Queer_Trans_Feminisms

“Hell, I'm suspicious.“, writes Sandy Stone regarding medicalized discourse about “transsexuality” in her manifesto The Empire Strikes Back in 1987. One of the problems she sees for creating a posttranssexual counterdiscourse is that to “…attempt to occupy a place as speaking subject within the traditional gender frame is to become complicit in the discourse which one wishes to deconstruct.” Over thirty years, a large-scale “Stop Trans Pathologization” campaign, and decades of Queer Theory and Transgender Studies later, “posttranssexual”, postposttranssexual, transgender or non-binary counterdiscourse certainly exists. Yet, current trans_queer-antagonistic discourse still positions transness_queerness as some sort of “Phantom Menace” – to stay with Sandy Stones Star-Wars terminology. Furthermore, questionable forms of self-ascribed allyship against queer- and transantagonistic moral panics often ignore decades of trans_queer_feminist writing. Understanding trans_queer feminisms as essential part of antifascist practice, we will read and analyze queer and trans feminist texts and manifestos that go beyond questions of representation and stay suspicious of categorizations.