JUNE 4th | 6:30pm at McNally Jackson Seaport
Revisiting the Archive of American Trans Politics
Paisley Currah, Joanna Wuest, and Whit Washington
moderated by Jamie Lauren Keiles
Choose an RSVP Option:
I'd just like a seat, please - $5.00
I'd like a copy of Sex Is as Sex Does - $28.00
Transgender life is under attack and the trans rights movement has got to come together. But wtf is it?! In this evening of reckoning, we flash back to the origins of national trans politics and try to answer certain obvious questions obscured by the chaos of the present day: What exactly is the trans rights movement? What is its history? Who does it purport to represent? Where are its boundaries? What are its strategies and institutions? How does this movement relate to other movements? Why do trans people often feel so far from it? What are the viable alternatives?
Jamie Lauren Keiles is the author of The Third Person, a forthcoming book on nonbinary identity, and the admin of @sexchange.tbt, an Instagram-based trans public history project.
Paisley Currah teaches political science and gender studies at the City University of New York. Currah’s prize-winning 2022 book, Sex Is Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity, revealed the hidden logics that have governed sex classification policies in the United States. His new book project, Legislating Gender, situates the current wave of anti-trans legislation within a longer history of the regulation of gender. Currah’s work has appeared in The Boston Review, The New York Review of Books, Nature, and The Yale Review. In 2024-25, he is a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study.
Joanna Wuest is Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University and a Public Fellow in LGBTQ Rights at the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). She is the author of Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement and other writing in The Nation, Boston Review, and Dissent.
Whit Washington, Esq. (they/them) brings over eight years of experience in advancing equity and inclusion through innovative legal strategies and community collaboration. A dedicated advocate for trans rights, Whit has centered their practice on addressing the unique challenges faced by trans people in prisons. In addition to their practice, Whit is an avid researcher and their work focuses on the socio-legal/political purpose of the prison industrial complex in the U.S. by looking at the relationships between human rights movement, the creation of criminal law, and the U.S. economy. In addition to their work, Whit enjoys spending time with family, cooking for community, and celebrating trans joy.