Black People

As an academic field, Trans Studies is relatively new, and the specific focus on and mention of Black people in Trans Studies is even more recent. This entry will address both the presence of Black people and Blackness in the field of Trans Studies, as well as how thinking about Blackness’s relationship to gender nonconformity necessarily alters our understanding of gender nonconformity as such, its racialized baggage, and its attending oversights. In short, the operative question becomes, How have Blackness and Black people raised a critique of gender and Trans Studies such that gender and Trans Studies must fundamentally revise their conditions of emergence?

As with many, although not all, academic disciplines in the humanities, Trans Studies initially did not consider the impact of race, specifically ...