Transgender studies, also called trans studies or trans* studies, is an interdisciplinary field of academic research dedicated to the study of gender identity, gender expression, and gender embodiment, as well as to the study of various issues of relevance to transgender and gender variant populations. Interdisciplinary subfields of transgender studies include applied transgender studies, transgender history, transgender literature, transgender media studies, transgender anthropology and archaeology, transgender psychology, and transgender health. The research theories within transgender studies focus on cultural presentations, political movements, social organizations and the lived experience of various forms of gender nonconformity. The discipline emerged in the early 1990s in close connection to queer theory. Non-transgender-identified peoples are often also included under the "trans" umbrella for transgender studies, such as intersex people, crossdressers, drag artists, third gender individuals, and genderqueer people.
Transgender studies provides responses to negative points of views about transgender people. Those negative misconceptions could be the narrow and inaccurate transgender state in psychology and medicine, etc. The ultimate goal of transgender studies is to provide knowledge that will benefit transgender people and communities.
History
In response to critiques of how transgender issues were represented in gender and gay and lesbian studies, the late 1990s saw an increase in transgender scholarship and the emergence of a specific discipline of academic study. Sandy Stone is a transgender woman whose 1987 essay "The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto," published in response to the anti-transsexual book The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male, has been cited as the origin of transgender studies. At times a contested field, scholars in transgender studies argue that what positions transgender studies as a unique discipline is the way trans bodies are centered epistemologically in the discipline.
In 2016, through her foundation, Jennifer Pritzker gave a donation of 2 million US$ to create the world's first endowed academic chair of transgender studies, at the University of Victoria in British Columbia; Aaron Devor was chosen as the inaugural chair.
Notable works
Notable works dealing with transgender issues sometimes bridge the space between memoir, creative piece and critical work. Transgender fiction and non-fiction are often informed by the personal experiences of the authors and various transgender authors have written pieces important for the field of trans studies that were not strictly speaking critical scholarship. Some of these works include Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity by Julia Serano (about the experience of and sexist basis for transmisogyny), Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg (a novel about the complicated overlaps and tensions between butch lesbian and trans masculine identities and communities) and Janet Mock's Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More (a memoir detailing Mock's experience growing up within intersecting marginalized race, class and gender categories)
Other important transgender studies texts are more firmly theoretical or critical. Judith Butler, whose work is important for queer studies more broadly, was influential in the field of transgender studies specifically for the formulation of the theory of gender performativity that is the basis for genderqueer activism and theorization. Jack Halberstam is another key figure in transgender studies. Halberstam's work deals with female masculinity, the concept of "queer failure" and various theorizations of trans or gender variant embodiment and temporality. Paul B. Preciado's Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era is considered autotheory and intertwines personal and cultural histories of clinical hormone therapies with political histories of hormonal birth control, and performance enhancing testosterone use.
Academic journals devoted to transgender studies began with the International Journal of Transgenderism, which published its first issue in 1997. The next year saw the publication of a special issue of Gay and Lesbian Quarterly (GLQ) on transgender topics. Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People by Viviane K. Namaste was published in 2000 and was "the first scholarly study of transgendered people." Transgender Studies Quarterly (TSQ), the first non-medical academic journal devoted to transgender issues, began publication in 2014 with Susan Stryker and Paisley Currah as coeditors. The first issue, "Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty-First-Century Transgender Studies", was a book-length double issue with over 85 short essays on various keywords related to the growing field of transgender studies. Some essays took key terms from other fields (such as "Capital", "Queer", "Disability", and "Postmodernism") and teased out the connections to transgender activist and academic thought. Other essays took words understood as important for transgender studies and discussed their theoretical histories and potential future paths ("Becoming", "Cisgender", "Identity", "Transition", and others). Since 2014, TSQ has had issues devoted to, among other topics: Archives and Archiving, Trans/Feminisms, Transpsychoanalytics, Blackness, and Sport Studies. On August 2, 2021, the Center for Applied Transgender Studies announced the launch of its flagship publication, the platinum open access peer-reviewed academic journal Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies, published by Northwestern University Libraries. The Bulletin is the first open access journal dedicated to transgender studies and the first journal dedicated to empirical research on transgender social, cultural, and political issues.
Recently books have been published on the important intersection of race, nationalism and transgender identity including Susan Faludi's memoir "In The Dark Room" about her Hungarian Jewish father's transition at the age of 76 and C. Riley Snorton's Black on Both Sides which explains the co-constitutive histories of blackness/anti-blackness and transness/transphobia in America from the 19th century onward. Columbia University Press published, in February 2019, "the first introductory textbook intended for transgender/trans studies at the undergraduate level" by Ardel Haefele-Thomas.
Applied transgender studies
Recent scholarship in transgender studies has pushed against the field's primary emphasis on humanistic inquiry, instead centering scholarship that empirically investigates issues of social, cultural, and political significance to transgender and gender minority people globally. This emergent subfield of "applied transgender studies" conceives of itself as "an interdisciplinary endeavor to identify, analyze, and, ultimately, improve the material conditions transgender people face in daily life." The Center for Applied Transgender Studies in Chicago, Illinois has been the primary driver of the turn to applied transgender studies and it publishes the only academic journal dedicated to the area of study, the Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies.
Teaching transgender studies
Sara E. Cooper (Professor of Spanish and Women Studies) applied for a teaching position at California State University at Chico and she received the job, in spite of her focus on Spanish studies. She writes a journal article that highlights the ridicule she sometimes received during her public speeches, but insists on educating her peers "as a matter of personal safety and respect". Cooper brings up how the LGBTQ community is not as supportive towards certain categories in their community as some of her students are led to believe and while she faced a few challenges in her career, she concludes that teaching Transgender Studies was ultimately life-changing.
Cooper's specialization was initially Women Studies, and from there, she was granted the authority over a course that is exclusive to the LGBTQ community. This mirrors the placement of Transgender Studies within the school curriculum. In Women Studies classes, transgender issues are sometimes taught as an extension of women's issues, and are rarely given attention on their own.
Susan Stryker's anthology The Transgender Studies Reader (2006) was awarded the Lambda Literary Award in the transgender category.
In 2016, Aaron Devor was appointed the inaugural chair of Transgender Studies at the University of Victoria, in Canada. Devor is the academic director of the Transgender Archives, one of world's largest collections on the history of transgender activists and research.
