F O R U M

Introduction
Trans-Exclusionary Politics by Other Means

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S E R E N A BA S S I a n d G R E TA L A F L E U R

T rans-exclusionary dogma is the political quicksilver of our moment. Impos-

sibly dynamic, these politics can assume the shape of any container —policies,
religious beliefs, nationalist sentiment, laws—they inform. Indeed, it is the deeply
mercurial nature of trans-exclusionary perspectives that makes them so perni-
cious. They can undergird, at once, calls for a putatively stabilizing return to
traditional gender roles in the home and the state and demands for greater legal
and policy-based protections for girls and women in sport, employment, and
state services; anti-colonial critique and imperialist nationalisms; and biological
essentialisms and the explosion of gender norms. To account for the breadth and
diversity of trans-exclusionary politics of various kinds would require several
years’ worth of additional special issues, but even then, because these politics are
so labile, so responsive to the conservative political whims of the moment, we
have no doubt but that they will continue to take new form and shape new and
emergent ideological entrenchments.
We thus decided to conclude this special issue with a “forum,” a collection
of shorter pieces that we hoped would broaden the scope of the questions, move-
ments, and histories that this special issue addresses. We received many proposals
in response to this special issue’s call for papers that were not quite article length
but that brought important breadth and depth to the qualitative and lived expe-
rience of trans-exclusionary politics. In what follows we present readers with an
assemblage of what we have come to think of as important one-offs, which offer
both short and more sustained opportunities to think about the landscape of
these politics in different grounded contexts. Mat Thompson’s piece, “Choosing
Threat, Embodying the Viral,” homes in on the rhetoric of contagion that per-
vades trans-exclusionary political rhetoric.1 Instead of asking how trans people
might resist any association with the epidemic, especially during times of a global

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly * Volume 9, Number 3 * August 2022 460

DOI 10.1215/23289252-9836106 ª 2022 Duke University Press
 BASSI and LAFLEUR * Introduction * Forum 461

pandemic, they argue that we should embrace the viral and the dangerous as a
means of politics. Hidenobu Yamada narrates the fortunes of trans-exclusionary
feminist politics in Japan, elaborating how gender identity disorder—GID—came
to be hallowed as a state-sponsored form of experience supplanting other, dif-
ferently capacious understandings of gender diversity that more directly chal-
lenge nationally codified norms around family and kinship. On a related note,
Ezra Berkley Nepon offers a report from their longtime work in LGBT phi-

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lanthropy, detailing the development of global philanthropic organizing specifi-
cally aimed at accounting for and circumventing the growing power of trans-
exclusionary politics in both state-based and private forums. Jo Krishnakumar and
Annapurna Menon’s dialogue addresses similar concerns on a more local level,
offering a dialectical reflection on each of their experiences of more implicit
forms of transphobia or trans-exclusionary politics in feminist organizing spaces
in their home of the United Kingdom, even or especially in political movements
that do not specifically dedicate themselves to trans politics. Gina Gwenffrewi,
on the other hand, reflects on the experience of being an academic and journalist
seeking to interrupt implicitly and explicitly trans-exclusionary narratives in the
UK press within the context of a media culture that has been famously unwilling
to consider perspectives by trans people or anyone else advocating for trans political
justice. Finally Sophie Lewis and Asa Seresin offer a critical meditation on some of
the not incidental but rather crucial historical sympathies between feminisms
and fascisms, drawing critical attention to the fact that these politics are not so
strange, as bedfellows, as we might want them to be.
Together, these pieces represent a widening and diversifying of the con-
versation around global trans-exclusionary politics and their imbrication in right-
wing movements of various stripes that this special issue seeks to establish with
its seven article-length pieces. We hoped that, by including a forum, we could
encourage the inclusion of a wider range of topics, as well as a series of responses
that would provide a place for casual, colloquial, first-person, experiential under-
standings of the long arm of trans-exclusionary politics on a global scale. The short
pieces that follow represent an extremely eclectic series of responses: some infor-
mational, some more theoretical, some reflecting on past experiences, some call-
ing for specific models of future action. What unites them, to our mind, is how
they import a more granular and emplaced understanding of the fortunes of trans-
exclusionary politics in specific places, forums, and communities. Unfortunately,
what also unites them is that, taken as a whole, they truly reveal the terrifying
extent, reach, and hydra-headed evils of these politics. From Japan to Croatia,
England to the United States, trans-exclusionary coalitional politics have exploded
beyond the fairly tight range of sites where, for many years, we expected to find
462 TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly

them, such as certain radical lesbian communities, university philosophy depart-

ments, and proposals for legal protections for lesbian, gay, and bisexual peo-
ple. We find trans-exclusionary politics —whether they take the form of trans-
exclusionary feminisms, “gender critical” feminisms, or anti-gender approaches
to the organization of family and state—in local, domestic, national, and inter-
national structures all over the world: in local and state ordinances regulating
health care; in anti-imperial and anti-colonial writing; in nationalist propaganda;

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in local and national education policy; in international religious and anti-religious
doctrine; in right-wing movements of all stripes; and, of course, in some femi-
nisms, just to name a few. This forum represents only a handful of possible
approaches to the vast global rhizome of trans-exclusionary politics. While the
pieces that follow will not, of course, settle these questions, they importantly
broaden the scope of the inquiry and lay important foundations for future
strategizing.

Serena Bassi is assistant professor of Italian studies at Yale University. Their work interrogates
modern racial, gendered, and sexual formations by focusing on literature in translation. They
have published in journals including Translation Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, and
Signs.

Greta LaFleur is associate professor of American studies at Yale University. They are the author
of The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America (2018) and coeditor of Trans Historical:
Gender Plurality before the Modern (2021) and “The Science of Sex Itself,” a forthcoming special
issue of GLQ.

Note
1. For an example of this rhetoric, see Marchiano 2017.

Reference
Marchiano, Lisa. 2017. “Outbreak: On Transgender Teens and Psychic Epidemics.” Psychological
Perspectives 60, no. 3: 345–66.