Abstract: Some people think transgender politics is new, or that it began in the 1990s. But in fact, transgender people have always existed, and the real story of the beginnings of modern transition are much older. Before the First World War, Germany had a transgender political movement, and under pressure, the German government had begun to grant a limited form of legal transition. From a transgender orphan who escaped from nuns in the Alps in the 19th C, to a young man who changed his sex around 1900 in Hamburg, to a middle aged woman who went to court in 1929 to fight for her right to live as a woman, this talk tells the stories of some of the trans people who helped to shape what became Weimar Germany's exciting and vibrant world of trnasgender politics, until the Nazis took power and destroyed it.

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.

Transgender disinformation is information intentionally produced to mislead public understanding of transgender populations, including strategic fabrication of facts, methodical data manipulation, selective statistical representation, intentionally decontextualised research conclusions, and the use of dubious or misappropriated sources, among other tactics. The intention of such disinformation is to manufacture uncertainty, cultivate fear and distrust, and—with increasing strategic precision—direct coordinated pressure campaigns against transgender people and the supportive ecosystems surrounding transgender communities: affirming parents and partners, evidence-based healthcare practitioners, responsive local governance structures, and the cultural institutions. This lecture looks at UK transgender disinformation narratives, tactics, and the illusions it uses to make such claims stick and spread to create disinformation afterlives that continue to shape public discourse long after their original contexts have dissolved.

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.

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."