Trans in geography: Outlines of a socio-political location

This is a recording of a keynote I gave at the Queer Geographies Post-Graduate Reading Group kickoff meeting September 21, 2022. The talk is entitled "Trans in geography: Outlines of a socio-political location." 

During the conclusion, the internet connection becomes unstable for a moment. The conclusion is reproduced below.

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Today the urgent political stakes of making space for trans people and trans geographies could not be more clear. We are all aware of how transgender bodies are being targeted by the state, how trans bodies have been dragged into the middle of America’s culture wars. It is within this political climate, where the state is actively attempting to outlaw trans people’s existence, that this status quo of geography I have described becomes wholly unacceptable and violently inadequate.

Geography could be and should be a place where we build other worlds, other possibilities, other spaces for queer and trans life. It should not be a place where we play out the same cultural logics of right-wing U.S. political discourse and garden variety transphobia – that trans people are a threat to tradition, to order, and above all else to safety; that queer and trans bodies are just too much, that they are excessive, that, in their passive existence, they are somehow confronting us with something (Salamon 2018), that trans people are “opposing something in the very manner of their existence” (Ahmed 2016, 29).  If we create and sustain institutions deny trans people voices and the authority to give an account of our own experience – the distinction between our discipline’s gendered status quo and the transphobic mainstream continues to blur. If we continue to fail to listen, to fail to learn, the difference will quickly become negligible. Out there, in here, trans people’s humanity is at stake, under debate, or maybe just being overlooked. To be honest, it all feels like culture wars to me.

How can we address geography’s complicity in these structures of oppression?

Transforming geography – breaking with its exclusionary histories and oppressive legacies that continue into the present – means intervening in the reproduction of the status quo, breaking geography’s many silences. Creating an/other geography

means those on the margins not waiting for 'permission to narrate' but speaking their/our own truths in their/our own voices and for allies to help create opportunities in which such speech is possible. It is about insisting that good intentions are not enough and being 'more impatient with each other' (Tuck and Yang, 2012: 10) so that we might stop wasting time and finally work together to get to where we need to go. (my emphasis; Oswin 2020: 14)

So we need to speak. Yet it seems that being speaking subject in geography as a trans person means causing controversy. So be it:

As queer, trans, and/or gender expansive people we cannot place ourselves outside of controversy. Rather, we cannot do anything but situate ourselves as the sources, targets, producers, or instigators of chaos and disruption in the current state of our worlds. (Dasgupta et al 2021: 502).

This is to suggest that our liminality has its own political potentials -- the symbolic troubling trans embodiment accomplishes indeed works to challenge dominant social and symbolic systems.  The individual political possibilities of this location are limited, risky, and exhausting, as I have detailed. Yet a broader collective reflection on the production of this socio-political location might enable more effective and transformative political potentials (Kinkaid et al. 2022). It is this collective reckoning that I urge my colleagues to undertake. 

Indeed, this structurally produced liminality, this structurally uneven distribution of negative affect precarity and labor (Malatino 2022), this relational vulnerability highlights our collective responsibility to transform geography in the service of q and t people, and all of our minoritized colleagues. The socio-political location of trans people in the discipline, alongside the experiences of other minoritized scholars, namely Black, Indigenous, and geographers of color, demands reflection, accountability, and action from all of us (Kinkaid et al. 2022). It demands solidarity and real allyship. We must begin from this shared sense of responsibility if we are to collectively transform geography.

It is my hope, and my deeply uncomfortable and risky wager, that by refusing the present terms of my inclusion in the project of geography, that such an opening might be possible – that by hearing these stories, my colleagues might come to understand this location so that they stop confining me and others to it, either through their ignorance, their fears and prejudices, or their learned silence; that they might find some small, imperfect, everyday way to contribute to my liberation and that of so many others; that we might stop shoring up the oppressive logics of this geography, of this world, so that we might get on building another one.