You know you have really arrived when they name an academic field after you.
TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly will be the journal of record for the vibrant, rapidly evolving interdisciplinary field of Transgender Studies--and you can be part of its groundbreaking debut in 2014. It will be co-edited by Dr. Susan Stryker (University of Arizona) and Dr. Paisley Currah (CUNY-Brooklyn), and published by Duke University Press.
Transgender Studies has far-reaching implications across many academic disciplines, including not only gender and women’s studies, sexuality studies, and LGBT Studies, but also social sciences, health, art, cultural studies, and many other broadly defined fields. The development of transgender studies also makes a politically significant intervention into the lives of trans community members with tremendous unmet needs, by changing what and how we know about transgender issues.
Here’s a preview of the first five issues:
TSQ 1:1+2, “Postposttransexual: Terms for a 21st Century Transgender Studies,” will be a special double issue of short essays on key concepts in transgender studies.
TSQ 1:3, “Decolonizing the Transgender Imaginary,” will explore cross-cultural analysis of sex/gender variation, and bring transgender studies into critical engagement with ethnography and anthropology.
TSQ 1:4, “Trans Cultural Production,” will be devoted to the arts, film, literature, and performance.
TSQ 2:1 “Making Transgender Count,” co-edited with the Williams Institute’s GenIUSS group (Gender Identity in U.S. Surveillance), will tackle such issues as population studies, demography, epidemiology, and quantitative methods.
Remember when Femke Olyslager and Lynn Conway presented their paper On the Calculation of the Prevalence of Transsexualism to the baffled innumerate shrinks at the 2007 WPATH conference?
Guess what? There are more of us in the world than have had surgery in the US. And, there are more of us who have had surgery in the US alone than the shrinks think there are of us in the whole world.
And not one shrink ever noticed the numerical impossibility of that during the last 30 years. The accepted estimates had to be wrong by at least two orders of magnitude. It took two professors of electrical engineering to (try to) explain it to them.
But then the shrinks went right on estimating our numbers as 1:34,000 because -- that's what their own publications have always said. And what is electrical engineering, anyway? And you Ts are cute and all, but what are all those squiggles you are writing up there? And remind us, what is probability? -- we didn't do so well in that course.
Some of us wondered whether shrinks have ever even learned how to count.
Well, soon there will be a whole issue of TSQ devoted to counting how many of us there are.