GLR May-June 2026

entered a new phase of movement history, and giving an ac count of what worked in the past and what didn’t is an impor tant part of facing the future. EE: Have you expanded on any of the figures from past edi tions based on recent historical research? SS: I was pleased to be able to include more content in this third edition that addressed pre-20th-century history. I was able to add a few paragraphs about Frances Thompson, a transfeminine person in Memphis, Tennessee, in the 1860s and ’70s, whose outing in the press during the 1876 presidential election ar guably played a role in the outcome of the election, which cul minated in overturning post-Civil War Reconstruction and instituting the Jim Crow apartheid regime. Thompson’s case history powerfully illustrates the 150-year-long history of racist and reactionary weaponization of trans issues for political mo tives that are so visible in our present moment. EE: Many people did not expect such a vicious campaign against the transgender community. However, you predicted its intensity during the burgeoning backlash during the repeal of the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance. What moves do you an ticipate the anti-trans movement will make over the next few years? SS: Unfortunately, I think there are certain elements in the fed eral government that are ideologically anti-trans—people like Russell Vought—and they are quietly and deliberately doing what they consider to be the Lord’s work in making life ad ministratively impossible for trans people, making transition in creasingly impossible. That permission structure at the top trickles down to the state level, particularly in the gerryman dered red states, where laws about ID and health care provision, public facilities, etc., can put real teeth into the animus ex pressed in federal Executive Orders and changes in federal pol icy. Add on top of that, the fact that the fascist tendencies in the U.S. have discovered that trans issues can be useful for winning elections, and that most people, liberal and leftist people in cluded, are so ignorant about trans issues that they are easily manipulated. Even more sadly, most people simply don’t care about trans. They don’t care when things are good for us, and they don’t care when things are bad. EE: What new books, literature, and social projects influenced the revisions to Transgender History ? SS: Well, I continue to feel that the emergence of a self-de scribed “Black trans studies” over the past decade has been per haps the most significant intellectual development in reframing what transness means and does. It deeply informs my sense of transness being about more than gender. It’s about moving across the beliefs, practices, and ideologies that try to bind us all in a socioeconomic position through the meanings it attributes to our flesh and to bodily difference. It makes clearer to me how trans oppression is rooted in the biocentric, bio-essentialist par adigm that is also at the root of anti-Black racism and settler colonial violence. EE: Black trans studies has been such a welcome—and over due—intervention into the field. What other developments are you most excited about in trans studies today? What areas or May–June 2026

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