Histories of the Trans Present

Are trans people new? Is sex binary? Can sex change? These questions and their precedents have monopolized gendered politics and have taken on global significance in recent years. Amidst the tidal wave of transphobia and the scapegoating of trans people within the US election and across transnational borders, answers to these questions are pressing and of great consequence—not only for trans people themselves, but the stability of the systems of gender and sex which organize bodies and persons along a cis/trans and male/female divide.

But the importance of sex and gender to everyday and political life has a much longer history. While we have eclipsed the “transgender tipping point” from 2014 and are now dizzy at the center of a transgender hysteria hurricane, anxieties and control over what sex and gender are—and who can change them—have many pasts. These pasts have constituted key paradigms of world history, including empire, the state, citizenship, selfhood, mind/body dualism, social reproduction, divisions of labor, religious order, secular and scientific thought, human difference, and even time.

In short, sex and gender (almost) always matter. But they have mattered and manifested in different ways, been differently articulated, embodied, and regulated, and ebbing and flowing as concepts of social concern and contingency across contexts.

Following Foucault’s formulation of a history of the present—a genealogy of how we got here—this course is a history of the trans present in that it charts the ways in which sex and gender have been ontologized across borders and contexts, often in ways which regulate and police bodies within borders. It historicises the divisive discourses that animate present day politics, showing that sexual dimorphism’s legitimacy has been continually contested in different ways and from different standpoints for centuries, and that arguing for or against the universality of sex/gender is a move that people across left/right and liberal/illiberal political lines have historically made. The path towards trans’ contemporary inception is not only uneven, including many discontinuities as well as continuities. It is also global and disturbing, requiring the violence of empire, eugenics, and slavery to cleave sexual dimorphism into two, whose “binary logic” trans then seeks to muddy and muddle—in ways which sometimes yield to ideas of what sex and gender “really are”. Trans peopl