This essay discusses short-circuited trans care by focusing on failures of t4t as an ethos both interpersonally and within particular trans scenes. The author begins by recounting an experience working at a bar/restaurant that appealed to its identity as a caring trans community space as part of its exploitation of trans workers. This dynamic inspires the main argument, that t4t can become an ethos of scenes and institutions beyond the interpersonal while short-circuiting practices of trans care. Short-circuited trans care is (...) then traced to t4t by drawing from Hil Malatino's work on trans care and t4t, Kai Cheng Thom's work on community dynamics, and trans literature to argue that practices of t4t often include abuse, expulsion, and assumptive care. This short-circuited trans care is linked to trans scenes by discussing the ethos of t4t in the history of Topside Press and trans cultural production. The author does not condemn t4t and to this effect offers a critique of tethering trans cultural production to prestige instead of care. Rather, the goal of this essay is to openly discuss aspects of t4t and trans care that are often obscured through the projection of a highly questionable “we” or universalized “trans community.”. (shrink)

The need for gender recognition is widespread, even when hypervisibility and other effects of trans antagonism make that need dangerous for trans people. This reason partially accounts for why, in trans critique, recognition is a dirty word. As a political aim, and to some extent as a moral norm, trans critiques encourage dropping recognition. On the other hand, social philosophers often view recognition as a solution to misrecognition and take recognition to be a remedy for injustice. In my view, recognition (...) should neither be dropped nor held as a foundational norm for trans emancipation. First, I present three ways trans recognition is ambivalent. Second, evaluating Axel Honneth’s observations about the entwinement of recognition and domination, I argue that recognition is an ambivalent norm for trans critique and struggle. Third, I propose studying trans recognitive practices (rather than recognition in abstract) and I illuminate what might set trans/t4t recognition acts apart from their cis-grounded analogues, centering the roles of the body and space/place as resources of trans/t4t recognitive practices, and how such practices focus on the subject’s change and becoming over their identification. (shrink)

Previously proposed strategies for preventing hermeneutical injustices mostly take for granted the interests people have in various things about themselves being intelligible, and aim only to enable them to satisfy these interests. Historically, the pursuit of such strategies has been somewhat successful in preventing trans people from suffering hermeneutical injustices in their interactions with cis people. Yet the widespread anti-trans backlash of recent years has brought to the fore a number of limitations and previously unacknowledged downsides to trans people’s pursuit (...) of such strategies. Thankfully, the pursuit of such strategies is not the only way to go about preventing trans people from suffering hermeneutical injustices in their interactions with cis people. At least some such injustices can be prevented by instead doing away with some of the interests trans people have in certain things about themselves being intelligible to certain cis people, and thus with the possibility of those interests going unfairly unsatisfied. In particular, trans people can do away with some of those interests by meeting the needs which underly them for themselves. Such strategies are infrapolitical in the sense that because they largely play out within a marginalized group rather than between a marginalized group and a dominant group, they tend not to register on the radar of the dominant group. I argue that especially in the context of a backlash against a marginalized group by members of a dominant group, this is an important advantage to strategies of this previously untheorized sort. (shrink)