Welcome to the 62nd issue of The Funambulist, the last one of 2025. Building Trans Communities is an invitation to approach trans identities and political struggles around the world through two angles: their collective dimension and their forever escape from clear-cut definitions, in particular those emerging from the West.
Let’s begin with their collective dimension. At a moment when the transphobic reaction in many societies (particularly but not exclusively in western ones) has been built on mythologies projecting monstrous creatures pit against righteous heroes and heroines, it is tempting to adopt a resistance centered on one’s individual agency. In other words, when facing the violence of transphobic narratives, we could suggest: “Each person is free to define themselves the way they want; let people do what they want, it does not hurt anybody.” Such a framing adopts a model of liberalism, which defends first and foremost individuals’ freedoms.
Such a model appears politically fraught on at least three levels. The first one being, like all frameworks that place the individual at their center, the structural inequities that determine relationships of power between people remain. To say it somewhat simplistically, this model is indifferent to the vast difference of political conditions between, say, Black working class trans women and white bourgeois trans men. The second one is that this model is fundamentally an apolitical one: it says nothing about the political order that the gender regime embodies, and assumes that shifting this order can be done innocuously. The third reason is that although this liberal paradigm may have an impact at the scale of interpersonal relationships, it is simply too weak to resist the strength of transphobic structures.
As such, what this issue attempts to do instead, is to insist on bringing forward the collective dimension of trans identities and struggles. Of course, this collective dimension involves a communitarian sense of mutual care (like Dean Spade and Ohan Breiding discuss in this issue), sheltered from transphobic violence, but it does not stop there. Rather than refusing to address the political nature of gender, this framework embraces the fact that refusing gender assignment is, in fact, a radical political act—or, as Mikaelah Drullard writes in this issue, an ontology (i.e. an entire way-of-being into the world).
Its collective dimension therefore focuses less about the freedom to define oneself, and more about supporting the collective effort to dismantle the gendered political order of society.
As often in The Funambulist, addressing the collective also means thinking internationally. In doing so, we want to be cautious not to reproduce the imperial infrastructure of knowledge production when reflecting on these questions—while recognizing that, in many ways, we also contribute to it. In the context of this issue, this means that what we understand by trans identities and struggles should not be constrained within a western definition of “trans.” The fact that this term is central in this issue’s title and editorial line, is somewhat a concession to the western imaginary. But a term can also be a vehicle left open for additional meaning, and that is what I’m hoping for in this context.
This question that goes much beyond terminology is a crucial one, debated (sometimes quite vehemently) in numerous geographical contexts, including those we are mobilizing within this issue. In India, many people have embraced the term “trans,” but Shripad Sinnakaar, in his text, deploys the vast richness of the identities that play gender against itself—the most prominent one being Hijra. This debate also exists in Colombia, but in context of this issue, we spoke to an organization called Liga de Salud Trans (Trans Health League) that claims the term “trans” in its very name. In contrast, Mikaelah Drullard, hailing from Mexico, is fundamentally attached to the travesti identity and, more specifically, the Black travesti identity—better expressed in the original Spanish as travestinegra. In her text, she writes: “I’m a travesti, not a woman. We are Black, not women. To be a woman is to be part of a white ontology.” This suggests an obliteration of the tempting model to make trans women and men, women and men “like any other” in a sort of camouflage strategy—this, of course, being a political framework that acknowledges yet leaves aside individuals’ personal aspirations and relationships with gender performativity.
What Mikaelah’s contribution points at, alongside other contributions in this issue, is how the gender regime embodies a fundamental part of colonial structures, and how racialization never operates without a gender component.
This is not to say that gender, as a political order, was not operative prior to the conception of colonial racialization, but that a contemporary analysis of it is impossible without thinking of it within coloniality.
As usual, our editorial methodology tries to be mindful of each situation’s specificities. As such, this issue also aims at complicating the often-heard narrative depicting Indigenous societies (grossly flattened into an identitarian monolith) as living in a perfectly fluid gender embodiment until the European invasion and occupation of their respective lands. Colonialism, in turn, usually does not shine for its recognition of specificities, and has imposed strict, essentialist, and legally-enforced gender norms on colonized societies across the board. The text by Beshouy Botros that follows this introduction interestingly introduces some trouble with such colonial essentializations, in the contexts of French- and British-occupied Casablanca and Cairo.
The film I Enjoy Being a Girl by Hoo Fan Chon, described further in this issue begins its story at the dawn of European colonialism in Malaysia. In it, the late interviewed protagonist, Anita-Alex, fluidly alternates pronouns and first names to describe herhimself and herhis lifelong friend Ava, in a way that may produce discomfort for those of us who have diligently learned to forget deadnames and use appropriate pronouns. Facing this discomfort, one of the options we have is to believe that even in our struggles, some places in the world (i.e. the West) are more advanced than others (in this case, Malaysia), thus allowing ourselves to judge Anita-Alex for being complacent with the gender order and the assignment it imposed onto herhim. Instead, another choice consists in embracing this ambiguity and recognizing that gender is organized around fixed and definitive/defining identities and that such a glissement (i.e., “sliding” and a wink at Martiniquan philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant’s family name) is precisely a kind of process that escapes this order.
My main regret for this issue is to have failed in my attempts at securing a contribution that would have made the Faʻafafine, Faʻafatama (both in Samoa), Fakaleitī (in Tonga), or Vakasalewalewa (in Fiji) imaginaries surge within these pages. The idea behind such a contribution would have been to challenge the unimaginative ethnographic designation of these identities as “third gender” in these three Polynesian (Samoa and Tonga) and Melanesian (Fiji) contexts. Here again, “trans” collective identities escape the capture of definition-making in the way a fish escapes the hands of the fishers. With this emancipative glissement in mind, I wish you an inspiring reading. ■