A Vernacular Science of Gender: Trans History After Transsexuality

This talk explores how transgender studies has come to presume an idealized separation between medical-scientific discourse and the social field of lived experience in its objects of study. Observing that this tendency rests on a series of premises about history and historical sequence, the talk explores a remarkable vernacular archive of do-it-yourself transition practices from the early 1950s that aimed to critique and rival the project of institutional trans medicalization at its precise moment of emergence. This previously unexamined archive questions the terms of the field’s foundational desire for an arrival at a conceptual and historical “after” transsexuality and medical science.