2025 Speakers
Emily Hobson, Laurie Marhoefer, Jo Hsu - Widening the Arc of Trans History

VISITING SPEAKER SERIES
WIDENING THE ARC OF TRANS HISTORY
EMILY HOBSON
LAURIE MARHOEFER
Trans Berlin:Making the Modern Transgender World
in Jazz Age Germany
JO HSU
The Burden of Proof and Other Stories:Reimagining Evidence from the Trans/Crip Diaspora
Abstract: From 1989 through 1992, a coalition of activists fought to convince the United States Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to expand its diagnostic criteria for AIDS and through this to compel the Social Security Administration to grant more people, particularly women, access to AIDS-related health care, services, and benefits. The ultimately successful campaign, led by the Women’s Caucuses of ACT UP and known as Change the Definition, was both a policy fight over medicine and social welfare and a cultural struggle over women’s and lesbians’ racialized, classed, and sexual relationships to AIDS. Change the Definition complicated and destabilized the categories of women as a collectivity and lesbian as an identity, and did so especially by confronting the connections between AIDS and incarceration. By linking women and lesbian to prison and HIV, Change the Definition rearticulated women and lesbian as subjectivities of deviance rather than respectability, difference rather than sameness, and risk rather than safety, thereby challenging prevailing constructions of gender and sexuality. The categories of mobilization that animated Change the Definition form part of the genealogies of prison abolition and trans(-inclusive) feminisms and offer a meaningful model for analyzing the relationships between categories of women, lesbian, bisexual, queer, and trans in racial capitalism.
Bio: Emily Hobson is an historian of radical social movements, queer politics, and HIV/AIDS in the United States. An Associate Professor of History and Gender, Race, and Identity (GRI) at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) and a past chair of the GRI department, she received her PhD and Master’s degree from the University of Southern California in American Studies and Ethnicity and her BA from Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges in History and Literature. Emily is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2025-26, terminated by federal action), the National Humanities Center (2024-25), the One Archives Foundation, Smith College, CUNY’s Center for LGBTQ Studies, the University of California Santa Barbara, and other sources. They are the author of Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left (2016) and co-editor, with Dan Berger, of Remaking Radicalism: A Grassroots Documentary Reader of the United States, 1973-2001 (2020). Emily’s current research examines the history of HIV/AIDS activism by, for, and with people incarcerated in the United States. Activists in this movement organized feminist, queer, and abolitionist opposition to the convergence of state neglect and state violence that defined the Reagan through Clinton eras. Articles from this project have been published or are forthcoming in Signs, Radical History Review, QED, Sinister Wisdom, The Abolitionist, and Truthout, among other venues. Emily currently serves the American Studies Association as a member of the ASA National Council (2023-2025) and the 2025 ASA Program Committee.
Bio: Laurie Marhoefer is a historian of the queer and transgender past. His work has been influential in public conversations about queer and trans people living in Germany under the Weimar Republic and Nazi State. In 2024, he helped to co-write a historians' amicus brief for the pivotal US Supreme Court Case US v. Skrmetti. He also wrote a biography of the Asian Canadian gay activist and Vancouver resident Li Shiu Tong and his boyfriend Magnus Hirschfeld. Marhoefer is a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he lives with his child and dog. He is currently writing Trans Berlin, due out with Tiny Reparations (Penguin Random House) in 2027.
Abstract: In 2025, the question is not should academia imagine differently, but how will our disciplines adapt to a world with ever-compounding cruelties? This talk asks, what possibilities are lost in an overreliance on argument and “evidence”? I use nonlinear storytelling to explore how academic conventions and scientific consensus have buttressed the myriad harms targeting LGBTQ people, people of color, and disabled people. Attacks on gender-affirming care, public health precautions, and anti-racist movements are often portrayed as anti-intellectual, but this view neglects the longstanding involvement of scientists and academics. It also ignores the complicities of our own disciplines and professional standards. Bending rhetorical insight through the prism of the lyric, I explore the knowledge that escapes linear thinking. Drawing from scholars and activists including Cameron Awkward-Rich, Eli Clare, Margaret Price, La Marr Jurelle Bruce, Kai Cheng Thom, Johanna Hedva, and Remi Yergeau, I dwell with the irrational, the broken, and the maladaptive. This is a story told in crip time, through trans-of-color imagination, with the urgency of chronic pain and illness. There are no easy answers here, but there is potential in the journey— if you’ll take it with me.
Bio: Jo Hsu (They/Them) is an associate professor of Rhetoric & Writing and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. They’re the author of Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics, and their work explores how storytelling shapes policy and culture. They’re currently working on several projects related to anti-trans rhetoric, narratives of pathologization, and contested diseases.
Stephen Davidson - Voice Coach

Stephen Davidson
TRANS+ COMMUNITY VOICE WORKSHOPS
A practical introduction to transmasculine & transfeminine voice
for members of the Trans+ community
(including NB/GNC folks)
Transfeminine workshop: 6:15 PM - 7:15 PM PDT
Transmasculine Workshop: We'll look at how the voice works, what T changes (and doesn’t), and explore vocal qualities that read as masculine. You'll practice in low-key pairs, never on the spot, with time for questions and tips on how to practice.
Transfeminine Workshop: We'll explore how the voice works, what makes it sound feminine, and try simple exercises to begin shifting vocal habits. You’ll practice in relaxed pairs, never on the spot, with plenty of time for questions and discussion.
Chloe Turner - Visiting Researcher

Chloe Turner
MANUFACTURED DOUBT:
Mapping UK Transgender Disinformation
Aino Pihlak - Visiting Researcher

Aino Pihlak
PUTTING THE FEMME IN FEMINIST:
Trans Feminism & the 'Male Lesbian'
in the American Second Wave
John Fenaughty - Visiting Researcher

John Fenaughty
The Benefits of Puberty Blocking Medications:
A provisional analysis of the mental health and social benefits associated with puberty blocker access and use by young people in Aotearoa, New Zealand.
The New Zealand Government recently launched a public consultation on the "safety and efficacy" of puberty blockers, a move that appears influenced by political pressure from populist coalition partners and the highly contested UK Cass Review. This talk draws on data from the 2021 Identify Survey, a large national community-based survey of over 4,800 young people aged 14–26 in Aotearoa New Zealand. This presentation shares key findings from a sub-sample of 329 participants who either accessed or wanted access to puberty blockers. Among the 115 young people who had accessed puberty blockers, 87 responded to an open-ended question about how gender-affirming medications had affected their lives. The vast majority (95%) described positive or extremely positive impacts, including improved mental health, reduced suicidality, improved body image, better social connections, enhanced quality of life, and a renewed sense of hope. Quantitative analyses comparing those who could access blockers (n = 115) to those who wanted but could not access them (n = 214) reinforced many findings, with statistically significant associations across multiple domains of wellbeing and positive youth development. Recommendations include the removal of any further restrictions on access to puberty blockers; a need for improved healthcare access for young people; and further research on intersectional experiences and barriers to access.
Dr John Fenaughty (he/him) is a queer cis pākehā (settler) lecturer at Waipapa Taumata Rau | The University of Auckland. John's research and activism focus on takatāpui and rainbow+ young people's health and wellbeing, with attention to equity and inclusion, especially in educational and health contexts. He teaches in the Graduate School of Social Practice in the Faculty of Arts and Education.
Luca Tainio - Visiting Doctoral Researcher

Luca Tainio
I'm So Proud, I Grew it Myself:
Challenging Cisnormative Ideals of the Penis
Through Trans Male Embodiment
In my presentation, through a discussion of three YouTube vlogs by trans men, I will suggest that the seemingly simple division between men who have a penis (cis) and men who do not (trans) not only fails to reflect embodied realities of many trans men but is to a great extent discursively created and maintained.
Instead of defining trans men's bodies through a lack of "genital status reserved for cisgender men alone" (Keegan 2016), I consider the non-surgically altered trans penis as a form of body-reflexive practice of masculinity and thus a significant part of building one's trans male self.
My aim here is to critically bother the common cultural idea(l)s of what is, or what counts as, a penis, and in a wider sense to create a counternarrative to the cisnormative ways in which we see and understand male embodiment.
Luca Tainio is a Doctoral Researcher at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and an Adjunct Lecturer at Karlstad University, Sweden. His research focuses on questions of transmasculinity, embodiment and knowledge-production. Currently Luca is also a part of two research projects; "Affective Activism: Sites of Queer and Trans World-Making" and "Trans*Creative: Health, Violence and Environment in Trans Cultural Production."