Trans scholarship is poised to give transphobia the analytic importance early queer theory gave homophobia. Should it? Recent polemics by trans studies scholars, like Kadji Amin, have criticized the abstract, expansive conceptions of transness canonized by transgender studies, insisting on the need for new methods attuned to actual trans populations. But anti-trans politics have increasingly figured transness as a “social contagion” spreading across the planet. Does the analysis of transphobia require a more capacious framework?

This panel brings together leading and emerging trans-identified trans scholars looking to develop strategies and methods for anti-transphobic critique. Using our training as literary scholars, this panel will interrogate the rhetorical tendencies of historical and contemporary transphobia and anti-trans politics. Foremost among these is the tendency to figure transness as eminently communicable in the fullest sense of the word. The very language that renders trans experience legible is itself being figured as a danger to public health and livable futures. Judith Butler’s return to gender scholarship, Who’s Afraid of Gender? (2024), has given public form to the terrifying ramifications of transphobia so-conceived. But trans studies has been following to these developments for decades. What methods might a dedicatedly anti-transphobic critique privilege? What should it avoid? What discourses, genres, and tropes would a theory of transphobia privilege? What histories, texts, and intersections might it clarify? As organizers, we are excited to provide a forum for the diversity of thought offered by our panelists, including historical, literary, and philosophical approaches.

As presider, Jessy Nyiri will articulate the political stakes of the conversation and its organizing contradictions in an introduction no longer than a few minutes. Nyiri will stress the variety of forms taken by anti-trans politics: ultra-conservative, far-right populist, scientistic, ostensibly feminist, academic. Alongside this, Nyiri will foreground the ongoing debates within trans studies between advocates for expansive and minoritizing conceptions of transness. The question is, what must anti-transphobic critique prioritize?

In “How To Be a Woman Though Male: On Uncertainty and Trans Pedagogy,” rl Goldberg takes up the question of trans pedagogy and communicability in anti-trans conservative Abigail Shrier’s book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. Goldberg argues that Schrier’s “gender critical” fear of trans social contagion relies on a logic of trans or bodily certainty: the idea that it is both possible and desirable to know for certain that one is trans in order to prevent the spread of transness to the merely “questioning.” This paper explores what possibilities emerge if we refuse the transphobic demand that “certainty” be a
condition of access to trans healthcare, and argues that we should turn instead to epistemic uncertainty. Goldberg takes up Gayle Salamon’s consideration of uncertainty in phenomenological ethics in order to ask what such open- mindedness makes possible for trans pedagogy: the notion that all trans people have to learn how to be trans.

Colby Gordon will speak on “Trans Tone” in a paper exploring the historical convergences of antisemitism and transphobia. Through a reading of Oskar Panizza’s short story “The Operated Jew” (1894), Gordon highlights the phenomenon of mauscheln (to speak “like Moses”), a derogatory term for a mode of German speech marked as Jewish. By drawing out the ways in which mauscheln was also gendered, Gordon argues that trans modes of communication, and transphobic backlash to this legible speech, share a constitutive history with antisemitic rhetoric. This paper thus extends recent scholarship in German trans studies, like that by Zavier Nunn and Laurie Marhoefer, while recontextualizing the current confluence of antisemitism and transphobia.

Grace Lavery will attend to the trans feminist critique of transphobia and its continued exclusion from the academy in “A Few Do's of Anti-transphobic Critique.” Focusing on trans feminism’s articulation of the non-immanence of sex, Lavery traces the hermeneutical and historical implications of this articulation throughout recent literary and cultural criticism. Lavery argues that, while trans feminist thought offers a productive challenge to traditional methods of
humanistic study, humanistic study has returned the favor by using "trans studies" to exclude trans people and methods from the scholarly work of critique. This paper then develops methods of engaging trans feminism in order to build towards an anti-transphobic, critical practice.

Alexis Ferguson will act as respondent, offering a 5-10 minute synthesis and re-contextualization of the panelists’ arguments. They will draw on recent anti-transphobia studies, like Jules Gill-Peterson’s A Short History of Trans Misogyny and Emma Heaney’s forthcoming Feminism Against Cisness, to highlight the critical implications and potential applications of the panelists’ proposals alongside the ways in which they differ.