This essay considers the dependency of trans youth by bridging transgender studies with feminist care ethics to emphasize a trans wisdom about solidarity through dependency. The first major section of the essay argues for reworking Sara Ruddick's philosophy of mothering in the context of trans and gender‐creative youth. This requires, first, stressing a more robust interaction among her divisions of preservative love, nurturance for growth, and training for acceptability, and second, creating a more nuanced account of “nature” in relation to nurturance for growth to avoid casting transition as contrary to a trans youth's healthy development. In the second major section of the essay, I depart from Ruddick's framework to emphasize the difference of care for trans youth by trans and/or queer communities and through mutual caregiving, stressing a trans wisdom about dependency and solidarity found in the work of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson. Turning to Eva Feder Kittay's links between dependency work and equality, I argue that Rivera and Johnson's work contains a distinct knowledge derived from practice necessitating the connection between solidarity and dependency in particular communities. I then call for more work on trans care ethics, trans ethics, and trans wisdom more broadly.

Or, you know. In my Sybil Vane. I made great plans to be bratty all week but at least a divorcée in a whatever apartment where I have already let the coffee burn for myself to clean after a change of mask and costume, a salon confessional, a CfP. There'd have been gloves and buttons involved piles of shirts to come on spontaneous or world-historical underboob no teaching and minimal committee work I mean it like a flood alert. A paragon, like I'd fuck me.-"Self-portrait as a Karen" by Kay Gabriel, from Elegy Department Spring Introduction: Curiosity and the Transgender Tipping PointTrans subjects, and I employ the term "subjects" with a purposeful bivalence to signify both "topics of concern" and "individuals of concern," have received renewed attention and visibility during these tumultuous 2010s. At the level of mass cultural curiosity, the notion that trans people could be sympathetic or even to some extent respectable, already indicated by the move from media venues such as Jerry Springer to the less carnivalesque platform of Oprah in the 2000s, was solidified through the phenomenon of the "Transgender Tipping Point" via Time 2 Magazine in 2014 (Steinmetz) and the spectacle of Caitlyn Jenner's transition in 2015 (Bissinger).Both media events were framed with a similar narrative: first, that "trans" was a phenomenon not receiving due attention until recently; second, that "trans" presented a set of up-and-coming social issues and possibilities for progress as a cutting-edge social movement; third, that visibility, media, and specific (nameable and photographable) voices are its vanguard;fourth, that this movement faces a threat from entrenched gender norms and institutions, including specific resistance from traditional or conservative views and policies, and perhaps a number of skeptical feminists. The general message relayed to the public by mass culture is that "trans" is located at the cutting-edge of concern across multiple fronts, finally arriving and coming into its own as a movement, and capable of great progress through renewed sympathetic public curiosity.Public curiosity often frames visibility as a positive force, but visibility for trans people is frequently ambivalent. In Talia Bettcher's "Evil Deceivers and Make-Believers," she emphasizes that visibility for trans people is accompanied by negations of gender/sex credibility or even heightened violence (Bettcher 50). Viviane Namaste also emphasizes that the production of trans visibility according to gender in the abstract can render the needs of specific populations of trans people invisible, including trans refugees, migrants, sex workers, drug users, poor trans people, and homeless trans people (Namaste Sex Change, Social Change 277-278). It is thus important not to ascribe public curiosity to any clear good for trans people, since structurally the visibility of trans populations may be accompanied by heavy politicization, exclusion, and violence,

In conversation with Emmett Harsin Drager and Andrea Long Chu's “After Trans Studies,” this collaborative essay also turns to questions of field formation and the ethos of trans studies. Situating the growth of the field in the material conditions of precarity under which trans knowledge-workers work, the authors argue that trans studies can't be “over” because, in fact, it isn't yet here. Rather than viewing this as only a dismal proposition, however, they insist that the tenuousness of trans studies provides us with the opportunity to envision and enact more sustaining ways of being “in the field.”

This essay discusses short-circuited trans care by focusing on failures of t4t as an ethos both interpersonally and within particular trans scenes. The author begins by recounting an experience working at a bar/restaurant that appealed to its identity as a caring trans community space as part of its exploitation of trans workers. This dynamic inspires the main argument, that t4t can become an ethos of scenes and institutions beyond the interpersonal while short-circuiting practices of trans care. Short-circuited trans care is then traced to t4t by drawing from Hil Malatino's work on trans care and t4t, Kai Cheng Thom's work on community dynamics, and trans literature to argue that practices of t4t often include abuse, expulsion, and assumptive care. This short-circuited trans care is linked to trans scenes by discussing the ethos of t4t in the history of Topside Press and trans cultural production. The author does not condemn t4t and to this effect offers a critique of tethering trans cultural production to prestige instead of care. Rather, the goal of this essay is to openly discuss aspects of t4t and trans care that are often obscured through the projection of a highly questionable “we” or universalized “trans community.”