For nearly twenty years, Anglo-American feminist theory has posed its own epistemological questions by looking at the lives and bodies of transsexuals and transvestites. This paper examines the impact of such scholarship on improving the everyday lives of the people central to such feminist argumentation. Drawing on indigenous scholarship and activisms, I conclude with a consideration of some central principles necessary to engage in feminist research and theory—to involve marginal people in the production of knowledge and to transform the knowledge-production process itself.

This paper identifies and examines the possible contributions that emerging fields of study, particularly feminist public health, can make to enhancing and expanding trans/feminist theory and practice. A feminist public-health approach that is rooted in a tradition of political economy, social justice and equity studies, and an anti-oppression orientation, provides one of the most comprehensive “toolboxes” of perspectives, theoretical frameworks, methods, practices, processes, and strategies for trans-oriented scholars and activists.

This paper argues that trans and genderqueer people affect the gender formation and identity of non-trans people. We explore three instances of this relationship between trans and non-trans genders: an allegiance to inadequate liberal-individualist models of selfhood; tropes through which trans people are made to stand as theoretical objects with which to think about gender broadly; and a narrow focus on gender and evasion of an intersectional understanding of gender formation.

In an examination of the psychological aspect of passing, this essay challenges Sandy Stone's conceptualization and subsequent request for transsexuals to forego the act. Employing an auto-ethnographical approach, this essay contends that considering the “psychic” dimensions of passing requires different, and more hopeful, articulations about transsexual bodies, such that gendered and racialized transsexual bodies are produced not simply in terms of social reading and physical embodiment, but also through psychic affirmation and disavowal.

Bigenderism maintains there are only two genders, which correspond with the two sexes, male and female. Basic bigenderism requires that legal documents and public institutions designate a single invariant gender (that is, sex). Strict bigenderism applies these categories in a social context that stigmatizes “imperfect” men and women who do not reach ideals set by the bigenderist schema. I discuss these concepts and their implications, present three models that successively weaken bigenderist assumptions, and argue for the most radical of the three.

This article examines shifts in the legal, medical, and common-sense logics governing the designation of sex on birth certificates issued by the City of New York between 1965 and 2006. In the initial iteration, the stabilization of legal sex categories was organized around the notion of “fraud”; in the most recent iteration, “permanence” became the measure of authenticity. We frame these legal constructions of sex with theories about the “natural attitude” toward gender.

Feminist and trans theory challenges “the” binary sex/gender system, but can create a new binary opposition of subversive transgender versus conservative transsexual. This paper aims to shift debate concerning bodies as authentic/real versus constructed/mutable, arguing that such debate establishes a false dichotomy that may be overcome by reappraising scientific understandings of sex/gender. Much recent biology and neurology stresses nonlinearity, contingency, self-organization, and open-endedness. Engaging with this research offers ways around apparently interminable theoretical impasses.

This article traces the historical becoming of the contemporary supersaturation of images of queer and transgendered Iran through the narrative and tropic devices introduced by filmmakers in the past twenty years. I argue that the censorship code enforced by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance is partly responsible for the formation of what has come to be a ubiquitous figure in the New Iranian cinema: the “cross-dressing” or “passing” figure. By performing close readings of Baran and Dokhtaraneh Khorshid—two films that are exemplary of a subgenre organized around the “cross-dressing” or “passing” figure—I identify a “transgender move”: a temporary space of political and agential potential that many spectators—both domestic and diasporic—seek in the post 1990s New Iranian cinema.

I explore how the Buddhist icon Kuan Yin is emerging as a point of identification for trans people and has the potential to resolve a tension within feminism. As a figure that slips past the male/female binary, Kuan Yin explodes the dichotomy between universal and particular in a way that captures the pragmatist and feminist emphasis on doing justice to concrete, particular lives without becoming stuck in an essentialist quagmire.