For years now, I have grappled with how to do philosophy as a trans person and how to do philosophy from the social position of trans. While the former simply negotiates my standing as gender-marginalized in the profession and the world, the latter takes that space of marginalization as a space of theorization. But I have also, more fundamentally, been grappling with how to do philosophy for trans people and with trans people, and in the places where trans people are. Or, again, to do philosophy for and with and in communities of people whose bodily projects (to use PJ DiPietro’s words) may be pointed to by “trans” but are not capturable by “trans.” The for, with, and in relations shift the emphasis from me as an individual theorist to me as part of a group or groups—to how I serve, who I stand with, and where I listen.
Wrestling with these questions (and their prepositions), I turned my hand to doing trans philosophy in, with, and through interviews, archives, ephemera, histories, and interpersonal intimacies. To that set of practices, I also added doing philosophy with [trans] people in a [trans] place.
The Project
My first academic job was a visiting position at Hampshire College. Arriving on campus, I was floored by the incredible queer/transness, neurodivergence, and soulfulness I met at every turn. I felt at home in a way I had never felt before. I wanted to understand this place and honor the people I met there. Two years later, I returned to the valley and started interviewing trans and allied students, staff, faculty, and alums not only at Hampshire College, but also at the other Five Colleges: Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Ultimately, I conducted 78 interviews and relied on another 27, for a total of 105. I also consulted local and college archives, including the Sexual Minorities Archives run by trans elder Ben Power. People shared stories with me, boxes of old papers, and now defunct Google drives. Across all of this, I listened for the wisdom (sophia) of trans people in a place.
The result is How We Make Each Other: Trans Life at the Edge of the University. At the time I started the project, I was deeply frustrated by existing literature on trans people in higher education. Overwhelmingly, that literature focused on trans people as sufferers and policy changes as our saviors. If administrators would just institute enough non-discrimination clauses, pronoun and name-change practices, inclusive bathrooms and housing options, trans healthcare coverage, and (some) trans programming, trans people would flourish in the university! Right? I wanted something so much richer. I wanted to think from, with, for, and in the place of trans people at the edge of the university. So I turned my attention from trans policies to trans poetics.
For me, trans poetics refers to the ways in which trans folks make resistant sense of themselves and their world through material practices in peripheral and insubordinate spaces. I rely on classical poetics, trans poetry, and Fred Moten’s work to frame that account and on stories from the Five Colleges to give it flesh and life. As important as policy work is, trans flourishing does not hinge on administrative largess. It hinges on making spaces (and making-spaces), in the underbelly of the university, where trans people tell stories, stage mutinies, and shout poems at the future.
Major Moves
The lion’s share of How We Make Each Other is devoted to thinking history, resistance, and hope through an archive of trans poetics. In the field of philosophy, subject areas like these—epistemology, politics, affect—are rarely taught from the perspective of trans people. Still more rarely, if at all, are they thought through the wisdom that everyday trans people offer. I aim to intervene in the long philosophical tradition of theorizing these terms in universal and uprooted ways. If you are teaching Immanuel Kant and Baruch Spinoza, consider also learning from trans folks making political and affective sense together. If you are writing about testimony, revolution, or even despair, consider turning to this highly relevant archive of trans life.
Looking for a trans poetics of resistance (or history, or hope), I could not use traditional schema or search criteria. How I looked—and what I looked through—had to change. For each subject area, I developed a corresponding set of attunements and analytics. For me, attunements are practices of noticing that allow poetics to come into the frame, and analytics are frames that allow poetic noticing to set to work. Queer and trans river scientist Cleo Wölfle Hazard, for example, attunes his work to the underflows, the hyporheic zone where a river seeps through the silt and clay of the riverbed and its watershed. To do so, he sinks porous analytic tubes deep into the earth. Through them, he can witness the buried ebullience and small rebellions of the underflows. Something similar is true of trans poetics. To witness it, I could not stare at a typographical map or even stand on the riverbank itself. I had to sink my eyes and feet and hands into the riverbed. Some of the attunements I use are to silences, hangouts, the ephemeral, and the concrete. Some of the analytics are dust, stash, glue, pebble, and risk.
The result is a book where you will find canonical philosophical voices (e.g., Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, Audre Lorde and María Lugones, Ann Cvetkovich and Saidiya Hartman, Ernst Bloch and José Muñoz). But you will also find voices of trans leaders and thinkers from the Five College world (e.g., Cameron Awkward-Rich, Cavar, Mateo Medina, Jordy Rosenberg, Jules Rosskam, Justine Killian, Calliope Rose Wong). You will meet trans student organizations such as Gender Liberation UMass, Gender Resource Network, Tangent, and TransActive. And you will meet many nameless queer and trans people who staged resistance and made sense together over the last thirty years. I explore what it means to battle the archive for these stories. I wrestle with the role of disability and fatigue in these narratives. And I draw wisdom for protest-building and world-making. Stockpiled together, these stories become an ourchive (Ren-yo Hwang’s term)—an ourchive that gender disruptors of all sorts can claim and contest, resonate with, resist, and remake.
Methodological Commitments
Jason, one of my interviewees, spoke of his frustration with “theory”:
When I got to Hampshire, I came from a large, underfunded, overcrowded public high school. I went to a supposedly “intro” to queer studies class (I remember it was a 100-level class). And I’m sitting in there, and they’re talking about trans people and I don’t understand the language. I’m trans and I have no idea what’s happening. And I felt like I couldn’t ask. […] I think that’s where a lot of the frustration for me really started. I understand the purposes of theory in a lot of ways, but I also think that sometimes it’s used in a way that cuts off people who it’s affecting. Then it becomes in a lot of ways really inaccessible to the people who are being written about. (11)
As I wrote How We Make Each Other, I kept asking myself how to write for Jason, to write in a way that welcomes him into its pages, where he could see himself and find nourishment. Where all the people I spoke with and about could find nourishment.
While the book makes conceptual interventions, it also makes methodological ones.
- Story-led theory. In philosophy, stories typically get used as examples of the theory, or applications of the theory, or intuition pumpers of the theory. But an unstoried theory remains paramount. Often, those stories are fake. Is it too much to say I am tired of fake stories? Too many real stories desperately need to be told, deserve to be told. What if we never told another fake story in trans/philosophy again? In this book, I am politically committed to trans stories leading trans theory. More than that, I am committed to showing that trans stories are already mobilizing trans theory. They are already theoretically dense, already humus.
- Place-based theory. One manuscript reviewer was alarmed that they didn’t see “all the big names in trans theory” populating its pages. “Your readers will want to see those names,” they told me. I consciously chose, however, to focus on trans theorists and creators who were local to or had intersected with the Five Colleges themselves. I wanted to use local theory for a local project. I wanted to garden within a philosophical ecology rather than (re)crown philosopher kings.
- Community accountability: I not only listened to and wrote from interviews and archival materials, but I returned to (and in some cases tracked down) the people themselves, invited them to review the passages in which their stories and words are represented, and I revised accordingly. Reflecting on it now, I wonder why it is so hard to think of that work as philosophical? That return to voices other than my own, that revision of the text in dialogue with another (unmasked), that responsibility to someone else’s perspective and wisdom.
This is not to say I don’t make claims of my own. What I offer in the book is an account of trans poetics. Through story-led, place-based theory, I offer distinct attunements and analytics that allow us to track a trans poetics of history, of resistance, and of hope. That is the major gift of this book, but it is a gift from all of us, not one of us, and certainly not just me.
Looking Back
As trans philosophy has become a recognizable subfield, the question of method has resurfaced for me. Trans philosophy’s tributaries flow from many places on the theoretical and geographical map. As such, there is a certain inherent pluralism to the project. But that pluralism has its limits. It is no surprise that certain investments in what philosophy is (and what it isn’t)—how it looks, sounds, or should be done—are replicated in fields auspiciously formed to critique precisely those investments (e.g., feminist philosophy, Africana philosophy, Latinx philosophy, philosophy of disability, etc.). Nor that hierarchies of legitimation and legibility already at work in Philosophy are reprised in these Minor Philosophies. I often sit back and wonder how more radical breaks can be cultivated. And I wonder if trans philosophy might ever lead philosophy to more ethical practice.
There is already a pattern in trans philosophy of assimilating to philosophical universalism, abstraction, elitism, and more. Of celebrating the lone wolf genius at the cost of the everyday wisdom and insight of trans people, in community, building countercultural spaces. Indeed, there are swaths of trans philosophy that can and do leave out trans communities and trans people, except insofar as they are (or by virtue of their being) academics, philosophers, thought experiments, decontextualized grab-quotations, empty place holders, or social cred. This is all to be expected, but also, at least for me, resisted.
For work informing my own that forefronts listening, frustrates the paradigm of Individual PhilosopherTM, and takes archival materials, interviews, community phenomenologies, interpersonal intimacies, or some combination thereof as grounds for more embedded and accountable theorizing, see works by PJ DiPietro, C. Jacob Hale, Hil Malatino, Gayle Salamon, C. Riley Snorton, and Susan Stryker.
The methodological questions I have get at the heart of the philosophical—and trans philosophical—project. I am not surprised that trans philosophy has and will replicate dominant philosophical methods (and their dominance). But I hold out hope that something about the trans in trans philosophy will demand something more. That it will transition people out of their inherited methodological pathways and demand a reformation of how thought gets done and gets written, gets spoken, and gets shared. Where the trans of trans philosophy demands an engagement with sociological, historical, archival, ethnographic, and geographical tools. Where the trans in trans philosophy pries our hands from the paradigm of Major Thinker and transports us to minor thought worlds and community accountability and interpersonal intimacies. Where trans brings us up short and stops us in our tracks, precisely in front of people in a place.
It is a truism that philosophy is behind demographically. It is rarely appreciated, however, that philosophy is also behind methodologically. While other fields have developed people’s history, citizen science, and community action participatory research, philosophy has not had its community revolution; its methodological crisis. In our field, “public philosophy” most often refers to philosophers sharing their views with the public—not to the public or publics philosophizing of their own accord. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if trans philosophy could be the aperture through which that revolution got underway?
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender injustice, issues of gender injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Elisabeth Paquette or the Associate Editor Shadi “Soph” Heidarifar.
Perry Zurn
Perry Zurn is Provost Associate Professor of Philosophy at American University. He researches primarily in political philosophy, critical theory, and lgbtq (esp. trans) studies. He is especially interested in the politics of inquiry and voice, material histories of resistance, poetics, and ecologies. He is the author of Cisgender: Disorienting a Category (forthcoming), How We Make Each Other: Trans Life at the Edge of the University (2025), and Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry (2021), as well as the coauthor of Curious Minds: The Power of Connection (2022). He is also the co-editor of four books, including Trans Philosophy (2024).
