by Jo Hsu
In Hil Malatino’s Trans Care, he describes gender-inclusive bathrooms, pronoun-go rounds, and other elements of everyday trans activism as care work. Often mundane and “unsexy,” these items are hardly revolutionary, but “like all care work, [this work] is about fostering survival; it is maintenance work that must be done so that trans folks can get about the work of living.”[1] This life-sustaining quality is also what feels so immediate about teaching, learning, and writing trans rhetorics: we are creating vocabularies, stories, and spaces where trans life is possible—even celebrated—despite all efforts otherwise.
Malatino’s work, grounded in mutual care and trans survival, served as a guiding voice throughout the Transgender Rhetorics class I taught at UT Austin in Fall 2021. We considered how gendered norms become embedded in political deliberations, news and popular media, and formal and implicit policies—and the often dire consequences for gender nonconforming people. Students conducted “gender audits”[2] of sites of their choosing—for example, campus housing facilities or Zoom’s online architecture. In examining how these commonplace settings are rhetorical – that is, how they express and enforce particular values, social hierarchies, and cultural expectations—students also exercised their own gender creativity, crafting proposals for reinventing such spaces.
The contributions to this issue, some of which emerged from that class, offer related explorations of trans innovation. Through personal narrative, Brett Glasscock demonstrates how trans thought finds possibility in unlikely places. In “Going to the Mattresses for Gender-Inclusive Housing,” Adrienne Hunter highlights over fifteen years of trans students’ advocacy for their own safety on campus. Sean Moothart describes working with the Texas House LGBTQ Caucus to combat 2021’s anti-trans legislation, and Evan Montelongo’s internship at the Kind Clinic provides lessons on the role of language in gender-inclusive care. In Arts QT, Jazz Bell’s poetry highlights both mundane and extraordinary experiences of trans care. For our reviews section, Nick Winges-Yanez spotlights kin·song, a performance that captured rage, isolation, resilience, and beauty in disabled and trans life. And, Rocky Lane, an Austin-based activist and entrepreneur, joined me on Audio QT to discuss mutual care within trans and queer communities.
Many of these contributions recount moments from 2021—a year rife with public transantagonism. Last year, U.S. state legislators introduced a record number of anti-trans bills, with over 40 in Texas alone. Texas also leads the way in anti-trans violence, and has drawn national attention for its attempt to censor LGBTQ+ and antiracist content in public schools. The persistent threat hounding trans life makes it easy to overlook the tremendous imagination, generosity, and care that suffuses trans communities. Like Malatino’s Trans Care, however, the essays, poems, and stories throughout this issue center the courageous ways—big and small—that trans people get (each other) through the work of living.
Despite relentless attempts at trans erasure, Texas has the second-largest transgender population in the United States. It is the home base from which Monica Roberts conducted decades of transformative work and where organizations and communities continue to show up to defend trans youth. So often, trans stories only garner attention when they’re accounts of tragedy. Transness, however, is at its heart an experience of hope– that other ways of being in the world are possible and that we can get there together. In this issue you’ll find such instances of trans creativity, generosity, community, and joy. I am so grateful for the gift of these stories, and that these artists and authors chose to share them with us.
[1] Hil Malatino, Trans Care (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 41.
[2] Heath Fogg Davis, Beyond Trans: Does Gender Matter? (New York: New York University Press, 2018).
V. Jo Hsu (they/them) is an assistant professor of Rhetoric & Writing and core faculty in the Center for Asian American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. There, they are also a faculty affiliate of LGBTQ Studies and a member of the Disabled Faculty Equity Council. Their research and teaching asks how narratives shape cultural and political environments and how stories can enforce and/or disrupt structures of domination. Their book, Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics is forthcoming Fall 2022 (Ohio State University Press).
