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Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
For me, it's true to what philosophy could be.
Andrea J. Pitts:Being within a space, a kind of dialogical space that's not gonna already set up the terms, it makes for exciting possibilities.
Perry Zurn:To try to say, okay, trans philosophy can be its own specific subfield of philosophy and it can have its own projects, but then there's tension there about what it means to be establishing a field like that.
PJ DiPietro:A plural understanding of both philosophy and trans that spoke to my decolonial intersectional transnational approach to philosophizing.
Perry Zurn:We're super excited to be here talking about trans philosophy, an edited collection coming out with the University of Minnesota Press. My name is Peri Zern, and I'm provost associate professor of philosophy at American University in DC. And I'd love my co editors to introduce themselves along with me.
Andrea J. Pitts:Great. Thank you, Perry. My name is Andrea Pitts. I'm associate professor of comparative literature at the University at Buffalo, and happy to pass it along to my colleagues.
Talia Mae Bettcher:Hi there. Happy to be here. This is, Talia Boettcher, and I'm a professor of philosophy at California State University Los Angeles.
PJ DiPietro:Hello, everyone. This is PJ DiPietro, scholar, activist, and an associate professor of women's and gender studies at Syracuse University. Pleasure to be in your presence and with the audience.
Perry Zurn:We, I mean, you should see our faces right now. We're all smiling. We love working together, and we love having to be together. So that's one of the predecessors of this book really is our friendships with each other. But I wonder, Talia, if you could sort of kick us off with the story of how we came to the idea of this book.
Talia Mae Bettcher:Well, I think that it's really been lost in the the haze of time. But I think generally, I think that the two of us, Perry, we both had the idea for a collection and we approached each other and we started talking through the idea of a of a collection. And at the time, we had a very different vision. I think we were thinking like, well, what we wanted to do was secure a kind of like, play the game to secure a kind of reputability for folks within the profession, sort of stake out of field or subfield that way. And fairly quickly on, we realized that that was just not the way to go, and it was not really true to our vision of trans philosophy.
Talia Mae Bettcher:And I think that then with the additions of Andrea and then PJ, you know, I think really helped us sort of, you know, see that even more clearly, sort of open things up into a very different conception of where we ought to go.
Perry Zurn:It's true that we were at this juncture where students, especially graduate students, were coming to all of us really at the time and wanting to know how do we do trans philosophy and how do we make trans philosophy a thing. And in a sense this edited collection was one of the first ways we tried to make it a thing. Of course, we were preceded by conferences, earlier conferences, in 2016 and 2018, respectively. But really to try to say, okay, trans philosophy can be its own specific subfield of philosophy and they can have its own projects. But then there's, you know, there's a tension there about what what it means to be establishing a field like that.
Perry Zurn:Andrea and PJ, do you wanna come in here with the the rest of the story?
Andrea J. Pitts:I mean, I just also wanna echo this is Andrea. I wanna echo the opportunity to work with with the folks in this collection because I know for me to get an outreach from, Talia and Perry early on was, like, you know, a a welcomed invitation because, I mean, I've been admiring both of them as scholars and now proud to call them my friends and and colleagues. And so it was another opportunity to connect and to collaborate. And I also, you know, was, you know, working with students at the time. I know Perry and I had been working on a conference.
Andrea J. Pitts:We had been working on the Trans Philosophy Project Conference. I had been working with a grad student, Maggie Castor, and had been, you know, kinda helping do some compiling work. I know, PJ, we had reached out to you to also do work on that website and to also expand, outside the Anglophone philosophical discourses about trans philosophy. And so at the time, I was also thinking in addition to working with Perri and Talia, it would be amazing to expand our purview and think within, at least for me, one of my philosophical sub worlds and kind of interdisciplinary areas is Latinx and Latin American philosophies and and studies, feminisms more broadly. And so to have the opportunity to connect with PJ and do more concrete work thinking across Latinx and Latin American philosophical spaces was really exciting.
Andrea J. Pitts:I was just really excited to also have the opportunity to connect with them and to be able to to build the project out that way.
PJ DiPietro:If I could add something to that. By the way, I am, today, I am coming to you from Cuenca, Ecuador, and I think I'm feeling okay, although I had dental surgery last week. So excuse me if I have any second of dwelling too long on any question. It's just the med pains talking. Sorry about that.
PJ DiPietro:One thing that I that I remember clearly was the practice that I think the the invitation, in my case, came either around one of the trans philosophy projects conferences or right after that. And what I truly appreciated was the conviviality of the space, the practice of hospitality, and understanding a plural understanding of both philosophy and trans, and that spoke to at least my, decolonial, intersectional, transnational approach to philosophizing. That's a term that I'm borrowing from Talia. I'd say that that was pretty much appealing to me, and hopefully the book continues to convey that hospitality, that plurality, and the intention of being multimodal and being also very thoughtful about the approach to what it means to do trans philosophy, taking on trans at the same time that we trouble what trans may mean and what it may foster. So thank you for making me a part of this amazing project.
PJ DiPietro:Thank you.
Talia Mae Bettcher:Should we go on to the second chapter of the story with with regards to publishers?
Perry Zurn:That's where I was gonna head next. Yeah. I was gonna say, you know, we were thinking, especially when Talia and I first got together to to collect these pieces we were thinking we're going to aim to publish with Oxford University Press because it is one of the more renowned strictly philosophy presses or a place where the some of the most advanced philosophical work today is is being published. But the more we thought about it and worked with it and others will share other elements of this story, we really shifted in our hearts toward Minnesota because Minnesota already has precisely the kind of breadth and complexity that PJ was gesturing to that is the heart of this project. We want trans philosophy, but in general as a field, but also this book to speak across disciplines.
Perry Zurn:We want it to speak across locations and geographies. We want it to be expansive and challenging to what philosophy is and what trans is thought to be. And Minnesota is such a great such a perfect place, for that and had such a great track record for already publishing trans philosophical and transtheoretical work, that we ended up shifting to Minnesota. But other folks can add a little bit, pieces of that conversation.
Talia Mae Bettcher:Well, we were working with OUP, but I think that we became increasingly alarmed about the other sort of work that was being published through OUP. And there was sort of the various publications of gender critical feminist philosophy. I think there was this sense that we were being positioned in a kind of trans people, pro or con. Not only is that not as a terrible starting place for trans philosophy because it already involves accepting yourself as sort of something that can be discussed in that way and marginalized. And it it it really shuts down a lot of other conversations, but it's reductive.
Talia Mae Bettcher:You're reduced to an issue rather than, you know, something that can grow, something that is creative, something that has a plethora of methodological approaches. It was antithetical to, I think, what we had in mind at the time. And so, you know, there was, at first, I think the thought that we would press back a little bit. We sent a strongly worded letter. But I think that, for us, you know, together, we decided we you know, this is not something that we can really, in good conscious, be part of.
Talia Mae Bettcher:And, we need to be part of something that allows us to pursue the type of vision that we had, you know, unfettered and unreduced to a pro and con issue.
Andrea J. Pitts:I would definitely agree. I mean, I think one of the broader questions we were engaging was about, like, what are the political stakes of publishing right now? Like, publishing as trans philosophers, publishing within naming and marking trans philosophy as a field. Right? Like, that's also something that, Harry and Talia, you both were mentioning as, like, you know, initial goal of the project in the book.
Andrea J. Pitts:When we're thinking not just of publishing as a academic exercise in career advancement, but actually about the reception of ideas, the exchange of ideas, the possibility for connection, communication, and, expansion or critique, those things also require, I think, what you were mentioning Talia about being within a space, a kind of dialogical space that's not gonna already set up the term so that we're antagonistically placed against now, you know, a pretty hostile set of trans antagonistic views that are themselves being published within the same institution. So I think part of what we were engaging with was how to not only try not to center the very transphobic and harmful text, like gender critical feminist texts that are being published, like how not to center those, how not to make those the focus of the book in any way, but also which company will we be keeping as publishers? And I think Perry already mentioned this, but I mean, there were some amazing books already out with, University of Minnesota Press. I know some of us have already know C. Riley Snorton's Black on Both Sides was a foundational text in my thinking and also one that, well, we're thinking Perry's book is in here.
Andrea J. Pitts:I know Talia's book is coming out, Hill Molotino's book. Those are the folks who are generating thought and who are companions in a project to, I think, advance trans life and futurity or gender variant life and futurity. And that's that felt like a better fit in terms of, like, collegial and creative space than a space that was gonna put us in a kind of polemic that was already divisive and seemingly an obstacle.
Perry Zurn:So we're speaking a little bit to this, the scene, the publishing scene, but also the philosophy scene on which trans philosophy appears. We could also speak to the scene of the world in which this particular book appears at this particular moment and when we were generating it. So we were generating it during the Trump administration. And now, you know, the way in which trans people and trans issues, and trans knowledge has been targeted in political and media campaigns since just speaks more and more to the necessity of lifting up trans thinkers, trans voices, transtheorizing, trans lives, not as a political ploy in someone's agenda, but as and through the richness and the complexity that they already represent and the uneasy way in which they can get co opted into other projects.
Talia Mae Bettcher:And I think that there's something that philosophy can really bring here. You know, if you think about ways in which trans knowledges have been represented as ideological or represented as sort of like by the phrase gender ideology as a way of reducing and dismissing. By thinking about philosophy and what philosophy does, I guess, suppose somewhat somewhat of a caricature, but nonetheless, is supposed to challenge assumptions, is supposed to dig down deep, is supposed to blow things out of the water and explore richly. And I think that by taking up philosophy then as a label that we will, as PJ likes to say also, like trouble, but taking it up as a label and thinking deeply about this stuff and recognizing that what is ideological is the dismissing of trans thinking and trans theorizing and trans philosophizing. Right now, it seems that philosophy is perhaps one of the last disciplines in the humanities at least to, like, really start taking up the issue of philosophy in a more sort of mainstream way.
Talia Mae Bettcher:I mean, there have been those of us who have been, like, working on this for a long time, but in a more mainstream way, suddenly, it's in vogue and suddenly, it's an issue. It does raise all sorts of questions, methodological questions about what is it to do philosophy. There is this thought, for example, that in philosophy, you just take an issue and you pro and con it and you debate back and forth about it. And one of the things that that does is it abstracts from the philosopher themselves in the moment. What are they doing?
Talia Mae Bettcher:Who are they addressing? Why are they writing? And what are they attempting to accomplish when they philosophize? And I think that when you start to take approaches like trans philosophical ones seriously, and it's certainly not the only ones, you really start to see philosophy as a kind of doing or a set of doings. And you really want to like start looking at what can be accomplished with trans philosophy and what are people trying to do who have never thought for very much at all about trans issues, who suddenly now want to say, oh, I've thought about gender issues for a minute, and I'm a philosopher, and I have some views.
Talia Mae Bettcher:What kind of work is that doing to continue a kind of marginalization? And how is it a failure of philosophy itself to really dig deep by shutting down a particular sort of inquiry?
Perry Zurn:I wonder, PJ, if you would also speak at this moment to I mean, we're talking about the scene in the world and in philosophy on which trans appears, but can you trouble trans in this kind of western dominant sense of trans that's that typically is getting mobilized when we talk about trans issues or trans politics or trans philosophy?
PJ DiPietro:I appreciate that question, Perry. And I want to say something that Andrea mentioned earlier about the need to think on the ground in specific locations and from different genealogies of what it means to both take up and give uptake to trans and at the same time, as I said earlier, trouble trans. The category, the experiences that are understood under the category, the ways in which self recognition sometimes works through and with and sometimes against trans. It points to non normative bodily projects that are informed or undergird, underlied, underwritten by other cosmologies, different on topistemologies where some of the assumptions that we make about the about reality or about the reality of the body or about the reality of sex and gender or that system that we call sex and gender don't quite fit into those understandings of the world, ways of being in the world, ways of doing in the world. I think that's one of the beautiful aspects of the book, that it allows us to do trans philosophy from within a cluster of pretty expansive, I would say, on topistemologies and social ontologies.
PJ DiPietro:It it allows us to think trans in juxtaposition with and about the resonance of trans with other non normative projects without authoring. Right? Without thinking that trans is always the umbrella, thinking that trans is always the universal, that trans can capture all of those specificities. So I think that's the kind of work that, as philosophers, we aspire to do. We pay attention to experiences, but also those who experience those experiences.
PJ DiPietro:And we pay attention to the ways in which they are making collective sense of those experiences. And in doing so, they are also engaging in philosophy. And sometimes they are sex workers. Sometimes they are spiritual, guides or officiants. Sometimes they are part of, a dance troupe.
PJ DiPietro:And I think that's one of the beautiful things that the book does. Right? That it authorizes its sanctions, the practice of philosophizing from within and without philosophy proper.
Perry Zurn:It's a beautiful emphasis on locatedness there. And there's certainly a a translocality, I think, to a lot of the work that's done in this book and that we hope continues to be done in trans philosophy. And this certainly resonates with some of Talia's work and her concept of ground bound trans philosophy. So a rootedness in a where and a who and a when and thinking whether it's trans or other forms of gender disruption from that place, that's the kind of rootedness or locatedness that we want to attach philosophy to rather than let philosophy pull trans into some kind of abstract universalizing metaphysicalizing space. But I also wonder, I mean we've come to trans philosophy late as a field of philosophy.
Perry Zurn:Right, Tully? You said humanities in general. There's a lot of humanities fields that have engaged trans studies for a long time now, and philosophy is sort of just stumbling its way toward that. But we can certainly learn a lot of lessons from other marginalized fields of knowledge and practice that have made a space in or adjacent to philosophy. And, Andrea, I wonder, in particular, if you might lead us in thinking about some of the gifts of some of those other traditions that could guide us in this in this moment.
Andrea J. Pitts:Well, yeah. I mean, I was just thinking about PJ's point about the multiple multiplicitous genealogies that are kind of informing. Because it's funny, like, thinking about my own trajectory into trans philosophy. And, PJ, I'm sure you're gonna recognize some of these folks. But, like, I actually came into first reading transtheoretical work through, like, Diana Maffia and Josefina Fernandez and, like, in the Southern Cone in Buenos Aires.
Andrea J. Pitts:So I was finding all these amazing books and then later started reading Marcia Marcia Ochoa and other people who were really, like, within Latin American studies and also within gender gender studies context in in Latin America, thinking critically about as precisely the topics PJ is mentioning, sex work, labor, self determination. I mean, a lot of questions that were, like, very politicized from grassroots communities that then and I know we all have our own genealogies into this, but I was not finding that dialogue about trans studies in this was, like, mid two thousands, first decade of the February. So, I mean, Talia's work is is obviously somebody who became an early example of somebody who was doing this kind of grounded work for me in philosophy, but it was my kind of trajectory did not come from philosophy to be thinking about trans and travesty and and gender variance in that sense. And so also, you know, thinking here about about works like, you know, we were talking about how we would teach this book earlier and, you know, Hortense Spiller's work is obviously a touchstone now for a lot of folks thinking about the Transatlantic slave trade and the kind of relationship between turf positionalities and anti blackness and so on.
Andrea J. Pitts:And so I think there's a lot of, you know, multiple genealogies to get to the not just the the collection of chapters and and authors that we have in the book, but also to pluralizing where philosophical work happens. And to me, that's, you know, as somebody who's now positioned in a comparative literature department, that's really exciting because it also means that there's a lot of opportunities to do rich, exciting, not just interdisciplinary, but, like, beyond the institutional setting of higher ed, like, having connections and possibilities for political projects that build from some of the historical and theoretical work that's being done in trans studies and also try to to see where it gets uptake. Is it relevant? Is it connecting? Is it I think, something to echo, Talia.
Andrea J. Pitts:Is it is it useful? Is it gonna be something that people will resonate with and including our students? So, yeah, I think that's at least one piece of that.
Perry Zurn:I love the idea of thinking a little bit about how we each came to trans philosophy because I think it affects how we think of trans philosophy. Talia, I know there's a specific space for you there.
Talia Mae Bettcher:Yeah. That's, I wasn't expecting that question. So let me, like, I guess when, I turned to trans philosophy, the expression transphilosophy did not exist, and there wasn't a subfield known as transphilosophy. And it wasn't my specialization, or it wasn't something I'd set out to do. While I was getting my PhD in philosophy and I was, writing a dissertation in early modern philosophy, I was close friends with, Jacob Hale.
Talia Mae Bettcher:He was writing some of the earliest, most genius, rich philosophical, trans philosophical work. And, you know, I learned a lot from him. But it wasn't until the murder of Buen Araujo and the subsequent treatment of that in the trials, in the media coverage. I mean, back then, you know, mainstream newspapers' coverage of trans issues was abysmal. I was very grounded in LA Trans communities, and we responded to that in various different ways.
Talia Mae Bettcher:But it was through that that I came to finally start writing about trans issues. You know, and again, this is following Jake. The way I thought about things was always very local. I knew that what I knew it was coming from was coming from trans communities in LA. But But it was an opportunity for me to start making sense of my experiences since the mid nineties.
Talia Mae Bettcher:Like, I like to say, like, you know, trying to make sense of the WTF. What the fuck is going on? How can I use philosophy to illuminate? My approach to this has always been that. It's always been one of, like, how can I illuminate my experiences, and can this be useful to other people in their in their experiences as well?
Talia Mae Bettcher:And then how can I talk to other people if we think of philosophy or writing as a way of maybe engaging with other literatures, how do you how do you start those sorts of conversations? But it wasn't until, you know, I guess 2015, '20 '16 when I don't can't remember when I met you, Per, it was before then. But there started to be an increase in folks who were actually trans and non binary in the professional philosophy, some young, mostly like grad students who were really starting to think about these issues. And it was really interesting because suddenly I wasn't alone anymore and suddenly there started to be a bunch of of people doing this stuff. And now suddenly there's such a thing called trans philosophy and that's really remarkable and exciting.
Talia Mae Bettcher:And I'm so glad to still be around to be part of that.
Perry Zurn:We're glad you're here too. I know I, so I'm thinking about yeah coming into trans philosophy from other fields from specific LA based kind of activism and culture. For myself, I know at the time I was coming into just thinking trans at all. I was in a Christian college, and I couldn't I wasn't allowed to order things that had trans in the title or in the content. And so I was limited to what I could search online.
Perry Zurn:So it was stories. It was poetry. It was YouTube videos. It was some erotica. Right?
Perry Zurn:And this is this is how trans and transtinking happens to me, which is far outside of the philosophy I was getting in the classroom. And I think that that says something about how trans gets situated and should still be situated
PJ DiPietro:as uneasily beside academic inquiry, really. PJ, what
Perry Zurn:about you? Yeah. I
PJ DiPietro:generational shift that both Talia and you are gesturing towards, this sense of how many of us did not have a grad class where there could be any transcendent in philosophy acknowledged even as a subfield, not even as marginal. So it was only spoken about as something that was muted. And then the ways in which Talia, Betscher, and Ann Garey co edited this first issue, special issue of Hypatia on trans philosophy. And I think maybe that was 02/2009 or yep. And I was in grad school right back then, and that makes a difference.
PJ DiPietro:It situates the way you are thinking, and the genealogies that you're trying to cultivate are situated differently. I remember, particularly, I trained with Maria Lugones, who was truly influential in giving us this sense this broad broad sense of a coloniality of gender, right, a systemic understanding of gender under a colonial legacy. Working with her, because she was an an an ethicist, she was a theorist of resistance, and I'm borrowing this idea also from some conversations we had with Talia before, is that what is trans philosophy if not transresistance against multiple oppressions? And that resistance, that creativity that Perry sometimes calls the poetics, right, the the trans poetics, that resistance is what drew me to the following contradiction. I was trying to make sense in, Northwestern Argentina of, what was increasingly becoming a homonationalist gay world.
PJ DiPietro:And in trying to understand the resistance to that homonationalism is that I encountered the ethics, the politics, the phenomenology of travesty sex workers. It was through that shift that is an epistemic shift that I learned that in many ways, the way in which I was philosophizing these political practices that were antinormative in my view and in the view of those practitioners that I needed to do a lot in order not only to enact epistemic justice, but also to become a collaborator, a philosopher collaborator, not from the outside, but from within struggle. And I think that made a ginormous difference in terms of the scholar activist that I have become and what I can bring to a project like this and what I can bring also to the trans philosophy classroom, to the pedagogy, and to the methodologies. So I think that those shifts are in this co edited volume honoring these types of shift that we have witnessed, sometimes enacted, and that continue we continue to cultivate.
Perry Zurn:I wonder then if and it's amazing. I don't think we've all shared our genealogies in that sense before in the same rooms to to to trans philosophy and to trans philosophical work. So I I appreciate that and that we could capture it at this moment. But we do have, you know, we have this book and we have, PJ just referred to, Talia, your work with Anne Gehry on the trans feminism issue of Hypatia as a kind of predecessor to this. Why and how did this become possible, and what do you see as the collection itself as doing?
Talia Mae Bettcher:Well, you know, when I started when I published through Hypatia, Evil Deceivers and Make Believers, Hypatia got an interest in in trans stuff and so wanted to do something on it. You know, I was very still young at this point. I didn't have tenure. I didn't know what I was doing. So I ended up working with Anne.
Talia Mae Bettcher:I don't think that we were thinking of I wasn't thinking of trans philosophy as a subfield. I was thinking of sort of like the intersections at the time of feminist philosophy and trans studies. But one of the one of the obstacles we found was just simply there were too few trans and non binary folk in or even out of the profession who were submitting things. It was a real struggle to sort of get that going. And there just simply wasn't critical mass, if you will.
Talia Mae Bettcher:Certainly, I think that where we are now is a very, very different time, not only in terms of the profession, in terms of academia, in terms of sort of, like, the world as a whole, but there is that critical mass where I think that we can we can maybe do something like what I think that Anne and I had envisioned back then. Some of the things that I'm, you know, really proud of about this collection is that while it is trying to say, you know, here's trans philosophy, we've sort of arrived now. It is again and this is drawing on you, PJ, in some of your remarks. Could do the constant troubling? Like, what what does that mean?
Talia Mae Bettcher:What are the costs of this? What what do we want this to look like? Right? What do we want this to do? Should this just fit in nicely with the rest of professional philosophy or or not?
Talia Mae Bettcher:There's a kind of honesty in the collection where we are aware of what it is we're doing. We're not pretending that there's a kind of universal. We're not pretending that this isn't situated. We know that that's part of what we're doing. We're doing something that is situated.
Talia Mae Bettcher:Because of that, what ends up happening is you're starting to, maybe facilitate conversations that didn't exist before, that couldn't happen, at least within an academic context. And because of that, you're creating something new. So some of the things we've talked about in the past are sort of recognizing the locality, recognizing the multiplicity, but there is this other side to it about like, what new can be created? What is positive to be created? And how do we generate new conversations that are complex, that maybe generate new forms of closeness?
Talia Mae Bettcher:And I think that that is super important, and I think that it's super important important not only politically, but I think that for me, it's true to what philosophy could be. I mean, if you take this idea that philosophy aims at revealing or illuminating or blowing out, you know, assumptions and getting us to think in new ways, well, then precisely what we need to do is not follow the path of least resistance into professionalization because that is just going to lead us to to closing down the conversation. It's gonna lead us to cottage industries, and it's gonna, you know, lead us to issue of the day. And that's not gonna build something, I think, that could really be rich and useful.
Perry Zurn:That context is great because then I we spent a little bit of time kind of revisiting this collection now that, you know, it's been done for at least on our end for for a little bit, and each of us has gone on to new projects. And our own thinking about what trans philosophy is continues to change and to develop for each of us in different ways and in different context, which is great and as it should be. I'm remembering that when we first got this collection together, we define trans philosophy as philosophy that was accountable to trans experiences, histories, politics, and cultural productions. It was that accountability that we really wanted to emphasize. But then Talia's piece in Hypatia called What is Trans Philosophy came out and I think it was at that juncture that we added illuminative of and accountable to trans experiences, histories, cultural productions, etc.
Perry Zurn:So it's not just a philosophy is accountable to but also needs like let's also have some illumination and some gift that trans philosophy is giving. You know, it's not just a tethering, it's also a changing and a developing and a growing of trans thinking of itself and of other things. Right? There are those changes. But then as we were chatting in an earlier conversation to just today, there were already edits that we all wanted to make.
Perry Zurn:So, Talia, you've you've just sort of flagged some of these. But PJ jumped in and said trans philosophy has to be something that takes up trans and troubles it. Right? And Talia said, well and it has to be in the service of trans resistance to oppression. And Andrea said, and creative of trans world making.
Perry Zurn:We're already trying to deepen and expand our understanding of what this project is. So with that, you know, we give us and the contributors are offering this book of trans philosophy as a set of beginning points after many other beginning points behind us. Right? But that and we want it to to move. We don't want this to define.
Perry Zurn:We want it to move forward, this project we're calling trans philosophy. And so I'll just quickly go over the sections in the collection just so folks can know like what you want to jump into immediately. First of all, we have an introduction which all four of us co wrote. We should talk about what co writing that was like. But and it's called situating and desituating trans philosophy.
Perry Zurn:So again, we're really trying to think critically about even the project of setting up trans philosophy as a subfield. Then part one, we focus in on metaphysophical issues and questions, categories, trans as a category, gender kinds, you know, all that sort of stuff. That's part one. Part two focuses in on questions of embodiment and materiality in the flesh. How is Chen's philosophy deepening our understanding of those things?
Perry Zurn:Part three, we think about technicity and bioethics, so a little bit more applied kind of questions. And then in part four, politics and institutions and world making. We're really, really proud that we finished with a piece by Marlene Wayar that was translated for the volume. Andrea and PJ, do you wanna chat about why that's so significant in this case for this collection?
Andrea J. Pitts:Sure. I mean, this is kind of what I when I said that part of my coming to this was also coming from thinking across genealogies, geopolitics. I wanna just also echo. PJ's work has been foundational in my courses when I'm teaching on trans studies and on gender in any context in my classes. Just to echo critiques of nationalism and critiques of imperial and colonial violence are hugely important for the way that I think and understand the politics of gender variance.
Andrea J. Pitts:So, you know, we've tried in through the trans philosophy project, through conferences, but also thinking through this volume in particular, trying to be intentional about geopolitics of knowledge production. Part of that is also that the authors that we were working with were publishing, and there's a kind of Anglophone dominance within a lot of US based philosophy now. And I think also something that we need to contest in trouble, which we also discussed, in the intro that there's a a need to trouble those, not only linguistic dominance of the English language, but also the kind of cultural politics of an Anglophone context that seem to be one of the the concerns about trans as a theory that travels, so to say. And so I think to be thinking not only across languages, but also now to be thinking with theorists like Marlene Huizar, who are themselves within forms of struggle that are location specific, so that have very specific sites of activism, resistance. Argentine gender politics are, for a global scale, extraordinarily interesting and important.
Andrea J. Pitts:You know, we've talked about some of this in the conferences, but I think the kind of, you know, genealogies of travesti activism that are part of not just Marlene's work, but also, Luana Birkins and other folks who are part of the broader dialogues there in the Southern Cone and in Argentina in particular, were I know for those of us who work in Latin American studies or are now beginning to do work in Latin American studies and also, gender studies. I mean, these are the conversations that are illuminating and important and also resistant to the very same politics of state neutrality or, like, university neutrality or publishing neutrality. And so I think this idea of troubling the respectability politics of the university, of, academic life, of the state, the nation state, I mean, all of those, I think, were important things that I was not only through the research that I've been doing on my own, but also one of the things that I was really excited to have as a as a contribution from Marlene in the in the volume. And so when we had the opportunity to to work with her and to be able to translate one of her pieces, previously published chapter, I was, you know, really excited to do that, and I hope we'll do more of that.
Andrea J. Pitts:That's, that's our hope for the future.
PJ DiPietro:Yes. I I do want to say that the importance I again, like I said earlier about practice, it is the practices where the philosophizing begins. It is the practice of interpretation and the situated interpretation has a lot to do with ethics, to a lot to do with what does it mean to do this type of thinking and pluralizing together. Despite by or sometimes against the flows of knowledge and financial support for knowledge production that, you know, there's a gap and a rift between South and and North. So it has to do with that.
PJ DiPietro:It has to do with restoring some form of justice to knowledge production. But, also, it has a lot to do with the practice. Who are we speaking with? Who are we who are we engaging with? Who are we listening to?
PJ DiPietro:And in that, we also have to be very cautious and very intentional about the fact that, yes, Spanish can be an imperial imperial language, but it can also be a language of resistance for many, both bilingual and nonbilingual Latinx and Afro Latinx communities in The US and in other, you know, Latinx diasporas in the world. And then we also have to look at all the work in Oaxaca, Mexico, the work in, Guatemala by speakers of Maya Kiche, work that I've encountered, and I've encountered due to the beautiful work of bilingual indigenous researchers, scholars, activists who are doing this. You know, they carry the burden of doing this work of constantly translating themselves too, and the languages that are dominant in the house of knowledge. In that sense, we, what we practice with the book and with it's not about including a translation, but rather about, acknowledging how wide the field is, but also how we may sometime sometimes unintentionally support forms of ignorance that we have to criticize and deconstruct. I think that's, you know, so and thank you, Andrea, for putting it so beautifully.
Perry Zurn:Yeah. So I think at at this point, I'm just going to emphasize a lot of the methodological commitments that we share for this volume, but also for future work in in trans philosophy, the the kind of commitments that have come up already. I think we're really committed to pluralist philosophical approaches. We are each trained in different traditions in a sense of what philosophy is, and we want all of that to be at the table and more. We're committed to multiple genealogies of trans philosophy and philosophizing that differ geographically across linguistic and cultural diasporas, that differ interdisciplinarily.
Perry Zurn:We want a multiple methodology, multimodal kind of approaches. And then we're really interested also and committed to an intergenerational element to trans philosophy. So trans transness, especially as it gets deployed today in mainstream outlets, keeps being, but is certainly deployed as if it's new. Right? Trans is hitting the scene.
Perry Zurn:Suddenly, there's all these trans people. Oh, no. What do we do? And it's important to think about trans as one term that has bubbled up to dominate in particularly US centric and then abroad kind of locations to name something that is much older, that is much broader, that is much deeper, that certainly lived in the LGB when that was a thing and before we had LGB. Right?
Perry Zurn:And that is this kind of gender disruption, gender resistance, gender play that ought also to be a part of the conversation in trans philosophy instead of starting trans philosophy whenever trans, the term, gets hot or gets mobilized as hot or whatever comes after trans. Right? We want to think really deeply about past as much as we want to think about moving forward. So right now trans is not only critiqued as a particularly Western dominant term for gender disruption, but it's also even within kind of trans circles, there's a movement in a sense toward non binary as a perhaps a better broader umbrella for certain things or for certain experiences and people. We sit in different relationships to those generations, each of us does.
Perry Zurn:But we want to think about how this is a slice of a moment, right? These essays were written in a particular set of of years. How do we think about trans philosophy in that intergenerational sense as a project, as a practice that consistently disrupts but also holds together, gets taken up under its name, and also pulled apart under its name? And so I wanna turn us now to just questions about pedagogy, really, and how it is that this thing can get taught in that kind of intergenerational sense. It can get taught now.
Perry Zurn:It could get taught in twenty years, and that's gonna look really different. What are folks' thoughts about teaching this book or teaching with this book?
Talia Mae Bettcher:I hope it ages well. And we don't know where it's gonna go, what it's gonna look like. That's the thing. We're not really the boss of how it gets taken up in different contexts over different years, you know. And now that it's sort of gonna be going out to the world, we're not in control of it, you know, and it's gonna do what it needs to do.
Talia Mae Bettcher:And hopefully, it will it will work in various different ways for good, for in some way or other assisting, helping, improving trans, and I say that problematically trans lives. And I guess that's the only thing that I can say about where it's going, I guess, because I don't know. I could probably as someone who's I came of age, I transitioned right you know, I came in and I was learning the old discourse around trans sexuality and it was the nineties. And the nineties people forget was very much about shattering the binary. That was the moment, this emergence of transgender as a kind of politics.
Talia Mae Bettcher:And I sort of feel like, you know, I've seen that. I've seen the rise of other political mainstream sort of like political trans ideas like Serrano's work. So I've kind of seen a lot of it come and go and some of it come back, and I don't know, you know, how this is gonna be used in the future. I do hope that there can be new ways produced to think about this stuff. I find, maybe this is just my, you know, my age, you know, a lot of things get trotted out as if they're new, and they're not new.
Talia Mae Bettcher:I've even thought before. You know? I mean, trans was new in 1953 when Christine Jorgensen broke. It was new in the nineties. It's new now, and it will I hope that it stops being new.
Talia Mae Bettcher:I hope that it's either old or whatever. I don't know. But I think that the proliferation of new views, of new ways of thinking about things that don't sort of rehash the old ways, and I'm not saying one new way, but many new ways to give people additional possibilities for making sense of themselves and their relationships to the world. And I'll go back to a previous point I made. I think that that comes about most productively through, you know, transociality.
Talia Mae Bettcher:And here I'm kind of building on your own work, Perry. Transociality, the building of relationships, just face to face, flesh to flesh, but also in the interplay of different ideas, even published through academia. Like, you know, how are things positioned differently, trying to break their box and talk to something else if it's put in another box, then how can that create new ways of of of thinking about things?
Perry Zurn:So we hope trans gets old is was one of my takeaways. Andrea.
Andrea J. Pitts:Yeah. I mean, this is this is just a great conversation because I have so much to think about, and I'm trying to organize my thoughts. So I guess about pedagogy, to be honest, what I really love about this book is there's so many, like, not just avenues that one could take through the book. I know a lot of, introductions to edited books say that. But if you even just pop through the, like, citations at the end of each chapter, you've got a really rich set of resources from each author that kinda gives you, like, different frames of reference for how one could move through trans philosophical work.
Andrea J. Pitts:I was thinking back to something Talia said a few questions ago about philosophy and philosophizing. And one of the things that she said was that this book and the way that that she's practicing and I think hoping that trans philosophy will work out is you said that it will bring up new forms of closeness. And And I thought that was a really interesting thing because that made me think about historical proximity and closeness, like how to reimagine and revisit and reenergize intimacy with very distant genealogical places, so to say. Whether that's like Talia, I'm looking at you, so I'm thinking about, like, early modern philosophy being reread now in a trans philosophy book. I mean, I'm just giving her a shout out right now for her new book coming out.
Andrea J. Pitts:Who's which title is sorry, Talia. What's that title?
Talia Mae Bettcher:Of the book. Oh, it's Beyond Personhood, an essay in trans philosophy.
Andrea J. Pitts:Yes. Out when
Talia Mae Bettcher:of Minnesota press. It's out in April, the April. I can't remember the date.
Andrea J. Pitts:Yeah. It's April 2025. So but yeah. So like rethinking history of early modern philosophy and critiques of John Locke and personhood now in the context of phenomenological engagements with trans life and trans desire and, you know, critiques of the kind of, like, turf naturalization of bio sex and all this stuff. So I mean, like, that's just one example of the, I think, the recent work that's coming out.
Andrea J. Pitts:And the chapters in this book give ways to kind of, like, revisit historically, but also to create anew. That's one of the things that I just is so enlivening is that people like Tourmaline do this through film. Right? Revisiting proximity to Mary Jones or Marsha p Johnson in the context of kind of black trans feminist engagement. And there's also ways to do this through text and through the kind of like multiple dialogues, philosophical works that are being written now in a work like this.
Andrea J. Pitts:And so, I mean, not to put those on the same par, of course, but I mean, it makes for exciting possibilities because it gives this new energy and directionality to how to do not just philosophical work, but also to how to think with gender variance, bodies, desires, kinship, erotics, all of the things that I think they can show up in our textual works, but they also are the things that that fuel our connection in our community spaces, and hopefully will continue to do so in the future. Pedagogically, you know, I just feel really excited that there's so many ways to put together the book and make it available to students, and that could be through a range of different courses. You know, I'm doing a Latina, Latinx feminist aesthetics course, and there's gonna be a place for this book and that course. And there's gonna be you know, there's, like, all kinds of ways to move through the book that I think I'll be hopefully able now as PJ has mentioned, like, this is now something available to me as an educator that I didn't have, previously that I also have now as a resource.
Andrea J. Pitts:So that's, to me, is, a really helpful piece.
PJ DiPietro:One of the things that is very challenging about the dialogical situation in which we find ourselves, because we always begin, right, pedagogy is dialogical engagement, But we also begin with several ongoing dialogues already on the way. And then you have the structural conditions of the academy. I teach at a private university where students pay an obscene amount for their tuition, maybe $70,000 without room and board. So if you add room and board to that. And and then there's 24,000 students, and I teach the only class alone in transgenders and sexualities, not even trans philosophy.
PJ DiPietro:Right? Transgenders and sexualities. Yeah. Now I'm going soon I'm going to teach the first grad course in trans philosophy at Syracuse ever. Who knows?
PJ DiPietro:Now what I'm saying is the following, is that what the book conveys is, to me, something that Maria Lugones used to call epistemic coalition. And I don't know if that's the closeness, the resonances that you are highlighting. Andrea, I think it is related to that. And in my chapter, I look at Talia's critique of semantic contextualism, and I try to go with her onto this deepening of ontological pluralism because I feel the epistemic resonance, because that's where, you know, her work on trans resistance contributes to and builds. So I engage that work, and I engage that work through different shifts that have to do with what does it mean, right, to resituate yourself.
PJ DiPietro:If you are working with Afro Latinx communities and Afro Latinx thought about gender disruption or nonnormativity and what does it mean to travel to the world of transgender or black transgender sex workers or African American transgender sex workers in the in LA's in nineteen nineties. In Talia's work, it's very clear how she's accountable to that community. What I'm trying to do is to convey how to practice that accountability as a form of epistemic coalition. Right? It's that those terms that we craft are ways of being accountable to the communities we work with, and we engage.
PJ DiPietro:I think that's part of what's inviting about the book is that I see those collectives and communities in most of the chapters clearly defined. That is beautiful. Right? It's like you can go to that work and think about the ethics of the work. You can, think about the categories and how the categories are analyzed and examined, or you can even go to the aesthetic, right, to all of the affect that is being examined in the chapters.
Perry Zurn:I love that. I love that. When I think about teaching this book or when and when I think about others teaching this book or using this when they teach, I wanna invite people to think about what they allow their students to cite when writing a paper about this book or about any form of of trans philosophy? What what do you get to cite? So now that now that we have articles in mainstream journals and now that we have a collection with the university press, it might be tempting to just say well cite the academic work that's out there by trans philosophers and that's important that's an important thing.
Perry Zurn:But I think that I want to invite instructors to remember and myself to remember and to think about that trans philosophical work happens and has always happened well outside the university and continues to happen well outside the university. And so it should be, I think, a part of trans philosophy essays as assigned and written and invited by students at all levels that they turn to oral histories of trans folks, which are very widely available right now. That they engage in some archival work, that they dig up a zine, that they look on, you know, trans uses on on various social media sites, the old stuff, you know, Friendster, MySpace, like, you know, and then the newer stuff, Tumblr was huge and important, especially for bringing together kind of trans and crip experiences and neurodivergence. Turn to those places. Think about poetry and think about story.
Perry Zurn:There are these many places in which trans things get theorized and where philosophical play happens and philosophical insight happens. That's one of the senses that when I think about trans poetics, I think about that the making of meaning among translocialities doesn't just happen in the university, and trans philosophy isn't just trans philosophers getting together to to edit collections like this or to, you know, get beer at a bar. Right? And so when this gets taught, I think I want that heartbeat, that turn. In my own chapter in the book, one of the things I do is is deal with an an archive zine or an archival zine and and a story of trans activism there and the kind of struggle that went on there and how it did bring together kind of trans and disability issues at a particular moment.
Perry Zurn:But I think that's that should be a part of how this shows up. I want this to be that to be a part of how this shows up in the classroom. Let's put it that way across across fields. With that said, I wanna sort of pause and ask folks, is there anything y'all wanna return to bring up before we turn to hopes and visions?
PJ DiPietro:I do have I do have one little thing.
Perry Zurn:K.
PJ DiPietro:Sorry. Two small things. One is that when I mentioned activists, scholars who have been doing the work of translating themselves, I neglected to mention their names. One is Marco Chivalan Carrillo from Guatemala. Unfortunately, it passed very young, unexpectedly, a few months ago.
PJ DiPietro:Beautiful, beautiful work. Also, the work of the anthropologist, Mushe, her last name is Regalado. Amaranta. See, Amaranta Regalado. And I I wanted to make sure that I explicitly mention, their names.
PJ DiPietro:And I think that also has to do the second thing. It has to do with citation. Being mindful that academic publishing is also a way of gatekeeping and that we are very critical of, academic publishing as a gatekeeping system. But maybe what you said about oral histories and about, repositories and archives that are outside the sanctioned or authorized academic world, that that's also part of what goes into different politics of citation.
Perry Zurn:Other folks wanna return to anything?
Talia Mae Bettcher:I guess I just wanna stepping back and looking at everything that we've talked about. One of the things that we were talking about as we began is what we didn't want to do. We didn't want to get into a chance pro or con discussion. We felt that it was thin and limiting and ultimately blows down philosophical explorations. And I just wanna note that hopefully what has become evident is the extraordinary richness here, the extraordinary depth, and so many possibilities.
Talia Mae Bettcher:You might liken it to a feast that is possible. Or you can eat thin little saltines at the edge of the table, and we've decided not to do that. We've decided to have the feast. And I hope that comes out plainly in this conversation.
Andrea J. Pitts:I don't know. And I'm getting hungry right now. So now I'm
Talia Mae Bettcher:I was hungry. I think that's where it's coming from.
Andrea J. Pitts:I'm here for the feast. Just to look at my colleagues on the screen, like, this feels like a good collection because I also know that it came from a project where we were I know all of us have been many side channels in the background, many stressful deadlines, many, you know, sidebars to try to check-in and see where we are. And I think, like, as a collaborative project among trans philosophers, I feel good about that. I feel like we came out we worked with an amazing group of contributors for this collection who I am excited to not only see their work circulated, but also to see where their work continues to go. So I know there's just so many possibilities and openings and things that are, like, to me, really vibrant about this book.
Andrea J. Pitts:And, also, yes, let me circle back to the to the work ethic of Perry Zearn and the extraordinary labor that he put into this. So we are all tipping our hats, if you could see if the audience, can hear us tipping our hats to Perry Zearn for his labor in this as well. This is an exciting group of folks to be thinking with and to be, you know, hopefully inviting other people to do more work that critically engages, that can also contest, and also continue a dialogue that's gonna be impactful and resonant with trans life. I mean, like, that's, to me, the heart of this project. And as a exercise in in collective collaboration and thinking, it's just been a real joy for me.
Perry Zurn:I wouldn't have done without y'all. Just just for the record. But, yeah, I mean, I love to I like to facilitate dreaming and imagining and hoping in especially among trans folks. And so I wonder if we could end with our hopes and dreams for trans philosophy going forward. Talia, would you begin?
Talia Mae Bettcher:Is this a hope and dream for this collection or for trans philosophy as a whole?
Perry Zurn:Either or both.
Talia Mae Bettcher:Well, I guess my my hope is the same in in all cases. I just hope that it's in some ways useful. This anthology, this collection, it can't be everything. Trans philosophy can't be everything. But I do hope that it actually makes some people's lives better in the service of resistance to multiple forms of oppression.
Talia Mae Bettcher:Because I think that if it doesn't, in my own view, what was the point? That is my hope for both this collection and for trans philosophy in general.
Perry Zurn:Yeah. Andrea?
Andrea J. Pitts:Yeah. Just to pick up on that thread. I mean, the usefulness is also like we were talking about this earlier, and I've kinda given a little more thought to it now. The question would be, like, what's beyond an academic setting? What will be the impact of this book?
Andrea J. Pitts:I mean, I don't wanna be grandiose and assume that it's gonna make giant waves, but I also wanna think concretely about how our contributors like, is this gonna have, you know, hopefully, resonance for their careers and or their goals or their hopes for the future? And also, where will this connect and make possibility? Because I think, you know, Perry, one thing I've really loved about your work is also this, like, critique of the assumption of trans folks being like, living in isolation as though, like, one, as though trans is some siloed aspect of our lives that somehow just exists some way independently from the rest of our like, from who we are and how we connect. But also that trans people are somehow solitary, which is, I think, a really hard view of the world to to try to, like, hold and feel. So I think the idea that this book is a connection and is a is an opening for connection to me is the hope is that whether that's in the classroom among students or beyond the classroom among people who are sharing texts or ideas or whether that's within community spaces, whatever resonates with them ends up connecting in some other way, whether that's building a space for critique and for pushing back in ways that we might not have had the language for earlier.
Andrea J. Pitts:I know philosophy has given me a lot of that, like things that I knew were wrong in my gut that I now finally have the words to articulate. Those are things that I find really enlivening about some of the work we do, you know, as writers and as collaborators and thinkers together. So I'm hoping that there'll be that possibility for from further connections and and openness to to what comes
Perry Zurn:next. PJ.
PJ DiPietro:Yes. HOPES is that it affirms the possibility of resistant intersubjectivity, that we can do things differently through some type of togetherness. By that, I mean the following also, that we all are implicated by trans, and we all are implicated by trans philosophizing. What does that mean? It means, I hope, that by affirming trans in its many guises with heterogeneities across locations and mindful of the different histories of bodily projects, by affirming that that it makes uncomfortable or it creates some type of discomfort to those who are holding on to, quote, unquote, gender because it will supposedly give them some sort of -ing into the human, into class, into race, into something that looks like the individuated modern neoliberal subject.
PJ DiPietro:So that makes them feel, like Andrea was stating, that makes them feel that we all are implicated by trans processes, trans experiences, and trans politics. Yeah. I think that's that's my hope. And I think that maybe it's too much to ask for from a book. So I guess that the the hope the hope is about the pedagogy.
PJ DiPietro:Right? The type of pedagogies that the book inspires.
Perry Zurn:And I guess my hope in conjunction I also hope all of your hopes, and in conjunction with them, I really hope that Chen's philosophy I mean, this book in itself has tensions in it. There are discomfortable, uncomfortable relationships between some of the chapters, or between chapters and introduction. And that's as it should be. And I think I want trans philosophy in general to stay awake to and aware of the heterogeneity already there in the project and to think about already how power, resistance, prestige, elitism, positionality of location and geography, even within The United States, affects how trans philosophy gets seen or gets read or where it shows up. To stay awake to and aware to those things instead of taking the easy route and thinking, well, all trans philosophy is marginalized philosophy and is all equally valuable and true and says the right things, which just isn't isn't the case.
Perry Zurn:Right? So that stay awake to that. And then I also hope that trans philosophy keeps a kernel, if not a I don't know, a watermelon of irreverence and disruptiveness and commitment to, in some senses, disrespecting models, established models of philosophy, of scholarship, of of gender performance, of gender categories. There's something about trans that should stay disruptive for me and something about trans philosophy that should stay disruptive even to itself, right, to continue disrupting itself, I hope. So that's one of my hopes for this collection and for the field moving forward.
Perry Zurn:So with that said I want to thank Maggie Sattler and University of Minnesota Press for publishing the book, for for having us here on the podcast. It's just been absolutely fantastic. And, obviously, to all our contributors, all the folks who've influenced us, and especially to my co editors.
PJ DiPietro:Thank you.
Andrea J. Pitts:Thank you. Thanks, Perry, for moderating.
Talia Mae Bettcher:Thank you. It's been a pleasure.