This is the third in a series of blog posts about the 2nd International Trans Studies Conference in Evanston (4-7 September 2024).

Read Part 1 here.
Read Part 2 here.

There is something about seeing your experiences accurately represented in research. This can be very emotional if you are used to seeing people like you ignored, erased, or otherwise grossly mispresented. Much like media representation, research representation can be powerful in putting a mirror to our experiences and suddenly making them a lot more real.

I dislike the vast overuse of the term “valid” in trans discourse, but there is something very important about being actively validated, about being seen, when the entirely of society feels like it’s set up to deny or gaslight you. It’s a consciousness-raising moment, in which you become capable of truly acknowledging or naming what is happening to you. It is meaningful and authentic and it enables action. But it is also very painful.

As a trans health researcher, I think I’ve developed a pretty thick skin. I see a huge amount of bad trans health research, built on cis ignorance and a fundamental inability to engage with the reality of our lives. I also see growing amounts of painfully real research from researchers who are engaging with care. For better and for worse, I feel I’ve learned to carefully manage my emotions and let all of this wash over me, in order to engage consistently and “professionally”.

But on Thursday morning, a series of presentations made me cry.

Global Struggles, Local Solutions: Transgender Perspectives on Economics and Welfare

The morning began with doughnuts, piled high in the reception area of the conference, a very extravagant seeming American breakfast. From there I headed to the first session of the day, which explored trans political economy. This might seem like the dryest topic imaginable, but for me it gets right to the core of how systemic transphobia and cisgenderism operate, how we feel about that, and what we might do about it.

The study of political economy is concerned with how economic systems interface with social and political systems, and vice-versa. The first paper in this session, by Yukari Ishii of Sophia University (Japan), looked at homeless trans people’s access to welfare systems. In Reasons Underlying Gender-diverse Individuals’ Need for Public Social Welfare Support in Japan, Ishii reported on findings from the 2009-2020 consultation records of Moyai, a non-profit voluntary sector welfare provider, plus interviews with service users.

Ishii’s paper mapped in detail how trans people find themselves accessing welfare systems after being failed by heteronormative and cisnormative systems throughout their lives. She described trans people being rejected by their parents, dropping out from school due to the hostility of the heavily gendered environment, which limited their formal educational attainment. Participants in her research struggled to find work, or were otherwise fired for being trans. More tolerant work environments either required skills or an education background that trans people were less likely to have, or were deeply insecure, as in the case of sex work. Trans people who struggled to hold down a job also struggled to find places to live, with many sleeping at friend’s houses, in Internet cafes, or in the streets.

Ishii’s research showed up vulnerability is created through structurally embedded cisgenderism, impacting people from families to schools to workplaces and even to apparent sites of last resort; for example, she described how Internet cafes did not allow trans women to stay overnight if they were sex workers. She further noted that the consultation records at Moyai were limited where consultants didn’t have a lot of knowledge about queer people, or didn’t know what questions to ask about (for example) family violence. She concluded by recommending that welfare professionals gain knowledge of gender and queer issues, to ensure they are best placed to provide advice and support to service users, and keep better records for improving long-term understanding of the problems faced.

The next paper similarly traced the deep context of economic disadvantage, this time looking to history for a deeper context. In Trans-cending Barriers to QTPOC Labor in the South, Anthony Belotti of Virginia Commonwealth University (USA) focused on the US South’s historical legal landscape, linking this to the region’s racism, homophobia, and transphobia.

Belotti argued that “the history of the South has created an environment where QTPOC (queer and trans people of colour) do not have equal access to labour opportunities and class mobility”. Various legislation effectively criminalised queer, trans, and Black existence, including the Jim Crow laws, “decency” laws which banned wearing clothes not associated with sex assigned at birth, and anti-union “right to work” laws. Belotti argued that while there is relatively little archival material on QTPOC experiences in the South, these laws provide an important insight into people’s experiences, especially given the existence of legislation such as the decency laws implies a perceived need for them from authorities. The concrete impact of all this was that QTPOC had difficulties finding and keeping legal employment.

By the time Dan Irving presented, I will admit I was already feeling pretty vulnerable. In Ishii and Belotti’s excellent papers, I heard about contexts both very different to the UK, and remarkably similar. Beyond the broad importance of their findings, I recognised in their accounts the experiences of so many of my friends and colleagues – a meaningful and painful experience that underpins so much of my engagement with good work in trans studies.

Irving, of Carleton University (Canada) presented a paper titled Sensational Disruptions: Affective Economic Justice at Work. Building on his previous work on trans political economy, this presentation reported on findings from two large qualitative research projects on unemployment and underemployment among trans and non-binary people in Canada, conducted in 2012-16 and 2020-24.

Irving’s paper focused on exploring one anticipated finding from these projects in depth: the “I can’t put my finger on it” feeling. This theme involved participants encountering difficulties in the workplace or in attempting to land work, but finding it hard to articulate why they couldn’t get the job, or had hours reduced, or were laid off, even when appropriately skilled – or overqualified. There was something about getting through the door and finding the vibe was off. These experiences were especially likely to be detailed by trans people from racialised minorities, and/or trans women.

I immediately recognised what Irving was describing. How could I not? He had just described years of my experiences in the workplace as a trans woman. And of course, this isn’t really a new insight: the problems he named have been discussed in feminist literature for decades (especially Black feminist and womanist literature), and indeed within the consciousness-raising group I joined shortly after moving to Glasgow. These findings also related to the phenomenon reported by people from many marginalised groups, whereby we always have to be the very best to succeed in a basic manner in the workplace.

What was most useful about Irving’s paper, however, was his theorising of the phenomenon. In a manner that resonated with Nat Raha’s comments on the second day of the conference, Irving turned to affect theory (explanations that centre feeling and emotion) to explore what is happening to us in the workplace.

Irving described how trans people (especially racialised minorities, and women) often find ourselves constantly doing the additional work of ensuring that managers, co-workers, and customers feel comfortable with us. This causes a “sensate disruption” in our lives, shaped by the “corrosive impact of fear, repulsion, anger on the part of cisnormative employers, co-workers and customers and the violent impacts of rage, depression, exhaustion on trans jobseekers and workers”. Even worse, there are few outlets for these emotions: neoliberal discourses of personal responsibility mean that feelings are expected to be quarantined within the body of the (marginalised) worker, for example through us taking responsibility for our transitions and bodies and carefully managing our relations with others.

It was at this point that I started to cry.

I feel so, so tired and alienated in my work, all the time. I have some amazing colleagues and students, but I am still working in a system where I can feel myself being discriminated against while also finding it hard to always articulate the exact ways in which it happens. I am tired of being advised to refocus my energies in the workplace even as an eliminationist movement works against trans existence. I am tired of my research being erased or dismissed, I am tired of being asked to meetings where I am ignored, I am tired of being asked how the institution can best protect me, I am tired of being told that my failed grant applications are the “most impressive unfunded bid” that people have ever seen. I am tired of having little language for these experiences, and of pushing my feelings down every day.

I am tired of seeing as much, and far far worse, happen all the time to my trans colleagues and friends.

Responding to these findings, Irving asked: “how do we begin to grapple with the ‘affective byproducts’ of post-industrial demands for affective labour?” How do we reckon with the unsayable in our felt experiences? And quoting Deborah Gould, “what kind of political context do we need to build that actually listens to what many people are feeling and that cares about people’s disappointment, despair and furies?”

Drawing on the work of Hil Malatino, Irving proposed “infrapolitics” (low-profile, informal, undeclared forms of resistance) and community care as a basis from which to build solutions. Drawing from participant narratives, he argued that this can include political acts of resistance that are “not on the oppressor’s radar”: examples included zines and phone lines distributing information among workers and applicants, building community connections, and forms of entertainment and commentary such as comic strips. Like Ishii, Irving also highlighted the ways in which trans people effectively provide welfare services for one another, for example by providing beds or housing for homeless community members. What this all amounts to are forms of anti-capitalist resistance that amount to a collective recognition and addressing of the problem.

The session concluded with another extremely powerful and nuanced presentation, from Pato Laterra of the Interdisciplinary Centre for the Study of Public Policies, and Francisco Fernandez Romero of the University of Buenos Aires (both Argentina), titled A Trans Political Economy from Elsewhere: Reflections from Argentina. Like the other presenters, Laterra and Romero sought to use the concept of political economy to understand how trans lives are embedded in existing political structures, and propose alternatives for survival. They emphasised that in Latin American contexts, there is a strong tradition of research on travesti and trans people’s living conditions, with travesti-trans politics prioritising mutual support and resource distribution. It is within this context that they looked at implementation and impact the travesti-trans labour quota within Argentina’s public sector.

The travesti-trans labour quota is a form of reparative politics, in which 1% of federal jobs are reserved for trans people. This policy represents a response to the deep, systematic discrimination faced by travesti and trans people in Argentina, which reflects that reported from Japan, the USA, and Canada through the rest of the session. It was implemented in response to radical political demands from campaigners, with the presenters sharing a photo of a flag featuring a slogan they translated as “quota and reparation, we want redistribution”.

To understand how effective the travesti-trans labour quota is in practice, Lattera and Romero insisted on a rethinking of trans political economy, going beyond just thinking of trans people as workers or consumers. They wished to emphasise:

• everyday reproductive and care relationships, in terms of that which sustains life beyond income or the market;
• social policies that enable or do not enable certain lives, especially for people with an insecure relationship to the market;
• situated perspectives, for example through acknowledging how labour (and theory!) from the Global South is extracted by the North.

Lattera and Romero argued that the labour quota partially subverts trend towards assimilation regarding trans people’s inclusion in labour markets. This is because the quota aims to achieve economic redistribution, and positions access to work as a human right. Moreover, it supports the employment of the “least employable”, i.e. trans people who are more likely to be without educational qualifications, or have a police record. In this way, it offers a response to many of the issues outlined by the previous presenters, and an alternative to typical liberal capitalist logics that involve capturing the economic benefits of trans labour.

However, as one intervention within a wider network of unequal systems, the labour quota has significant limitations. Lattera and Romero noted that the “right to work” reifies labour normativity: that is, it upholds the idea that our value as human beings is dependent on being able to have paid jobs, and that paid work is more important than unpaid care work, community work, or domestic labour. Moreover, in practice, the trans people actually hired under the labour quota are most often the most privileged, being predominantly young, white, and highly educated; and once in role, they face a significant pressure to assimilate.

Lattera and Romero urged against any simplistic reading of the labour quota’s benefits or drawbacks, in a manner that forced me to reflect on my aforementioned feelings that “other trans people have it worse”. The “more privileged” trans people hired under the labour quota still face significant disadvantage in their lives. For many, this is their first job, and it is not well-paid. Moreover, those who do tend to land these roles within the public sector tend to regard it as a job they are gaining not (just) for themselves, but for their wider community. The introduction of the quota has also resulted in increased trans labour organising and trade unionism, including increased collaboration between trans and cis colleagues in service of their shared interests. This has been especially important given the mass firings of public sector workers by President Javier Milei since his election in 2023.

The presenters concluded by arguing that trans people’s concerns should be understood within transnational political-economic processes. For example the recent firing of trans workers is a part of wider processes of extraction, in which the Argentinian government is “giving away our wealth to the Global North”. At the same time, there are always lessons to be learned from different parts of the world, so long as we properly acknowledge where these ideas come from and show care in doing so. The Argentinian labour movement invites us to imagine other ways of trans participation in the economy, beyond capitalist productivity.

Game studies, visual culture, and transnationalising trans studies

I’ve had a lot to say about trans political economy, and I have had a very specific story to tell about how my own experiences intersect with what I learned. At the same time, this was just the first session I attended on the third day of the Trans Studies Conference. I’ve therefore decided to split my notes on this day across more than one post. I have yet to write about playing games with Giggle, trans photography and archives, or resisting settler colonialism – and that’s before we get onto Day 4. Watch this space!