality against trans feminine people of color.

In this article I explore how transgender and cisgender participants in internet-mediated visual and print-based sexual cinematic discourse frame the construction of orgasms among trans masculine and other male-identified, female-assigned at birth, subjects. Specifically, I focus on the visual and linguistic
platforms of amateur videos featuring trans men’s genitals posted on XTube, a website that hosts user-submitted films as well as space for user commentary. Importantly, the ‘visual’ text of the film content articulates in productive and perhaps unexpected ways with the ‘figurative’ dialogue of language used to frame the video as well as that deployed by posted responses to the film. Situating trans men’s genitals as both discursively and phenomenologically managed alongside ‘the privileging of the visual over the figurative’ I focus on employing frameworks of audience reception, how trans men and their sexual interlocutors, as either consumers of film or physical participants, both reproduce and destabilize hegemonic notions of maleness. Specifically, I consider how hegemonic notions of maleness extend to genital function and the politics of ejaculation and ‘cum’, or the bodily fluids produced peri and post orgasm, to reflect the ideological ‘productivity of genitals’ for trans subjects.

In this chapter, I consider how necropolitical geospatial policies regulate, in both expulsion and discard, trans feminine bodies2  of colour on the streets of Washington, DC. These policies, such as the prostitution free zone (PFZ), serve
to illuminate how exclusionary practices reflect gendered, sexualized, raced and embodied elements of neo-liberal citizenship demands. Specifically, the geo-social
function of the PFZ reveals how necropolitical ideologies articulate with space and homo(necro)nationalism, wherein the visibility of trans (feminine) bodies of colour in economically viable space is articulated as a threat to safety and the presence of criminality.

The mayorally instituted and police-enforced Prostitution Free Zones in Washington, DC, serve as a tool of nation-state disciplinarity, wherein many transgender women of color, viewed as ideologically suspect, are profiled as “sex workers,” facing police harassment and arrest. This article explores here how this process is not merely about sex work but rather about discourses that are evoked in the displacement of the always-already displaced—racial, sexed, and gendered “others” through interviews with activists and trans community members, as well as District of Columbia government publications.

As institutions of higher learning experience increasing financial responsibilities and shrinking endowments they are simultaneously becoming the sites of more
learning than ever before. Facing layoffs and uncertain career paths, many have gone back to school in search of degrees with the hope of securing a more
financially stable future. Yet, as the market becomes inundated with masses of recent graduates, fewer stable and financially sustainable academic positions are
becoming available. Schools want to spend less, yet continue to expand their student bodies. As such, cycles of knowledge production and consumption can be
reduced to devalued, yet highly commodifiable, units ripe for exploitative practices. The increased use of professorial adjunct and visiting lecturer labor fulfills
enormous percentages of university teaching needs, yet constitutes only a fraction of payroll budgets allocated for instruction. As a result, many of these fulltime
instructors earn so little instructing students they must go into forbearance on their own student debts.
In this co-authored piece, we—as a full-time professorial adjunct at both a small liberal arts college and at a major research university and as a full-time
undergraduate student—consider our own roles in maintaining the hegemonies of debt formation within institutions of higher education. We each contribute
to the institution of higher education in different ways, yet are equally bound to the accumulation of debt. In short, we, as educators, theorists, and researchers,
are faced with the challenge of how to engage in continued academic inquiry when our own participation within the institution of higher education directly
subsidizes the continued financial exploitation of our colleagues, our students, and the accredited knowledge exchange.

Public anthropology, as a field anchored in the shift of knowledge production from academics to the communities in question, becomes a critical tool in the destabilization of the tired tropes portraying trans persons. Through a publically-engaged anthropology, trans lived experience can be lifted above the blanket theorizing of the academy, stressing the complicated messiness of materiality over simplistic reductionism. The positioning of stealth as 'categorical denial' is yet another mode of gross oversimplification and decontextualization of trans experience that absolutely must be problematized if the academy is to produce anything of real political, social or legal use for trans persons. Rather than mere facile description, I highlight here the mechanism of power framing stealth practice and document on-the-ground modes of flexibility, resistance and disidentification. That is to say, I use public anthropological perspectives to rest legitimacy of knowledge production from the academic and, rather, cast critical attention to trans person who actively, and creatively, negotiate systems of power in their day-to-day lives. In doing so, those that are typically rendered outside of the bounds of struggle, those that are 'stealth' are relocated into the positions of resistance they occupy.

Visibility plays a vital role in the negotiation of transgender identities and experience. Reception of a trans person’s gender identity rests on the recognition of that gender as authentic – a judgment that relies on power structures that designate “authentic” gender based on sex designation at birth. Disclosing a gender discordant history therefore places a trans person’s gender identity under threat of delegitimation while also enacting a process of hyper-embodiment in which a trans individual’s body, and especially their genitals, become a metonymic focal site of their subjectivity. In this way, being publicly trans carries the potential of ideological or somatic subordination. We see these kinds of responses in media coverage of minor celebrities such as Chaz Bono or Thomas Beatie, the latter of whom was known for a time in 2009 as “the pregnant man.” In these contexts, we find a constant engagement with discourses of hyper-embodiment including detailed explanations of the physical transition process, reproductive capacity, and accounts of the development and potential origins of their trans identities. In this paper, however, we look to a very different context in which we see more variable engagements with the disclosure of potential embodied difference.
In this paper we explore how the notion of a trans masculine public is negotiated by trans men and other individuals assigned female at birth who identify as masculine or male through analysis of disclosure in the context of online personal advertisements geared toward men seeking sex with other men. Rather than finding a local grounding for the practices of publicly transmasculine subjects and their engagement with hyper-embodiment, we find quite a different relationship to disclosure in which a trans masculine public is situated within the bounds of a homonormative erotic public.

Chairman Mendelson and members of the Committee on the Judiciary, I speak representing the DC
Trans Coalition, a community based grassroots organization that seeks to secure and protect the
rights of the entire Washington, DC transgender, transsexual, and gender non-conforming (trans)
community. Thank you for allowing us to speak about the importance of population management
reform within the District’s detention facilities.

In this dissertation I explore how transgender, transsexual and other gender nonconforming subjects organize socially and politically as members of immensely diverse and discontinuous ‘trans coalitions’ in Washington, D.C. This ethnography, utilizing corporeally-anchored community map-making and interview data with over 100 trans-spectrum persons, attends to how emerging disjunctures between law, policy and lived experience—as expressed through the regulation of bodies in space—impact and highlight structural inequalities across trans-spectrum identities and practices. Ultimately, this project shifts a static view of a singular homogenous trans community into a politically and socio-economically-anchored discussion of trans-spectrum experiences, cross cut by issues of class, race, and modalities of gender expression, all within the physical, social and political arenas of Washington, D.C.

This book applies a framework of ‘trans vitalities’ through an ethnographically-anchored exploration of trans coalitional labor and activism in Washington, DC. Specifically, it considers how trans social justice work at the local level exemplifies why and how the notions of ‘trans community’ or ‘trans rights’ must be reconfigured. Trans vitalities, as a framework developed in this volume, functions in three particular ways: 1) to disrupt and rethink what valuable, viable, or quantifiable quality of life looks like; 2) to shift our understandings of community towards ‘coalition’; and 3) as a methodological, theoretical, and application-based set of tools that integrates a radical trans politics and community-based approach towards addressing trans lives. Trans Vitalities incorporates one-on-one interviews, community map-making projects, and an analysis of the DC Trans Needs Assessment, produced through trans coalitional labor.

An accessible case study for both how to research trans-specific topics and how to apply a framework of trans vitalities, this book is valuable reading for those who research or instruct on LGBTQ topics as well as activists, policy makers, and law makers.