What Are We Convening? – Intellectual Project and Vision

Black Trans Futurities: Political Imaginaries in the Academy and the Arts is a two-day symposium with both public and insular sessions at Arizona State University on March 20-21, 2025. ASU faculty members in the ASU School of Social Transformation, Sa Whitley and Aaron Mallory, are co-convening this symposium and work in a planning committee with two remarkable Ph.D. Students in the ASU Gender Studies doctoral program, Sarah Keeton and Aja St. Germaine. We will move through the two-day symposium attendant to each other’s ideas around our four session themes: (1)Black Trans Feminism & Abolition/Worldmaking; (2)Trans* Pedagogies of Crossing; (3)Trans*-ing the Black Erotic; and (4)Black Trans Materialism and Economies.

We are thankful to have 33 scholars/students/artists traveling to Phoenix/Tempe from around Turtle Island and from differently-situated positions in the art world and the academy.

The ASU Black Trans Futurities symposium is a function, so to speak, that invites scholars, artists, students, and other thinkers/dreamers to convene and discuss the state of the field of Black Trans Studies. 

At Black Trans Futurities, we will  “jam” about the vibrant theoretical interventions, the divergent ways of knowing and doing research, and the productive debates that this field has been beholding for the past decade. Moreover, many of the participants have shared that this space that centers black trans knowledge and cultural production in the academy and the arts is not exclusively an intellectual convening. It is a “black gathering” (Cervenak 2021) that we hope will generate various kinds of sustenance and a place to generate “black aliveness” (Quashie 2021) and “mais viva” (Santana 2019).We hope it will be a place for us to move toward horizons of black trans futures and be in relational-ethical community with each other. While we convene in these times of multiple converging crises, genocides, and heightened antiblack and anti-trans vitriol, legislation, criminalization, and erasure, amid rapid political transformations, what does it mean to love and “live fiercely”? – In pursuit of an answer, we center and follow the groundwork, praxes, and Afro-futurist imaginaries of black trans femme organizers, artists, scholars, and care workers in this moment of repressive political transformation.

Importantly, we imagine the  Black Trans Futurities symposium as a place for us trace how Black Trans Studies has emerged from, bumped up against, and staged generative “meeting grounds” (Bey and Green 2018) with other field formations —including Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, Queer Studies, Native Studies, Transgender Studies, Black Studies, Africana and African Diaspora Studies, Post-Colonial Studies, and American Studies. Part of this work will involves a political orientation of what scholars affect theorists in Transgender Studies have called “trans negativity” (Malatino 2022). What kinds of energy, affect, and “vibes” (Heitz 2024) do we need to collectively muster to form an insurgent rebuttal to alt-right/centrist pronouncements and “moves” against “woke gender ideology”? In which ways should we ragefully name, account, and mobilize to end the “state of emergency” – the numerous ways that the state is ceaselessly “coming for” for black trans lives? We are witnessing a federal attempt at the legislative genocide of a group of people -- its own citizens — what Jin Haritaworn and C. Riley Snorton have called “trans necropolitics” (2022) and what Eva Hayward has figured as neoliberal state’s “sanctioned foreclosure” of black transfeminine lives, “don’t exist” (Hayward 2017).

Among the transgender community, black trans women experience 62% of the anti-trans fatal violence in the U.S. according to a 2023 report by the Human Rights Council (HRC 2023). On top of this, black trans people and the history of many black trans elders and trans creators is actively under attack. With these bleak and horrifying socio-political conditions worsen in “society at large,” we hope that the Black Trans Futurities symposium offers what Che Gossett has called “temporary fabulous zones” — whether in the official sessions or when we’re just hanging a few of us together at a time around Phoenix, in nature, in somebody’s hotel room (Gossett and Tsang 2021). Even if we are living in the “not yet” of trans of color futurity, black trans futurity, and  two-spirit futurity/Indigenous sovereignty, we can give each other flowers (broadly defined), we can be down and write from that epistemological black trans and non-binary downness. We’re still here (Munoz 2019; Malatino 2022). In and outside of the symposium, we aim to make space for folx to make moves/movements together and apart— particularly as many attendees are black trans*, enby, agender, femme, and other gender expansive folx and some are not. Similar to the emerging field of Black Trans Studies, we are attuned to who all we have invited into the room, and we hope that we can all move with recognition, critical reflexivity, and possible reminders of how we each respectively take up space and power.

For Black Trans Futurities, an intellectual convening, we also are excited to make space to collectively build on the black trans feminist critique and praxes that has been articulated in the scholarship, archives, visual art, poetry, and performances of the participants joining us for this convening. We will be sharing and producing knowledge that is in but not of the university. We will explore the “fugitivity” and the crossings between transness and blackness throughout the African Diaspora (Snorton 2017; Tinsley 2018;  Bey 2022; Whitley 2022). Thinking with Dora Silva Santana, we are eager to map and celebrate what she calls “trans* portality” and the “artful multitudes of transness and blackness” (Santana 2022).

Who Are We? – ASU Black Trans Futurities Planning Committee

The planning committee for Black Trans Futurities is made up of two faculty members and two Ph.D. students at Arizona State University in the School of Social Transformation and the Women & Gender Studies unit. Sa Whitley is a black queer non-binary poet, scholar, and millennial with a middle-class background. They have written articles and delivered talks that are situated in Black Trans Studies. They have also taught a graduate seminar at ASU entitled, “Black Trans Feminism & Worldmaking” (Spring 2024). Aaron Mallory is a black queer feminist from Texas who studies knowledge production, loss, and black queer health. They also teach in SST’s African and African American Studies unit and go to more indie music shows than anyone you know. They started a monthly Queer Book Club in Phoenix at Grace’s Tax Bar! Sarah Keeton and Aja St. Germaine are both scholars in the Gender Studies doctoral program at ASU. Sarah is an auntie, truth-teller, lover & Black feminist scholar. Their research explores how trauma (historical, intergenerational and otherwise) is mediated by blackness, transness, & queerness, specifically in relation to those who identify and/or are identified as femme, nonbinary, and woman. Aja is a queer Anishinaabekwe and their current research focuses on trans of color critique and applications of queer methodology in Native archives. Aja is also the essays editor at Honey Literary, a 501(c)(3) BIPOC women, queer, and femme literary arts organization. Aja and Sarah were PhD Students in Sa’s aforementioned “Black Trans Feminism” seminar.

Three of us identify as black nonbinary folx, and one of us is a Native trans person. According to a 2021 report by the LIFT Initiative, black faculty are 3.4% of the ASU faculty population, and black graduate students are 4.8% of the ASU graduate student population in a city that is 7.8% black (as of 2024 Census data). These city statistics are complicated in the U.S. Census that lists people who identify as two or more races as 20.8% of the population of Phoenix (2021). In May 2020, Arizona State University enrolled approximately 3,500 American Indian students. That same year, it graduated 679 Indigenous students (ASU News 2022). American Indian/Alaska Native students are 1% of the undergraduate population and .7% of the graduate-student population at ASU. These ASU-derived statistics are complicated in their aggregation given that they distinguish “Native Hawaiian” as a category from“American Indian/Alaska Native” (2023).

Different types of privilege (respectively) have enabled our access to the university that many black trans women and transfeminine people do not have. Much like the authors of the “Issue of Blackness,” a 2017 special issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly, none of us identify as black trans women, and we also recognize that “it is past time for Black transwomen to occupy a similar position of power as we do in being able curate this conversation through an institutionalized medium, with living-wage employment” (Ellison, Green, Richardson, and Snorton 2017). We note that this dynamic of the emerging field has changed in small but noticeable ways since 2017, but indisputably, not enough.  

Lastly, all of us are also geographic transplants to this unceded land of the Akimel O’odham (Pima) and Pee Posh (Maricopa) Indian Communities. We each have different relationships to liberal-colonial regimes of private property, and we each live in rental housing in Tempe or Phoenix, AZ. 

Our academic-artistic migrations to Phoenix have made us consider what it means to do work in black trans studies in the Southwest, in transborder regions, and in cities that are not “chocolate cities” (Hunter & Robinson 2018) or black geographies that are fixed in place or time. 

Note on Black Trans Feminism and Politics in the Now

In 2025, black trans women activists, community members, and journalists have already organized rallies, protests, political demonstrations, and journalism that refuse an acceptance of this trans-antagonistic reality—even as it forms, tries to solidify around us. On February 14, 2025, a protester outside of Stonewall National Monument Park held up a hand-drawn poster over their head with the words, “There's no sTonewall without the T.” In larger print above that declaration, they wrote, “We are older than your laws, and we will outlive them!” (Hogan 2025).

On January 27, 2025, Raquel Willis wrote a love letter in Teen Vogue addressing transgender youth entitled, “Dear Trans Kids, You Don't Need the Government's Permission to Exist” (Willis 2025). On February 4, 2025, two transgender young adults and the families of five trans minors filed a federal lawsuit to contest two of Trump’s executive orders: one that defines biological sex as immutable and gender as correlative only to one's assigned sex at birth and another order that prohibit trans people from getting gender affirming-care before the age of 19 (ACLU of Maryland 2025; Yorcaba 2025). The country has failed every American with these executive orders, and they have ramifications for trans of color immigrants, undocumented folx, and others in the dregs of U.S. empire around the world. We also know that the Trump administration’s executive orders that deny incarcerated trans women gender-affirming care and displace them to men’s prisons— if instituted—will disproportionately affect black trans women (Transgender Law Center). We believe that jailsupport and “deviant care” is needed more than ever for QTIPOC and black queer and trans folx on the inside (Hwang 2019).

Transgender Studies is a significant interdisciplinary field of scholarly inquiry that explores the transgender phenomena in history, contemporary life, culture, and society, but as Ian-Khara Ellesante has brilliantly asked of this field, “Dear Trans Studies, Can You Do Love?” (Ellesante 2021). We are struck by the generative “no place” of Black Trans Studies. This subfield has proliferated – it has popped off — since its formal pronouncement by the writers of the “Issue of Blackness” special issue (Ellison, Green, Richardson, Snorton 2017). They ushered us “toward a Black Trans*/Studies,” and we are still curious about the “toward” and and “the slash”— if we have arrived at Black Trans Studies or if the non-arrival is an imperative we should take seriously—a repellent against the pitfalls of academic institutionalization. That said, many of the recent journal articles by PhD Students writing toward, within, and for Black Trans Studies have beautifully illustrated that this intellectual-reworlding, this set of scholarly conversations, epistemologies, methodologies, theories isn’t going anywhere and isn’t finished. We still have a lot more to say, to serve!

Further, the brilliant contributions of black trans femme artists such as Danielle Braithwaite Shirley, Tourmaline, Juliana Huxtable, Kiyan Williams, and others have been featured in art galleries and museums around the world—major programs such as the Whitney Biennale and to much acclaim. We also revel in and learn from the work and advocacy of BTFA Collective (“Black Trans Femmes Artists”). All of these fabulous contributions are a wellspring in Black Trans Studies. 

The political and movement organizing by black trans*organizers, aunties, youth, elders, and mama is giving “make a way out of no way” – from sistagirls in Australia to black trans women in TGIJP (Transgender, Gender Variant, Intersex JusticeProject) in California, and New York City’s Black Trans Travel Fund and Audre Lorde Project, we know that black trans social reproduction is an engine that won’t quit. 

We will visit with these organizers, artists, scholars, and journalists and their “werk” during these repressive political times and during our symposium (Ellison 2017). We will marinate all these wells of knowledge, power, and pettiness with those that we each of us bring with us. Hopefully, we will “cook” up something real (Glorilla 2024). We are here for the kiki, the shared meals, the poetry, and the community that our ideas and affective resonances will make and keep making. To riff on Alisha B. Wormsley, we are beholding the critical affirmation,

“THERE ARE BLACK [TRANS] PEOPLE IN THE FUTURE!”

-Sa Whitley, Ph.D. (copyedited by Aja St. Germaine).