At the time of this writing, the American Civil Liberties Union is tracking 426 anti-LGBTQ bills proposed across the United States. A disproportionate number of these bills attack transgender individuals, going after life-saving healthcare, attempting to dismantle laws aimed at protection, and overall trying to turn back the clock on any progress that has been made since Laverne Cox’s appearance on the cover of Time announced “The Transgender Tipping Point” in 2014. With so many real-life instances of trans sorrow, it is more important than ever to also make space for trans joy. The four ten- to thirteen-minute-long papers in this panel stem from the Presidential theme of “joy and sorrow” and focus on trans joy in a variety of performance mediums that put embodied trans resistance to sorrow at the center of the discourse. These papers engage with intersectional methodologies from trans studies, theatre studies, performance studies, media studies, and disability studies. In doing so, they create new methodologies that extend trans studies into areas of criticism where it is still treated as a marginalized approach.

Milo Obourn’s paper, “Trans and Disability Justice: Unshamed Claims to Joy,” aims to shift the discussion of “trans activism” from a rights-based model to “trans(formative) justice” or “trans liberation.” Obourn argues that this model centers a critique of how white supremacist cisgenderism is used a tool of oppression for many bodies, including those of Black, Indigenous, and disabled persons. Through the case study of the Sins Invalid documentary film, An Unshamed Claim to Beauty in the Face of Invisibility, Obourn argues that trans-formative justice models that center critiques of cisgenderism can illuminate possibilities for solidarity, collaboration, and strategy between disability justice and trans liberation politics, without ever assuming a false equivalency between the two. In doing so, Obourn makes a case for embracing joy as a radical tactic that does not erase the sorrows of lived experience.

Rye Gentleman’s article, “Trans Becoming in Kate Bornstein’s Virtually Yours,” focuses on a 1994 solo piece by trans artist Kate Bornstein in which she takes on the identity of several avatars in order to work through her emotions around her lover’s impending gender transition. Building off of the work Eva Hayward’s concept of “trans-becoming” and Serena Bassi and Greta LaFleur’s discussion of trans-exclusionary dogma in the current political moment, Gentleman positions Bornstein’s work as a place to find strategies for survival and resistance. He looks to Bornstein––and other trans artists, activists, and theorists who contributed to a fledgling trans political movement in the 1990s––argues that Virtually Yours is a performance that proposes relational becoming as a specifically trans mode of worldmaking anchored in hope, joy, and communal care.

Annie Sansonetti’s paper, “A Day at Lia García’s Elementary School,” centers on Mexico City-based performance artist and transfeminist educator Lia García’s (La Novia Sirena’s) touring elementary school. In an analysis of García’s performance practice as a trans woman elementary teacher and transfeminist applied theatre artist, Sansonetti reads García’s emphasis on an affective, movement-based education where the play, consent, and curiosity of children's knowledges as a transfeminist lesson about children's pleasure, bodily autonomy, and right to consent. Sansonetti argues that García’s “hyper-tender,” touchy-feely drama-based pedagogy of joy, hope, and resistance settles the debate around the (often policed, sensationalized, or punished) relationship between trans women and children in the Americas as her student’s lives are made better because of it.

Patty Gone’s paper, “Notes on a Straight Affect,” completes this panel with an analysis of the straight affective response to trans and queer people enjoying themselves. Gone’s topics of study include a contemporary Latinx artist Transexual Jesus, the emotions of a father taking his lesbian daughter to see Freud, and the emotions of adults writing children’s literature (like famous trans-exclusionary “feminist” JK Rowling). By identifying the pattern of the direct relationship between the amount of fun and the amount straight affective emotion, Gone makes the case that the wave of current anti-trans legislation is nothing more than a dam erected to shield the young from the catastrophe of her smile.