Trans Studies

Academic Roots: Ethnic, Feminist, Queer, and Trans Theories

Trans Studies has its academic and theoretical roots in the intersections of ethnic, feminist, and Queer Studies, which, beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, became burgeoning fields of study evolving from the civil rights movement, the United Farmworkers movement, the American Indian movement, the Women’s movement, and the LGBT movement. Within these social justice movements, there were robust discussions focused on intersecting oppressions and intersecting resistance. In response to these grassroots social justice movements, academic institutions began offering courses in Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies and/or Feminist Studies (in some cases also including the works of LGBT activists and authors). Feminist Studies, by its nature, explores the difference between sex assigned at birth (often referred to as biological sex or chromosomal sex) and gender as a social construct. Sex and gender are often conflated; however, Feminist Studies disentangles the difference between the biological and chromosomal sex and the social and cultural constructions of gender that become tied to sex. Feminist Studies in the late 20th century focused on both sex and gender within a binary frame: female or male and what it meant to be a woman or a man. During the late 20th century, there was less consideration of gender diversity such as the rich cultural heritage of Indigenous communities that had, historically, honored third gender identities and, in some cases, fourth and fifth gender identities. Many of the theorists defining the field of Feminist Studies during this time focused on white cisgender women. However, starting in the early 1970s, numerous books and essays penned by various women of color resisted these specifically white and often middle-class definitions of feminism. Essays like the 1977 Combahee River Collective Statement, written by a collective of radical Black lesbian feminists, and Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s 1981 anthology of collected works by women of color, titled This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, not only presented writings by feminists of color, but part of the critique within these two works and others focused on stereotypically Eurocentric definitions of femininity and masculinity. Although most of these writings do not discuss trans people per se, they do interrogate inherently fixed racist notions about gender identity and gender expression.

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