Read Part 1 here.

I began my second day at the conference Chicago-style – breakfasting on an enormous slice of leftover deep dish pizza. Suitably fortified, I strolled the sunny streets of the Northwestern University campus to the Technological Institute, a massive building in which the various conference sessions are taking place.

I was keen to arrive early for the first full day of the conference, as I had been asked to chair an early session. As described in my first post, the huge scope of this event means there are normally eleven simultaneous sessions at once, so there is sadly no way any one person can keep up with everything that’s going on.

Fortunately, the conference organisers planned long lunch breaks and multiple evening receptions, meaning there was plenty of time to meet and catch up with other people even if you hadn’t been able to see them present their paper.

In this post and others I’m therefore going to focus on the sessions and papers I did get to see. Bear in mind that this is just a tiny proportion of the material presented at the conference, and it reflects my own interests and ad-hoc decisions rather than the full scope of the event. It is also my interpretation of the papers I heard, so I may have missed nuance or got some things wrong! I’ve organised this post by the title of the sessions I attended, so do scroll down to whatever interests you most.

TERF Wars: The Battle for Feminist Futures

The danger of writing a book titled TERF Wars is that for years afterwards, people invite you to speak, write, and host events on the topic of trans-exclusionary feminisms. I suppose it was therefore almost inevitable that as a member of the steering group for the conference, I would be asked to chair this session! Fortunately, we were graced with a series of extremely interesting papers which shed new light on how best to understand and work through conflicts over “TERF” politics and essentialist ideas of womanhood, especially given their increasing alignment with far-right politics.

The first paper in the session was titled The Metaphysics of the Natural in TERF Discourse, and was presented by the American-Mexican independent scholar Julianna Neuhouser, based on her collaborative work with Siobhan Guerro Mc Manus. Neuhouser began by acknowledging the significant rise in opposition to trans people’s civil rights over the last decade, with an impact in turn on how a large portions of society think and speak. She argued that trans-exclusionary radical feminism (or “TERF” politics) has played an important role in this, enabling racist, ecofascist and anti-choice positions historically associated with conservative or far-right thinking to be presented as “legitimate” or even feminist within mainstream contexts.

Neuhouser traced a brief history of this process, beginning with the role of ecofeminist approaches which present women as more “naturally” connected to nature than men. In this context, trans women are positioned as a dangerous technological phenomenon, not fully women and perhaps not even fully human. Neuhouser noted the influence of Mary Daly – who infamously compared to trans women to Frankenstein’s monster in her 1978 book Gyn/Ecology – on later writers including the antisemitic conspiracy theorist Jennifer Bilek, and the UK journalist Helen Joyce. Antisemitism and transphobia are also entwined within ecofascist thinking around population control. Neuhouser discussed the example of Derrick Jensen, who turned to conspiracy theories about Jewish influence on trans-inclusive feminism to explain the collapse of his own political project.

Similarly, Neuhouser noted how trans-exclusionary logics have enabled religious right perspectives to be positioned as feminist, outlining the example of INAARGIT (the Feminist International Network Against Artificial Reproduction, Gender Ideology and Transhumanism). INAARGIT promotes the protection of women’s “natural” sexed bodies against “artificial” reproductive and body modification technologies, with consequences for assisted reproduction as well as trans existence. Neuhouser argued that this approach is tacitly associated with fears regarding a supposed Jewish and/or Muslim “replacement” of the white race, much like ecofascist perspectives that embrace the devastating impact of the AIDS epidemic in African countries as a net positive for humanity.

The second talk in the session was by Heng Wang from the University of British Columbia (Canada), on Cyber Trans Panic: The Transnational Circulation of Transphobia and the Mobilization of Vulnerability Among Chinese Trans-exclusionary Feminists on Social Media. Wang began their talk by noting the significant rise in anti-trans feminist discourse on Chinese social media in the last two years. She argued that while many contemporary arguments mirror those of Western trans-exclusionary radical feminists active in the 1970s and 80s, social media has enabled greater circulation of misinformation and disinformation in the present.

Wang explained that when queer and feminist community groups and NGOs first emerged in China in the 1990s, these were broadly trans inclusive. However, online debate and educational programmes led by these groups were restricted in the mid-2010s. Young women are now therefore turning to social media influencers for feminist understandings of sex and gender.

Wang identified the politics of translation as a key issue for influencers’ impact on both trans people and feminism. “Gender” is frequently translated into “social sex” (shehui xingbie). In the Chinese linguistic context, definitions such as this effectively work to essentialise sexual difference as natural, in opposition to the social. It has led to growing numbers of Chinese feminists defining womanhood in essentialist biological terms, and potentially confusing translation of Western commentary on trans women and feminism. Meanwhile, only a minority of individuals have access to Western social media platforms, meaning that content by figures such as JK Rowling as well as responses from trans-inclusive feminists are mediated by the influencers capable of both accessing and translating it. These acts of translation can be shaped by misunderstandings and a projection of the influencers’ own ideological positions.

Consequently, transmisogyny in China is on the increase due to an entanglement of global far-right politics, disinformation on social media, and the specific Chinese national context. Wang therefore argues for the importance of a localised Chinese vision of trans feminism.

The final talk in the session was by Alex Colombo and Gonzalo Bustamante Moya of the University of Oregon (USA), titled The feminist empire: toward an anti-fascist trans politics. The presenters’ starting point was a question posted by Ana Seresin: how might contemporary antifascist organising be strengthened by acknowledging that some feminisms can be fascist? In speaking of fascism, they drew on Aimé Césaire’s portrayal of fascism not as an exceptional form of politics, but as the application of colonial projects and procedures against a white population instead of colonised peoples outside of Europe. In this sense, fascism can be understood potentially as a logical extension of liberalism, rather than external to it. The presenters explored these ideas through a deep engagement with Judith Butler’s book Who’s Afraid of Gender? and Jules Gill-Peterson’s A Short History of Transmisogyny.

Butler’s book positions gender as a phantasm: a psychosexual phenomenon, a site where anxieties and fears are mobilised to incite passions. This causes a blockage of critical thinking and imagination. Butler demonstrates that anti-gender movements have successfully positioned gender minorities as a “threat to the nation” in many parts of the world, and have used fascist strategies to contain this threat: stripping people of their civil rights, and expanding the power of state control and surveillance. Butler’s proposed solution is to develop a “counter-imaginary” that organises reality differently and creates alliances against anti-gender movements. However, the presenters argued that this approach retains some reliance on the “liberal institutions” of the state, which do not provide the necessary resources to truly confront fascism.

Drawing on Gill-Peterson, the presenters argued for a colonial origin of trans-exclusionary feminist fears and anxieties. Gill-Peterson positions transmisogyny as “a mode of colonial statecraft”, used for the creation and management of sexual minority populations. In identifying some people as transfeminine and labelling this as a problem, colonisers gain a new rationale for surveillance and control. Transmisogyny can therefore be understood not simply as a form of individual prejudice, but as a mechanism of the liberal/colonial cis state, intended to ensure a “fear of interdependence and “refusal of solidarity”.

Consequently, anti-trans feminism’s alignment with anti-gender movements is not simply a matter of hatred, and liberal institutions cannot be relied upon to oppose this process. In mobilising the phantasm of gender there is a clear rationale for transphobic feminists to ally with fascists within liberal contexts. Consequently, trans politics must be explicitly anti-fascist, and anti-fascist politics must address trans liberation.

Mother Knows Best: Families and Parents of Transgender Children

I next decided to attend two different sessions about trans children and their families. In the first session, I heard two papers on how parents might actively support their trans children.

In How do parents become sensitive to their Nonbinary child’s identity? Noah Sweder of Tufts University (USA) reported on the findings of a research project looking specifically at pathways to support within families. They identified four themes from their interviews with parents:

1. Parents hear and support their child’s nonbinary identity. Sometimes they might find it hard to adjust, but making their best effort makes a real difference.
2. Parents learn about the ways cisnormative society harms their child. This can involve observing children’s experiences of joy in their identity and expression, and experiencing frustration at societal stigma and barriers to social participation.
3. Parents take significant and proactive steps to affirm their child. This can involve identifying who needs to know that the child is trans in order to better support them and make their lives easier, with key examples being schools and doctors. It can also involve taking strong action against transphobia, including being prepared to challenge family members.
4. Parents recognise that gender is just one aspect of their child’s life. The child has not essentially changed, but instead wishes to be seen and understood.

The biggest takeaway from these findings is that parents do not necessarily need pre-existing knowledge and understanding to be supportive of their child. Instead, they need to be prepared to listen, learn, and take action.

The second paper I caught in this session was by j wallace skelton of the University of Regina (Canada), titled Strong Parental Support From Parent-Advocates. Drawing on a larger dataset looking at parents’ experiences across Canada, skelton focused nine interviews from the largely rural province of Saskatachewan. In 2023 the Saskatachewan government introduced a policy requiring parental permission for name and pronouns changes in schools. This was repealed following a legal challenge in 2024, only for the legislature to hold an emergency session to bring in new policy.

skelton explained that while the researchers didn’t ask about the Saskatachewan’s anti-trans legislation, parents inevitably brought it up. They highlighted the emotional difficulty and exhaustion of receiving constant news around transphobic legislation, and the heartbreak of their children feeling unwelcome in the province.

In spite of this difficult backdrop, I found the paper optimistic in its focus on parent advocacy, echoing [NAME]’s research. skelton observed that the participant cohort had mixed experiences of advocacy before knowing they had a trans child, and many were targeted for supporting their child, for example being called “groomers” or “paedophiles”. In spite of this, all parents forefronted child agency, naming their child’s experiences as valuable basis for learning. Parents saw their children as educators, balancing this with a “team effort” approach to advocacy within families, and centring their children’s consent in acting on their behalf. For example, skelton cited a parent who said, “I think that’s the biggest advice is that you need to check with your child too if it’s okay”.

Often parental advocacy changed people’s relationship with their communities, for example through leaving unsupportive churches, or no longer meeting with hateful family members. Notably, this was typically positioned as a loss for the transphobes rather than their targets; as skelton put it, “what a shame for Aunt Bertha”.

At this point, I ran over to another session to catch part of a paper by my colleague Cal Horton from Oxford Brookes University (UK): Trans children and state violence: Solidarity and resistance in the UK. As the title indicates, Horton highlighted the horrific injustices young trans people are increasingly facing in the UK (see e.g. my commentary on the Cass Review). At the same time, it was great to see them emphasise the power of resistance from young trans people and their allies, especially the dramatic protests undertaken by Trans Kids Deserve Better.

Exhausted but full of ideas, I headed to the courtyard for lunch, presented in convenient little paper bags labelled according to dietary need and preference. This was a great chance to do the most serious work of the conference, which can sadly never be truly captured in a post such as this: meeting new people and catching up with old friends. I then headed to a session all about detransition.

Cease and Desist: New Perspectives on Detransition

This session opened with a paper by Leor Baldus of the University of Marburg (Germany), titled Detransition: Decisions, Perspectives, and Life Paths of Detransitioned Individuals. Baldus noted that there is very minimal community-based research on detransition, with discourse around the topic dominated by medical and psychological studies. This research therefore focused on detransitioners speaking for themselves, through interviews with six detransitioned people assigned female at birth.

The most interesting part of the paper for me was Baldus’ discussion of what she called the “paradox dynamics of gatekeeping”. This reflected my own observations that gatekeeping practices in trans healthcare can often cause rather than prevent forms of regret.

Baldus observed that diagnosis and therapy within gender clinics always takes place in a context shaped by societal norms, including sexism, heteronormativity, and transnormativity. As noted by numerous trans studies scholars over the decades, gatekeeping entails a feedback loop of verification to diagnose transness, as the person seeking transition has to intelligible to the gatekeeper, which reinforces the gatekeeper’s pre-existing assumptions regarding trans existence. This process inevitably insists on certainty on the part of people seeking transition, which creates little space for ambivalence or exploration. Baldus quoted a participant who said, “the demand for certainty during and in the process […] created a pressure I felt I needed to meet”.

Baldus also described how participants internalised “maladaptive coping mechanisms” in response to misogyny and lesbophobia they experienced while growing up. Where expansive gender options did not seem possible, trans identities offered an explanation and way of making sense of participants’ experiences prior to detransition. In this context, being male was seen as an alternative to being a woman (as opposed to being different kind of woman – or, presumably, a non-binary person, although Baldus did not discuss this).

Kincaid Moberly from the University of Idaho (USA) offered an entirely different angle on the topic of detransition in his paper Trans and detrans representation in the Remothered series. This paper explored the unusual portrayal of a “trans man bad guy”, Richard Felton, in the survival horror video game series Remothered. Moberly noted that where transmasculine people appear in video games, they are typically portrayed as friends or allies, often in victim roles that motivate cis characters. By contrast Felton is a violent adversary, playing the role of a male psychosexual killer and (when wearing a dress) fulfilling the transmisogynistic trope of a “lethal gender bender”.  

Felton also, unusually, has a detrans narrative. According to the game series’ storyline, he/she was forcibly transitioned into a male role as a young person, and his/her experiences of manipulation and abuse led to their own violence towards others.  

Moberly describes the games’ portrayal of Felton as an example of detransphobia: a phenomenon in which detransitioned people are exploited for their actual or supposed pain. He argued that the demeaning of detransitioned people’s bodies and experiences, as in Remothered, takes place in the name of protecting white cis children, rather than actually finding ways to support detransitioned people. A possible response to this can be found in the rejection of cisnormative expectations regarding both the body and life trajectories. Moberly highlighted media by and for detransitioned people that emphasises empowerment, fluidity, and agency, in stark contrast to discourses of pain and disempowerment.

Media portrayals were also explored by Kat Fuller of the University of Nevada (USA), in Gendering, Detransition, and Abjection: News Media Coverages. Fuller’s study analysed 130 media articles on Chloe Cole, a detrans activist and “former trans child” who positions herself as inherently damaged by her former detransition, stating “I feel like a monster”.

The articles in Fuller’s sample which were identified as aligned with centre-right and far-right perspectives emphasised discourses on “gender ideology”, “silencing”, and “cancel culture”. Cole’s experience was used to support idea that LGBT experiences should be criticised, and any kind of pushback on homophobia and transphobia in the media represents an attack on free speech. Narratives around a person’s original transition tended to represent this in terms of trauma and loss, highlighting (for example) a supposed loss of infertility or attractiveness, and decisions being made by children who are too young to understand.

Echoing Moberly’s paper Kinnon MacKinnon’s research on detransition/retransition, Fuller reminded us that Cole’s experience is not representative of all detrans people, given the great range of detransition narratives and retransition experience.

The final paper in the session offered a more reflective space. bush bashing, an excavation of detransition, was presented by Tait Sanders of University of Queensland, Australia. There was a great deal of visual imagery of the Australian bush in this presentation, encouraging attendees to be present in the story. In this mediative account, Sanders explained how bush bashing is an approach to foliage clearance and cutting that provides space for choices around what is cut back and what is not; which plants are removed and which are left or given more space to grow.

Sanders contrasted notions of “add on detransition” – in which non-binary or genderfluid understandings of the body are added like sticking plasters – to an approach in which “gender [is[ imagined as emergent in the space created by the cut”. In this context, a meaningful approach to detransition might involve the creation of space: “gender is embodied […] and all we need do is follow it”.


(Re)imagining Transness with Decolonial Theory

It is inevitable that a conference based in a country will feature many contributions from that country, and Anglophone trans studies has always been US-dominated. However, as one person noted in the Q&A for this final session I attended on the Thursday, a problem with this is that many US scholars fail to localise their own work. In this way, US perspectives stands in for the universal, whereas contributions from other parts of the world become peripheral. White perspectives in trans studies perform a similar function; as observed once again in the Q&A, “if you’re going to work on white transness, you need to name it”.

I felt like the first paper in this session, by Nat Raha of Glasgow School of Art (UK), happened to offer some insights on how to address these problems, drawing on material from her forthcoming book with Mijke van der Drift, Trans Femme Futures. In Transfeminism and affective economies: collectives contra separability, Raha reflected on how researchers and activists in trans studies and beyond might “stay with the trouble” and pursue abolitionist approaches. She encouraged us to think through the complicity inherent in our work, especially given dominant logics get reproduced. A practical example of this would be how to engage with Palestinian liberation activism within and beyond institutions hostile to it, for instance through participation in the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israeli apartheid. Raha outlined two key concepts for theorising the problem: separability, and affective economies.

Separability describes the reproduction of cultural difference through othering, as seen for instance in racist or xenophobic language or actions. Separability is enacted materially as well as in discourse, as seen for example in state borders, the arms trade, and deportations. Parallelling arguments made in the “TERF Wars” session at the start of the day, Raha explained that transphobia is part of the contemporary dynamics of separability, with gender norms folded into the enactment of white supremacy.

Affective economies describe how emotions and feelings provide motivation and structure for certain kinds of social order. Drawing on Franz Fanon, Raha provided the example of how emotional responses to the presence of Black, Indigenous and Brown people emerge in the context of specific histories and foundations of racialisation and inequality. In the context of these histories, mainstream conversations about racism tend to centre the feelings of white commentators. Similarly and relatedly, contemporary conversations about sex/gender are centring feelings of cis people. The structural impact of this is that the actual needs and perspectives of marginalised peoples are directly excluded.

Raha posited that a solution to these problems can be found in practices of abolitionist care. She encouraged us to think about our care practices in relation to separability, and invited us to consider how separability is reproduced in our personal and social lives. For example, who are we excluding in our work, and (to draw on the insights of the prison abolition movement) how might we stop treating people as disposable? How do we work through our affective investments in a way that manifests possibilities and togetherness?

In Conceptualizing Cuy(r)ness: Knowledge Production Regarding Gender & Sexuality in Ecuador, Nathan Campozano of SUNY Purchase College (USA) noted the oversaturated presence of the Global North in international conversations surrounding gender and sexuality. Relatedly, Andean perspectives are somewhat sidelined within Latin American studies. Campozano sought to counter this by exploring how people have challenged pre-conceived notions of gender and sexuality in Ecuador.

Campozano introduced “cuy” and “cuyr” as Ecuadorian responses to “queer”; unfixed terms that refuse direct translation. Understanding cuy(r) from a located Ecuadorian perspective enables a recontextualization of trans feminist activism from peoples including enchaquirados, a cuy(r) Indigenous community on the Ecuadorian coast. Campozano argued that a proper documentation of Ecuador’s cuy(r) history must cenre on localised language and understandings, lest these be displaced by Eurocentric or Americanised understandings of queer identity.

Two presentations then followed on the topic of Indian trans rights legislation. First, Sanjula Rajat of the University of Oregon (USA) presented their paper Beyond ‘Third Gender’: Coloniality and Hindu Nationalism in Indian Trans Rights Legislation. Rajat argued that the British colonisation of India required complicity and collaboration from portions of the Indian population, including in the imposition of the colonial moral order. An example of this was the “anti-eunuch” campaign which aimed to eliminate the hijra, culminating in the banning of their perceived cross-gender communities in the Criminal Tribes Act of 1891. While this law was repealed shortly after Indian independence, colonial logics remained in the new state. This can be seen broadly in continued processes of population surveillance and control, and specifically in continued state harassment and violence towards hijra.

In 2014, the NALSA judgement theoretically granted new civil rights to hijra and trans people, including a right to self-determination regardless of surgical status, and affirmative action to support employment. In practice however, hijra and trans communities continued to be targets for state criminalisation and control, especially in the wake of the ironically named Transgender (Protection of Rights) Persons Act in 2019. Rajat argued that the Transgender Act represents a continued expansion of state power, through the conflation of hijra and trans identities as “third gender”, and the logic for this made legible through appeals to nationalist myths of an accepting pre-colonial Hinduism. In practice, the Transgender Act has also made many people’s lives more difficult, for example through reversing elements of NALSA relating to matters such as affirmative action and legal recognition, and criminalising begging.

Rajat therefore positioned the law as a form of pinkwashing by the Indian government. They argued that British colonialism cannot be blamed alone for the difficulties faced by hijra and trans people in India, and that doing so obfuscates the ongoing impact of caste-based violence through Hindu nationalism.

Further analysis of NALSA and the Transgender Law was provided by Chandrasekhar Venkata Durga Sepuri of the University of Maryland (USA), in Weaving an Ambedkarite Theory of Transgender Justice. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar was a key figure in the Indian independence movement and a campaigner against the caste system. Sepuri outlined three key principles of the Ambedkarite theory of justice which are highly relevant to trans experience:

• A grand vision of social justice, underpinned by commitments to liberty, equality, and freedom of expression.
• Recasting social relations, emphasising the value of fellowship with all other human beings, in contrast to Brahmanic logics of caste distinction.
• “Educate, agitate, organise”: a vision of political power in which education is central to liberation.

Sepuri observed that the recent rising power of ethnic democracy and Hindu nationalism in India has coincided with the increased “protection” of trans people in law. However, this has in practice involved increased regulation of trans people’s lives. Echoing Rajat, Sepuri argued that the NALSA judgement failed to recognise Brahmanical foundations of transmisogyny, instead helping to build Hindu nationalist rationales for governmentality. The text of the NALSA ruling invited trans people to “join the mainstream” within the implicit context of this Hindu nationalism.

These problems were compounded through the shift from a (flawed) rights-based approach in NALSA, to a welfare-based approach in the Transgender Act. In addition to the discriminatory provisions outlined by Rajat, Sepuri highlighted how the lack of specificity in the Transgender Act’s welfare provisions deny opportunities for trans people to gain social or administrative power, and provide no specific legal consequences for discrimination against trans people.

From an Ambedkarite perspective, therefore, trans people have been failed on multiple fronts. They are denied access to equality and freedom of expression outwith the limited context of Hindu nationalism, denied fellow feeling through the focus on welfare rather than meaningful access to work or power, and there is an absence of a coherent approach to education that recognises intersectional forms of oppression.

Final thoughts

Thursday was a long day. I received a lot of intense information, and also took part in many meaningful conversations which are not reproduced here. I found myself zoning out a bit during the sessions on parenthood and detransition, so took a break during the evening plenary. I had earlier advised a PhD student not to worry too much about constantly attending every possible session – I definitely needed to take this advice myself!