Trans history, meanwhile, has often tried to identify people who transed gender—to borrow Jen Manion’s phrasing—in efforts both overt and implicit to write a long genealogy of transness, a project that does vital work in the face of prejudice and persecution founded on the denial of trans existence. In addition to these recuperative projects, newer developments such as trans-of-color critique have explored how transness complicates taken-for-granted notions about periodization and historical progress. At the intersection of racialization, authoritarianism, and gender nonconformity, for example, scholars have located dictatorships propagandizing trans bodies that confirm their reactionary sexual politics and racist medical experts who systematically exclude people of color from care offered to their white counterparts.

In line more with trans studies than with the usual approach of trans history, this roundtable takes a personal turn. As transgender historians across subfields, regions, and methodologies, we reflect individually and together on our experiences transitioning as students of history, and on how those experiences have inflected our work. What impact has the fact of our transness had on the history we write, even if that history is not directly about transing gender in the past? We plan to examine the nuances of multiple intersecting power dynamics within our research and in our lives as researchers, including studying the Global South from the Global North and the politics and particularities of our trans masculine experiences.

We also hope to converse with colleagues about being trans academics in this time of widely felt peril among trans and queer people in the United States and about how we can all contribute to a future for our profession and society that, even if imperfect, will have space for all the complex ways that people understand their bodies and selves across time.