Marriage equality was a significant achievement, one that yielded both practical and symbolic benefits for hundreds of thousands of queer households. At the same time, marriage equality is not the same as full equality. In the years since the Obergefell decision, LGBTQ rights advocates have continued to fight difficult and demoralizing battles against harmful laws and policies, which have increasingly targeted transgender rights. However, the movement’s past successes should offer hope for the future. The history of gay and lesbian rights advocacy reveals that small victories at the state and local level, brought about by working with nonlegal actors, can transform both the law and society. Although advocates have not yet achieved gay liberation’s visions of the future, they have attained meaningful reforms. The movement’s history thus offers a crucial reminder that the law can change society for the better.

This chapter meditates on how Black erotic bodies manifest in a white supremacist world. It contends that said bodies congeal through an amalgamation of fungible gender and material/discursive dispossession. These inheritances afford Black people the opportunity to conjure fugitive freedom practices, such as multiplicity, which enable Black people to harness erotic power in the pursuit of self-determined notions of pleasure and intimacy with themselves and within Black communities. To buttress my argument, I draw on the work of Akwaeke Emezi – namely, their debut novel Freshwater and an essay about their gender transition surgeries – and Audre Lorde’s classic essay, “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” to illustrate how multiplicity is a freedom practiced undergirded by erotic power such that practitioners need not minimize or eliminate contradictory or complex aspects of themselves in order to access pleasure and intimacy along personal and interpersonal registers.

Eighteenth-century Paris was the site of multiple sexual cultures ranging from permissive to conservative. All these sexual cultures operated within a set of prescriptive legal, religious, and moralistic discourses that prohibited sex outside of marriage while often supporting sexual pleasure within it. Many Parisians ignored these prescriptions, often with impunity. The police concerned themselves with public sex and intervened in private affairs only when asked to do so. Paris was home to a diverse permissive sexual culture. It was comprised of a portion of the financial, social, political, and intellectual elite, often identified as libertines, for whom sex outside marriage was both widespread and widely accepted. It also included men who had sex with each other as part of Paris’s extensive sodomitical subculture, though there is little evidence of a modern homosexual identity. Prostitution was endemic in Paris, encompassing numerous forms of transactional sex that translated into a sort of hierarchy, with women kept as mistresses by men of the elite at the top and those catering to marginal men at the bottom. We know least about the sex lives of other ordinary people, though evidence suggests many had sex outside of marriage and many cared deeply for their spouses.

This chapter examines the origins and legacy of sexology – the scientific study of sexuality – in the modern world. First consolidated into a coherent programme in the late nineteenth century, sexology has its roots in the re-organization of knowledge about nature in the frameworks of taxonomy, evolutionism, and race. A pervasive preoccupation with heredity gave rise to powerful eugenics movements around the world. The interest in controlling variability and unlocking the secrets of the soul generated parallel developments in biomedicine, especially psychoanalysis and endocrinology. Sex experts worldwide converged in diagnosing cultural signs of homosexuality for the purpose of national modernization. As the centre of gravity in sexual science began to shift from Europe to North America, researchers gave growing support to the sex/gender distinction and redefined the meanings of normality. In the waning days of hereditarian theories, the rise of cultural anthropology coupled with a renewed scientific investment of colonial powers to reverse hierarchical templates of sexual practices and norms emanating from the metropoles. A public health crisis (HIV/AIDS), social movements (gender and sexual minority rights), and the systematization of research protocols (bioethics) shaped a comeback of biological sexology in the closing decades of the twentieth century.

This chapter explores the histories of transgender expression, identities, communities, and activism globally in both premodern and modern eras. Histories of settler colonialism, slavery, war, and imperialism have transformed the terms and conditions by which people of transgender expression and experience understood themselves and were perceived by others. While an abundance of archival records chart widespread practices of “transing” gender globally, a complex web of factors influenced how a given community or individual defined, understood, and judged such efforts. Race, religion, region, culture and class are some of the key contextual forces that gave meaning to trans and gender variant sexualities throughout history. A wide range of concepts have been used to describe and make meaning of gender variant people throughout history, from two-spirit, hijra, and third gender to the more recent transgender, nonbinary, gender expansive. Many other terms that have been used throughout history were deemed derogatory by those individuals and/or communities to which they refer at the time or have since been determined to be derogatory by later generations looking back. This creates a fundamental tension for everyone writing these histories between the importance of recognizing the past on its own terms and the importance of not further perpetuating harm against a long-stigmatized group.

Feminist ethics, the project of living with gender in all its varieties while also seeking to undo gender-related limitations, seems simultaneously retrograde, repetitive, and utterly necessary. This chapter seeks to make connections among several major feminist philosophers and transgender theorists, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Julia Cooper, Simone de Beauvoir, whose work unfolds these interconnections and differences in ways that also work through the contradictions of wanting to recognize how diverse women are but also not wanting to remain within the complex and constitutive but insufficient cultural definitions of gender.

In this essay I work with Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh’s formulation of “pluriversal decoloniality and decolonial pluriversality”: a sense of spaciousness in investigating and engaging with all that has been inherited from modernity and coloniality. I distance myself from those understandings of decolonial practice that seek to discard and replace: for literatures, like genders and sexualities, are a palimpsest, they build on waves of what is experienced and encountered through lineages. There are deaths and memories as well as traces and continuities, and I wish that they all be folded in for the reading, teaching and writing experience to be, as bell hooks outlines, exciting and passionate – and as Mignolo insists, exceeding the “object of study.” I see Octavio Paz’s critical method of reading as decolonial and draw upon it: keeping many thinkers and poets as unruly talismans thrown together in an unruly manner, I look at paradigms of gendered/sexual signs in relation to pedagogies and research methodologies for English literature in the global south. What could be a template to read historically, critically and imaginatively across and between Western and non-Western texts with an incisive, generous, difficult passion that marks all erotic pursuit as errant and explosive, even the intellectual?

Based on ethnographic encounters in India over three decades, the authors reflect on what it means to study gender and the sexual. They argue that knowledge of gender and the sexual is bound up with epistemological and historical legacies, political ruptures, and subjective estrangements. In particular, the chapter critically engages the trajectories through which ontological assumptions about gendered and sexual selves have been configured and reconfigured over time. Moving away from the assumptions of “interiority” as the space for articulating or experiencing subjectivity, and from notions of “authentic,” extant cultural “types,” they look at the shifting material conditions and multiple temporal trajectories of forms of identification and self-evincing. Gendering and evincing of sexual selves emerge as terrains of partial connectedness between people, concepts, and material “things” as opposed to wholly defining attributes of any given subject. Three categories of gendered and sexual selves (kothi, hijra, and transgender) emerge and disappear over time in relation to each other, and to registers and economies of signification of law, health policy, activism, religious nationalism, and anthropology. This took shape within and across intimate lifeworlds, state actions, and transnational (mis)connections, here apprehended ethnographically.

This chapter aims to trace some of the relations between anthropology and trans studies around the definition of the category “transgender.” Doubling as a category of analysis and a lived experience, the transgender category opens up long-standing conceptual, critical, and methodological tensions between trans studies and anthropology, producing aligned and yet divergent understandings of gender, representation, identity, and cultural production. Yet drawing on the connections between these disciplines, the chapter also describes how, through ethnography, both are becoming increasingly proximate, particularly as transitioning comes to be understood to fundamentally challenge deterministic models of gender experience.

LGBTQIA+ patients are an important patient population to highlight when discussing urban emergency medicine. There are a multitude of terms regarding gender expression and identity that emergency medicine providers should familiarize themselves with if they plan on taking care of this patient population. Within the LGBTQIA+ population, there are specific medical and psychological issues that are relevant to each subgroup. Providers are not expected to know everything about their patients, but they must remember to remain open-minded and non-judgmental as they take care of everyone with precision and dedication. If a provider feels that the patient needs help in ways they cannot be of service, then the provider should be able to point the patient in the right direction via resources and referrals.

The activity of professional agencies, especially those within the legal system, as they participate in the co-Creation and co-Production of a trans individual’s new legal persona is the main focus of this chapter. Yet for all the talk of change and transition associated with transgender identity, the more common account given by transgender people themselves is one of coming to live as the person they have always been. This process of ‘coming to live as’ is in part transformative, but it is also in part confirmatory. The confirmatory character of the trans person’s process of transition can be regarded as being in two key senses a process of making a new social persona. The first sense is making in terms of personal development or growth. According to the definitions set out in earlier chapters, this is making in the sense of Creation. The second sense is making in terms of presenting or performing the new persona in society before the scrutiny of a public audience. This is making in the sense of Production. This chapter explores the implications for talk of ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’ when we think of trans identity in terms of a legal persona as a thing that is ‘made’.