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Much has been made of the intellectual contributions of “early” trans studies in the 1990s, beginning with Sandy Stone’s formidable essay “The ‘Empire’ Strikes Back.” But how did trans studies come to be, historically? In this talk, we argue that structural changes in U.S. labor markets reconfigured trans academic life through what we call the long 1970s. Building on recent individual work that explores the intertwining of labor and sexuality for trans subjects during the later half of the twentieth century, we situate field-formation labor within the larger context of North American economic restructuring and the construction of a white-collar trans professional class.

From the 1970s onward, trans people (particularly white trans people) were more able to enter the white-collar workforce in the Global North. This aligned with the emergence of corporate diversity consultancies and a neoliberal “tolerance” discourse that championed how diverse subjects could contribute to corporate ends. As trans and gender non-conforming subjects – and their extended communities of lovers and friends – contended with broader U.S. transformations from manufacturing to care economies, those with the prerequisite class and racial access to formal employment found themselves working in the expanding white- and pink-collar professions of data-entry, web development and IT support, and university staff and administrative support. At the same historical moment, trans people were finding a minor toehold in academia as knowledge-producers.

But the mere fact of out trans people entering corporate and academic workplaces did not change those workplaces as much as it changed trans communities and knowledges, in ways that would shape the available models for trans life for years to come and still appear as “problems” in trans studies today. For a field that, in its traditional genealogy, traces its origins to the early 1990s, it is imperative that our appraisals, and re-appraisals, of Trans Studies ground these analyses in the transformations of racial capitalism that permitted the emergence of professional trans subjects.

Cassius Adair is an audio producer, writer, and researcher from Virginia. His writing appears in American Quarterly, American Literature, differences, Avidly, The Rumpus, Nursing Clio, and Transgender Studies Quarterly. He is a coauthor of the experimental scholarly book Technoprecarious (MIT, 2020) and is writing a monograph about trans people and computers.

Aren Aizura is associate professor in Gender Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota. His first book Mobile Subjects: transnational imaginaries of gender reassignment (Duke UP, 2018) won the Sylvia Rivera Award for Transgender Studies. He is the co-editor of the Transgender Studies Reader 2 (Routledge 2013) and Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies (NYU Press, 2021). His work has appeared in numerous journals and books, including Transgender Studies Quarterly and South Atlantic Quarterly.