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Trouble Genders: “LGBT” Collapse and Trans Fundamentality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2021

Marquis Bey
Marquis Bey*
Affiliation:
African American Studies & English, Northwestern University, 5-103 Crowe Hall, 633 Clark Street, Evanston, IL 60208
*
Corresponding author. [email protected]
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Abstract

This essay considers how deployments of the acronym “LGBT” often obscure and flatten the specificity of the terms the letters reference. Also of concern here is how the “T” might be the more fundamental letter, as reactions to “LGBT identity” are indexed in gender transgression, to which the “T” refers. I argue for holding the trouble of the acronym in the “T” and that the trans underlies how “LGBT,” as a marker of subjectivity or violence, becomes legible. To carry this out, the essay makes a parallel to how “LGBT” functions similarly to “people of color” as the terms obscure the fundamentality of the trans and the black, respectively; clarifies the distinction between queer and trans, and subsequently trans and transgender; and demonstrates how transphobic readings are integral to homophobic responses.

Type
Article
Information
Hypatia , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , Winter 2021 , pp. 191 - 206
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Hypatia, a Nonprofit Corporation

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