(De)Subjugated knowledges: An introduction to transgender studies

In 1995, I found myself standing in line for my turn at the microphone in the Proshansky Auditorium of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. I was attending a conference called “Lesbian and Gay History,” organized by the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS). I had just attended a panel discussion on “Gender and the Homosexual Role,” moderated by Randolph Trumbach, whose speakers consisted of Will Roscoe, Martha Vicinus, George Chauncey, Ramon Gutierrez, Elizabeth Kennedy, and Martin Manalansan. I had heard a great many interesting things about fairies and berdaches (as two-spirit Native Americans were still being called), Corn Mothers and molly-houses, passionate female friendships, butch-femme dyads, and the Southeast Asian gay diaspora, but I was nevertheless standing in line to register a protest. Each of the panelists was an intellectual star in his or her own right, but they were not, I thought, taken collectively, a very genderdiverse lot. From my perspective, with a recently claimed transsexual identity, they all looked pretty much the same: like nontransgender people. A new wave of transgender scholarship, part of a broader queer intellectual movement was, by that point in time, already a few years old. Why were there no transgender speakers on the panel? Why was the entire discussion of “gender diversity” subsumed within a discussion of sexual desire—as if the only reason to express gender was to signal the mode of one’s attractions and availabilities to potential sex partners?