B Lee Aultman

This essay argues that not every practice toward achieving the good life can fit neatly into categories of the healthy and the normative-happiness. It argues for an aesthetic reconsideration of everyday life via the trans ordinary: scenes of everyday life-making for trans people. These scenes can problematize normative conceptions of the good life, or of happy living. In this sense, this essay explores how variously embodied practices can make a less-bad life possible. Employing phenomenology and recent trends in affect theory, this essay explores how trans narratives establish scenes of carrying on that, while not immediately heralded as happy, complicate the notion of healthy well-being altogether.

Trans studies has been argued to be at a defining crossroads. The discipline needs to reorient itself toward new theories of transness and subjectivity or face its own dissolution. This means contesting received dogmas of gender determination , identity, history, and narrative convention. This essay examines how recently proposed uses of narratives, poetry, and satire can enable such contests in generative ways. It theorizes the trans complaint as an index for how popularly and academically mediated trans cultures, or intimate publics, might turn toward ordinary life theories in order to understand desire, fantasy, and their interlocking complexities of making a life.

Using cases and legal precedent on transgender employment discrimination in the US-American context, this article investigates the epistemological consequences of creating a gendered legal subject. It interrogates the ways that courts enact certain kinds of knowledge claims that deny the experiences of transgender litigants as transgender. It argues how judicial reasoning tends to create conditions of transgender legibility that reproduces preconceived notions of normative, cisgender sex/gender experiences and knowledges, contributing to hermeneutical injustice.

The term cisgender (from the Latin cis-, meaning “on the same side as”) can be used to describe individuals who possess, from birth and into adulthood, the male or female reproductive organs (sex) typical of the social category of man or woman (gender) to which that individual was assigned at birth. Hence a cisgender person's gender is on the same side as their birth-assigned sex, in contrast to which a transgender person's gender is on the other side (trans-) of their birth-assigned sex.

The successes of the transgender rights movement in the US have taken place in the institutions where politics is imagined to take place--the courts, legislatures and administrative policy venues. However, struggles outside these venues are much less visible to scholars in political science. That invisibility is not surprising for two reasons. First, in political science, these institutions are often constructed as the horizon and limit of politics. Secondly, in order to be legible within US legal architecture, claims for equality are generally constrained within a “but for” arithmetic: for example, but for characteristic X, one would have been treated equally. The legal subject is thus reduced to a singular trait, which is belied by the lived reality of most. As a result, those whose oppression results from linkages between structures of racism, ethnocentrism, class, (dis)ability, and gender/sex are much less legible to political scientists and to the mainstream of LGBTQ equality movements. Moreover, the illegibility of trans politics outside the law produces its own effects, recursively reifying a “transnormative” subject of rights. In other words, illegibility can help constitute and reinforce what a “normal” trans person must be like. This essay will first briefly review the successes of the mainstream transgender rights movement in the US.  We will then shift our analysis and examine the embodied practices of trans political resistance. Embodiment includes the lived realities of transgender people, from gender expression to varied gender identities, as they are performed outside of the law’s rational gaze.  We frame our analysis with the concept of epistemic injustice, using it to critique the erasure of lives, experiences, and the variability of trans politics at the level of shared knowledge. It is our hope to resituate trans resistance in ways that do justice to their political lives highlighting the embodied and epistemic frontiers they inhabit.

Nonbinary trans identities have historically referred to a range of gender non-normative embodiments and self-making practices that stand on the outside of, or sometimes in di­ rect opposition to, the Western binary classifications of sex/gender (i.e., man or woman, male or female). These identities include but are not limited to androgyny, genderqueer, genderfluid, gender nonconforming, and genderf*ck. Increasingly, nonbinary has become its own free-standing identity, without many of the historical connotations that gen­ derqueer, for instance, might invoke. Nonbinary people identify themselves with gender-neutral pronouns or a fluid mixture of gendered pronouns in social practices. Some tran­ sition and take on embodiments that have a particular gendered aesthetic. This may or may not include sexual reassignment surgeries and other procedures that are body con­ firming. In short, nonbinary people have varied and robust social lives. The umbrella category of "trans" helps to situate some of the meaning and history of gen­ der-non-normative identities. On the one hand, it can be a productive political vehicle that mobilizes communities of similarly felt histories toward collective action. On the other hand, it can limit the range of recognized embodiments and practices that have partici­ pated in the historically pertinent conventions that trans describes. The history of nonbi­ nary identities is then a complex prospect. Such identities alter the categorical assump­ tions that underscore transsexual and transgender identities within binary terms. The complex narratives and histories of nonbinary trans identities raise some timely questions about the conventions of sex/gender in contemporary life. What constitutes one's endur­ ing sense of gender now that the binary itself has come under dispute? Should the gender binary be protected and for whom? In what varied ways do nonbinary identities alter a commonly shared imaginary of the bodily aesthetic? What role does desire play in the on­ going social changes in this long revolution of the body? The politics that emerge from these questions are becoming increasingly pressing as technology can now link otherwise isolated people across global boundaries. And finally, the reception of nonbinary identities offers important spaces of dialogue about the proliferation of identity politics, political movements, and the social divisions of labor these forces demand.