The Transsexual/Transvestite Issue

Contributors to this special issue challenge the racialization, relegation, and invisibilization of trans experience. While “transsexual” and “transvestite” were central categories that organized trans experience across a wide array of geographies, genders, and racial and class coordinates during the twentieth century, these categories have receded into the background of Anglophone activism and academia, the authors argue. Rendered anachronistic, both groups are more vulnerable than ever to long-standing stigmas with a new temporal twist. Just as importantly, colonial spatial logic has also exported transsexuality and transvestism out of the global north, embedding them as racial markers of gender in the global south. In an effort to promote ostensibly more open-ended and proliferating models of gender variance, the authors seek a critical reevaluation of transsexuals and transvestites, at once temporal, geographical, and political.

Contributors: Harrison Apple, Daniasa Curbelo, Ms. Bob Davis, Frau Diamanda, Sergio Domínguez, Jr., Emmett Harsin Drager, Iñaki Estella, Jules Gill-Peterson, RL Goldberg, Laura Horak, Billy Huff, Johana Kunin, Lazarus Nance Letcher, Diego Marchante, Jenni Olson, Lucas Platero, K.J. Rawson, Cole Rizki, Andrés Senra, Lindsey Shively, Patricio Simonetto, Emily Skidmore, Ira Terán, Beans Velocci, Marta V. Vicente, Alithia Zamantakis