Perry Zurn is an associate professor of philosophy at American University and a visiting associate professor of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at Cornell University, and is the author of, among other books, How We Make Each Other: Trans Life at the Edge of the University. Andrea J. Pitts is an associate professor of comparative literature at the University of Buffalo and the author of Nos/Otras: Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Multiplicitous Agency, and Resistance. Talia Mae Bettcher is a professor of philosophy at California State University, Los Angeles, and is the author of Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy. PJ DiPietro is an associate professor of women’s and gender studies at Syracuse University and the author of Sideways Selves: Travesti and Jotería Struggles Across the Américas. In this Recently Published Book Spotlight, they discuss the importance of diverse voices to philosophy (and life), the need to offer hope to graduate students working in trans philosophy, and the difficulties of working in a discipline increasingly under threat.
Why did you feel the need to put together this work?
While trans theory has been underway in other fields for decades now, in philosophy specifically, trans people have been, by and large, mere fodder for analytic thought experiments. In the 1990s and early aughts, very few philosophers were doing philosophy related to trans issues, and even fewer were trans themselves (e.g., Talia Bettcher, Miqqi Gilbert, and Jacob Hale). Following on the heels of the Trans* Experience in Philosophy Conference, hosted by the University of Oregon in 2016, however, an increasing number of trans people, especially graduate students and early career scholars, began building on those early precedents to produce philosophical work from and for trans life—and a proliferating variance of bodily project to which trans points but does not fully capture. At the time we conceptualized this project, we felt it was important to create space for a new subfield, Trans Philosophy, and provisionally formalize some of its contours. The result is this book!
What topics are discussed in the work, and why are they important to discuss?
Trans philosophy addresses philosophical issues that pertain to trans life. As such, it will necessarily touch upon every major philosophical subfield, and more besides. Here, we have collected essays in, for example, metaphilosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political theory, and philosophy of language. They address issues including embodiment, medicine, carcerality, trans fatigue, and transmisogyny. The collection gives special attention to philosophizing at the intersection of trans and Asian American, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and disability studies. Of note, too, is our final essay, by travesti activist and theorist Marlene Wayar, that situates trans philosophy in the context of Argentinian travesti/trans theory. As should be evident by this breadth, the collection is non-exhaustive. It is, instead, full of seeds which, we hope, will only propagate more growth in these and other directions.
Is there anything you didn’t include that you wanted to? Why did you leave it out?
While we are proud of the breadth of ways trans philosophy gets formulated throughout this book, we are also keenly aware of its limitations and hopeful for still more capacious renderings. For example, we offer trans philosophical work (and some historical context) from North America, Argentina, and Australia, in English or English translation. We are eager for trans philosophy, as a theoretical project, to take on a more robust transnational and multilingual dimension—and for existing trans philosophical work in other places and languages to be better represented and engaged. The collection also skews contemporary, speaking predominantly (although not exclusively) to trans life as it has been lived over the last half century, even if that life is contextualized through much longer genealogies. We are keen, however, for a better transhistorical sense of trans philosophy, as a project, to emerge. Finally, the collection is fairly academic in nature, leaving the impression (despite our protests) of philosophy as an academic activity, rather than as a trans activity. We are invested and engaged in facilitating explicitly community-rooted and trans-led philosophical projects.
What effect do you hope this work will have? How do you hope this work influences other philosophers?
First and foremost, we hope that this collection supports a paradigm shift in how trans life gets philosophized. We want to displace the largely fetishizing, objectifying, and extractivist ways in which trans people have otherwise surfaced in philosophy. And we want to centralize trans philosophical work that is accountable to and illuminative of trans experiences, histories, and cultural production—work that is, by and large, from us and for us.
Secondarily, we hope the collection provides academic validity and context to graduate students now working in trans philosophy. Very few PhD programs in philosophy have trans faculty members, let alone faculty members with the expertise to support doctoral work in trans philosophy. Graduate students continue to labor under unwelcoming committees, delegitimizing forces, and radically decontextualized notions of what trans philosophy and theory have been and could be. As faculty ourselves—none of whom are positioned in PhD-granting philosophy departments, but who are often leaned on to formally and informally mentor students at other institutions—we wanted to provide a resource that validates graduate student projects in this field and gives them some stepping stones.
How is this work relevant to the contemporary world, historical ideas, or everyday life?
As we are seeing in the contemporary political landscape, trans people have become targets for elimination from social and civil life. It’s terrifying. Given the representation of all trans-affirming thought as merely “radical gender ideology,” it is crucial that actual trans philosophical investigations see the light of day in all of their sophistication and diversity. The very existence and publication of this collection in today’s climate is of tremendous import. More importantly, we hope that by opening up new avenues for reflection, trans people will gain new ways of making sense of themselves and their worlds.
What was the experience like of collaborating on this work?
While we editors are all trans philosophers—or people who take up the terms “trans” and “philosophy” in intimate and multifaceted ways—we have different genealogies, life experiences, and even methodological commitments. We inquire in harmonious but also inconsistent ways. Collaborating, then, was a creative process that further illuminated, for each of us, what trans philosophy might be. But it was also a compromising process, where we each had to loosen our hold on our individual aspirations for the book. There was give and take. Furthermore, as editors, we do not agree with all the authors collected in the book. We acknowledge this because it is important, in our contemporary context, not to falsely represent coalitional work as seamless. We can build things together, even if we don’t see eye-to-eye on everything. And as we build together, we hope not only to discover a wider range of possibilities than we could have imagined alone, but also to make greater sense of our own commitments and priorities. That work is worth it.
Did you encounter any problems getting this work published, and, if so, how did you overcome them?
There was definitely an interest among publishers because it was clear the time was ripe. However, we had started working with Oxford University Press (OUP) but ultimately decided to go with University of Minnesota Press. Because OUP had decided to publish two books by Holly Lawford-Smith, we were worried that the collection was being positioned in a pro-con debate on the lives of trans people, which is not something that we had any interest in. After all, we wanted to announce the existence of a subfield, and the framing that OUP appeared to be offering undermined that possibility. So, the problem wasn’t a lack of interest. The problem was the underlying political positioning of trans people in philosophy—precisely the problem this collection faces head-on. We were also excited to hear that folks inside OUP shared our concerns and have pressed for a clearer commitment to trans scholarship done by and for trans people since.
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