Introduction: Trans-, Trans, or Transgender?

Our call for papers read: “Trans: -gender, -national, -racial, -generational, -genie, -species. The list could (and does) go on. This special issue of WSQ invites feminist work that explores categorical crossings, leakages, and slips of all sorts, around and through the concept ‘trans-‘.” While gender certainly?perhaps inevitably?remains a primary analytical category for the work we sought to publish in this feminist scholarly journal, our aim in curating this special issue specifically was not to identify, consolidate, or stabilize a category or class of people, things, or phenomen that could be denominated “trans,” as if certain concrete somethings could be characterized as “crossers,” while everything else could be characterized by boundedness and fixity. It seemed especially important to insist upon this point when addressing transgender phenomena.