“Through science to justice”: Geographies of Trans Livingness in DeSantis’s America

Keywords: queer geography, trans geography, eradication, erasure, resistance, emotional geography, subjectivities, intersectionality, dispossession, justice
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

It is no secret that the current political climate in the United States has turned against trans people. Although Texas and Florida currently stand out for their hostility, violence against trans people is likely to continue escalating at the national scale as conservatives work to eradicate “transgenderism” from the map. The spatialities of transness are shifting, becoming simultaneously and contradictorily both invisible and hyper-visible, with the end goal of eradication. Such eradication has precedent, but so does resistance to it. In early-twentieth-century Germany, for example, the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft conducted research into the lives of homosexuals and “transvestites,” and although not all of their work survived World War II, they nonetheless succeeded in cementing the here-ness and now-ness of many queer people living in their time and place. Taking a lesson from the Institut and from McKittrick (2011), twenty-first century geographers have the opportunity to “re-imagine geographies of dispossession…as sites through which co-operative human efforts can take place and have a place” (960). The fullness of trans subjectivities – and their intersections with other ways of being – create their own “sense of place” that merits description. This paper makes an urgent call for geographers to move spatially and temporally “through science to justice”: to mark indelibly the fullness of queer lives.