Trans Care

Forerunners: Ideas First

by Hil Malatino

What does it mean for trans people to show up for one another, to care deeply for one another? How have failures of care shaped trans lives? What care practices have trans subjects and communities cultivated in the wake of widespread transphobia and systemic forms of trans exclusion?

Trans Care is a critical intervention in how care labor and care ethics have been thought, arguing that dominant modes of conceiving and critiquing the politics and distribution of care entrench normative and cis-centric familial structures and gendered arrangements. A serious consideration of trans survival and flourishing requires a radical rethinking of how care operates.

Genres: Queer, Nonfiction, LGBT, Transgender, Theory, Gender, Queer Lit

72 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2020

About the author

Hil Malatino is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and a research associate in the Rock Ethics Institute. He holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy and a graduate certificate in Feminist Theory from Binghamton University. Prior to coming to Penn State, Dr. Malatino was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Gender Studies at Indiana University and Assistant Director and Lecturer in Women’s Studies at East Tennessee State University.

Reviews

[Morgan M. Page · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hil Malatino's monograph on the "t4t praxis of love" that is trans care work is both expansive and all too brief. Trans Care analyses the ethics and labour of t4t networks of care, challenging the cis and str8-centric models of care labour theorization that have preceded it since the emergence of Wages for Housework in the 1970s. For Malatino, trans case is, "about a certain kind of faithfulness and a certain kind of obligation: about what we owe each other. Minimally, it is this: a commitment to showing up for all of those folks engaged in the necessary and integral care work that supports trans lives, however proximal or distant, in the ways that we can. "

I only wish this book was longer, that it dived deeper. There is much more to discuss, and hopefully whether from Malatino or others, this book will ignite that further critical work.

[Bogi Takács]

A short collection of essays / loosely connected chapters circling the topic of trans care. It struck me as an academic working papers kind of thing, and this is what the publisher says about the series:

“Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.”

It did struck me as a collection of ideas, without a forcefully imposed throughline – this is not a problem for me FWIW! Just noting, also because people seemed to bemoan the lack. But I don’t think that’s part of the book concept.

I really liked that the author also brought being intersex into the contexts of trans care; as an intersex trans person myself, this is so often lacking from trans discourse, or actively excluded.

I thought overall the book was thought-provoking, and that’s wonderful and exactly what I wanted. Some of the thoughts it provoked follow, these might seem like substantial disagreements, but I also feel like that’s to be expected with a working-papers kind of format?

I was surprised that the discussion often elided disability as a topic. With so many trans people disabled, at considerably higher rates than the general population, I don’t think disability can be disentangled from trans care, or trans care from disability. (Disability broadly interpreted, with chronic illness, mental illness etc. also included.) I also feel like the cutting edge of discourse around care work is specifically from a disability standpoint in the past few years, both inside and outside of academia. Some of that is cited in the book, so it was IMO an unusual choice not to incorporate it more. Sometimes this led to gaps. Most discussion re: burnout from a marginalization-aware standpoint that I’ve seen in the past few years has been on autistic burnout or burnout connected to other forms of neurodivergence IMO, not infrequently with a trans intersection; though maybe we move in different bubbles? I felt like the book went back to critique very early discussions on burnout and there was a time gap where the more recent, disability-related discussion could have fit.

This avoidance was so marked that I felt the text outright tried to avoid the term “disabled”, sometimes even opting for “debility”, which is IMO a strongly pejorative term and not a suitable replacement.

Another aspect that appeared in the citations but not so much in the discussion was the role of migration. Migration, also within a country too, can damage/dissolve care webs as much - if not more so - as a trans coming out can. This strongly interacts with race and racialization, and the book does mention race, though not in depth; but these terms cannot be reduced to each other in either direction (I mean, anti-migrant discrimination cannot be reduced to race/racialization, and vice versa either, though there is a lot of overlap). So trans migrants can and do experience this kind of severing of ties twice, which can make it especially hard to have any functioning care webs. Definitely something I’ve experienced, and neuroatypicality also makes it harder for trans people to access this kind of informal care.

I'll keep on thinking about this. I am sad Corey Alexander is no longer among us - I would have greatly appreciated their comments on the book, as someone who thought really deeply about trans care.

_____
Source of the book: Lawrence Public Library

[Lawrence · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this in one sitting, scrolling quickly to try to read without looking too closely, skipping through parts out of order, in what I've come to recognize as my 'reading trans stuff' habit: equally intense desire and fear, both of which are driven by a sense that everything is 'close to home'. It's necessary to let my defences down to read, especially to see how the text comes from not-me; but everything it touches is so tender, I want all my defences up. So anyway: I have almost no idea what this book is "like" or if it is "good," though I suspect I will think and read more in/with it over time. But, I have read it, and I log everything I read, so let the record show, this is how it was.

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 5 out of 5]

A smart, jam-packed little book that lends itself to collective trans thinking within the academy and without. I dream of teaching Trans Care to teens. I gratefully accept its influence on my PhD dissertation and eagerly shove it into every hand I see.

[Iz · Rating 5 out of 5]

unfassbar gewinnbringend für meine politische praxis aber auch so auf ner ganz persönlichen ebene super cozy und gleichzeitig wütend machend. große empfehlung für dieses kleine buch

[Sasha · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is v short at 72 pages so it’s not surprising that I wanted more, but I wanted more! It mostly just felt like a brief collection of musings that weren’t quite as tied together as I expected. There are definitely great insights but some of it was shrouded in academic language so I had to reread a ton of times and sometimes still didn’t get it. Also one of my fave professors from Oberlin is cited in it so that was cool!

[cel hausske · Rating 4 out of 5]

love love love !
cried at the part talking about letting trans kids have the freedom to have their boy/girl/childhoods. letting them make mistakes and learn from them as all children get to do.
long live trans joy, trans love

[Alba Munarriz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exploración de los sistemas endémicos que nos privan de los cuidados necesarios, e ideas de cómo sortearlos y/o construir nuevos sistemas.
Todo es un comienzo...

[Emmett Glazbrook · Rating 4 out of 5]

wowie! great points made and i feel so proud of the trans community that i have had the pleasure of building. there were points where the author was just yapping for a bit, which i expected from an academic writing piece, so i think i gotta read this with like google next to me to look up words. overall made me think and feel

[Hal · Rating 4 out of 5]

first read of summer break! and, a great short introduction to this topic. :)

[Cooper Lee Bombardier · Rating 5 out of 5]

Was so mesmerized by the poetry of this thought-provoking slim text and moved by the questions it asks that I immediately started reading the author's new book, Side Affects.

[Em · Rating 5 out of 5]

need to read this 10000000000 more times

[Sylvia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thankfully this is a short enough read. I went into this thinking it was going to be some kind of academic manifesto. It's not so much that, but more of a personal diatribe, with occasional academic considerations on a very vague concept of 'care.'

This short text, like the majority of trans academia, is very trans-masc/TME centric. Not to mention US-centric to the point that being in the UK, I don't get much use out of the examples of healthcare where the situation here is very different.

There are a lot of personal anecdotes in here that drag on a lot and passages that I didn't really get had to do with the concept of 'trans care.' Examples ranging from Melania Trump, the appeal of Fall Out Boy fandom to 'AFABs,' to Claude Cahun being a 'trans twink.' Like, it just felt like it was meandering with all these anecdotes.

I did find some of the trans history interesting, especially the discussions on Rupert Raj and 'voluntary gender workers,' when Malatino gets into this stuff, it can be pretty interesting. Attempts are made to consider trans fem/TMA perspectives which is welcome, but they're not utilised enough to help articulate exactly what Malatino means by 'trans care.' Malatino also makes a lot of presumptions about the innate assemblages of trans communities and how survivalism necessitates mutual aid.

I just read Chav Solidarity by D Hunter and I just kept thinking of the anecdote of the trans woman in that, a severely traumatised, lonely woman who did awful things to deal with the trauma (despite this, Hunter talks about the stories she shared with him in those moments and seeing her when dying at the hospital). I just think of the numerous trans women who don't have these supposedly innate communities to help them navigate healthcare, legal work, employment and presentation.

I lived with anarchist trans women who helped out a bit, pretending to have this supposed anarchist/commune/mutual aid setup going on. But in reality it was me coming home from university to seeing them walk past all the mess made after staying in all day and withholding money from me due to the 'emotional labour' of me being stressed out about exams. I never really got that and so there's probably some anger and jealousy at 1) seeing a successful trans academic 2) getting published and 3) constantly talking about how privileged they are at having all of this and the trans friends and communities around them.

My advice would be to read Ruth Pearce's Understanding Trans Health for a better UK perspective on trans health organising (including a better analysis on activism during the transition between Harry Benjamin to WPATH which Malatino discusses near the end), ATH Edinburgh's manifesto if you want an actual manifesto on radical approaches to trans healthcare and Josephine-Giles 'Wages for Transition' for an approach on autonomist Marxist transfeminism in relation to transition, advocacy and its laboured associations.

[cab]

Malatino foregrounds care as the defining requirement for any politics (do you care or don’t you?)

Breaking down the binaries between caregiver/receiver of care, he proposes a t4t ethic of care (of “taking care of your own”), where “interdependency, mutuality, and subject interwovenness and encourages us to minimize the complexity of the affective interchanges at work when marginalized subjects engage in the work of making each other’s lives more possible”.

One part in the book, Malatino goes [on trans visibility]:

“We’re just recycling Foucault and repurposing a quip of his from Discipline and Punish—the one where he’s talking about Bentham and panopticism and he’s like y’all, to be seen is to be surveilled and to be surveilled is to be controlled and when you’re so routinely surveilled you internalize that shit and surveil yourself constantly.” (pp. 26)

and I have to say, y’all, I lost my shit.

[Brett · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s hard to review academic texts like this, but I liked the serious consideration given to care, in the sense of caring about trans issues and how that differs from caring for trans people. There’s a good chapter on “voluntary gender workers” — the carers running the trans newsletters, support groups, directories, sensitivity trainings, and all the other forms of (typically) unpaid, unappreciated labor — that are vital to trans care networks. It’s a type of organized caring I’ve always felt pretty removed from, even though like… where would I be without resources like transbucket (RIP) or whoever maintained the online directory of trans-inclusive healthcare providers in my home state 10 years ago.

[Nadav David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book offers several beautiful and thought provoking vignettes on care, care work, and care structures within and beyond trans (and queer) communities. While I wished this was much longer (only 70 pages) and went more in depth into the ideas, frameworks, and histories that were introduced, I found it to both illuminate what I’ve witnessed / experienced / benefitted from (as a cis straight man in queer / trans community) and raise new and important questions about the nature of care and world building within and beyond a capitalist, cisheteropatriarchal system. I also appreciated the author sharing personally about their experience as an intersex trans person, which I’ve read less about in trans / queer texts.

[Greta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Es un llibre curtet q esta molt be per començar a llegir sobre la realitat trans perquè utlitza un llenguatge molt planer i pròxim.

Mel vaig llegir de dos sentades i la segona mha agradat molt mes que la primera. Te reflexions i crítiques interessants.

M’agradaria llegir mes llibres sobre la realitat trans com aquet, que parlin desde la experiència pròpia i no els llibres de les acadèmiques de teoria.

Era de la biblo i com sempre em farà penita tornar-lo q amb els llibres soc molt de haver-los d’acumular i tenir en físic. Poxo greta :’\

[Kristopher Krumb · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is well written and concise, the latter being something that isn’t always easy to find in trans discourse. This is book about what care looks like in trans lives. It’s not clinical, instead focusing on how trans people care for one another, how the networks we create are essential to getting the resources that trans people need to survive. There’s some academic phrasing used that might not be the most accessible to all, but it would be hard to navigate away from its use without losing some nuance. I’ll keep this book on my short list when folks ask me for trans related recommendations.

[warren · Rating 4 out of 5]

i am now using STORYGRAPH instead of goodreads because goodreads is owned by union-busting, israel-supporting amazon. pls add me on storygraph @ pink_distro

<3

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Xirmiri · Rating 5 out of 5]

lo tengo subrayado entero

[Falin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Está bastante bien, me gusta el enfoque de tomar otros modelos de cuidado fuera del familiar y nse. Es cortito, me lo leí en 3 días y yo leo lento

[jude · Rating 5 out of 5]

a much needed text about taking care of each other among all the hate we have to endure as trans people 🫂

[Summer House]

Def a broader definition of care than what I was expecting going into the book. I was thinking mostly in terms of medical-industrial complex, but that's like a 10 page section at the end. This has much more to do with looking at Care Ethics through a trans lens (but you can read this w/o knowing anything about Care Ethics).

The biggest thing I got from this was from a section analyzing a conversation between Andrea Long Chu and Makenzie Wark describing gender as a gift we give one another. Made me want to retry reading ALC's Females with this perspective on it

[Alyssa Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well-written but didn't feel accessible in terms of the overarching themes and lessons. I found myself getting lost in the wordiness of this book a lot and I'm not sure I comprehended all that I wanted to.

[Inga Manticas]

I wish the author gave more fleshed-out and specific examples of what trans care is and could be. I wanted more theorizing on what sets trans care apart from other forms of care backed by concrete examples stories etc — and also more theorizing on what the future of trans care is or could be. I want hypotheticals, anecdotes, etc. For a book on prefigurative care I expected more prefiguration. Just reminds me of my classic frustration with a lot of contemporary queer theory: it dances around its own subject (in fear of making affirmative statements ?)

Like how the summary says that trans flourishing requires a rethinking of care … then do more rethinking of care ! You’re a theorist, don’t just say we need to do more theorizing.

That said there were a lot of good insights in here - ie non-transactional forms of care, mothering as a responsive practice, etc.

[Tyler Morley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was expecting to get advice on how to help and support trans people, but "Trans Care" is more an analysis of the existing systems of (mostly medical) care available to trans people. It also uses a lot of academic language, which makes it tougher to read and doesn't give much benefit (at least for my uses).

There was a great section in the middle, though, that starts "We come to gender as supplicants, all of us". It makes the point that we can signal to others what gender we want to be treated as, but we rely on them to pick up on those cues and agree to treat us that way.

With our friends and acquaintances we can directly ask for what we want, but with strangers it's all about building and maintaining the "markers of gender" like some kind of shibboleth and hoping/expecting that they'll see us how we want to be seen.

[Ángel Rodes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Una colección de ensayos cortos enlazados de forma más o menos acertada, centrados especialmente en reflexionar sobre la necesidad de la comunidad, la solidaridad trans, y con ráfagas culturales por en medio. Valoro mucho la importancia que se le da construir redes de apoyo y también el coste emocional que supone, las dinámicas que se crean, la necesidad de estos apoyos (incluso cuando no conocemos a las personas) para la supervivencia cuando las instituciones no nos cubren nuestras necesidades más absolutamente básicas. La conclusión de la redistribución de la riqueza y cambiar la narrativa individual por la libertad trans comunitaria, a tope.
Mis pegas son que al hablar de sistemas de salud y financiaciones solo pone de ejemplo lo que ocurre en EEUU (por lo que esos párrafos no nos sirven de mucho aquí en España) y, sobre todo, que aunque subraya la necesidad de las redes de apoyo y advierte de que en las comunidades trans pueden crearse dinámicas jerarquizantes según popularidad o privilegios, etecé, no advierte tanto de dinámicas tóxicas ni propone cómo gestionar malos comportamientos, abusos, en definitiva, cómo gestionar los problemas que ocurren en cualquier grupo cuando el grupo está lleno de gente vulnerable a la que alguien debería seguir apoyando en lo más básico para evitar que, a pesar de los errores, se le abandone por completo.

Tip tremendamente importante y que subrayaría mil veces: no exponer a otra persona trans en público; resolver los problemas en privado (por salud mental y aprovechamiento de las redes de acoso transfóbicas)

[Gizem Kendik Önduygu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bugüne kadar bakım etiğini genellikle heteronormatif aileyi ve “kadının ev içi emeğini” merkeze alarak tartışan metinlerin yanında, Hil Malatino’nun Trans Care kitabı kuir bakım anlayışıyla bence güneş gibi doğuyor. Bakımı evcilleştirilmiş, heteronormatif, “kadınsı” bir görev olmaktan çıkarıp, hayatta kalma, birbirini yaşatma, birlikte iyileşme ve dayanışma pratiğine dönüştürüyor. Malatino, bakımı evin dışına taşıyor: sokakta, kulüpte, hastanenin bekleme salonunda, topluluk buluşmalarında olabileceğini gösteriyor.

Ve bakımın içine öfkeyi ekliyor. Malatino, ezilen insanlar için öfkeyi desteklemenin ve beslemenin bireysel bakım ve bakım hareketini desteklemek için elzem olabileceğini öne sürüyor. Ayrıca trans bireylerin çoğu zaman karşılıksız olarak ve sürekli biçimde yaptıkları “gönüllü cinsiyet emeği”ni (Transfobik şiddet karşısında birbirini duygusal olarak destekleme pratikleri, sosyal medyada veya kamusal alanda trans görünürlüğü, hakları, onuru için konuşmak, güvenli alanlar kurmak, topluluk dayanışması örgütlemek, trans arkadaşlara doğru sağlık hizmeti, hormon terapisi, yasal süreçler hakkında bilgi vermek) bakıma dahil ediyor.

Of ve non-fiction bir kitabı okurken ağlatabiliyor. İnanamıyorum.

Görsel betimleme: Gizem elinde Hil Malatino’nun Trans Care kitabının kindle versiyonunu tutuyor.

[nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Malatino’s meditation on trans care & a “t4t praxis of love” is a smart, thoughtful, and heartfelt essay about the ways that trans people show up for each other. Lacking official avenues and access to political & economic influence, many trans folks have to rely on each other for survival, community, and care.

I really loved the section on “voluntary gender workers,” as it gave me some language to think about a lot of the work I do (mostly unpaid) educating others about queer, feminist, and trans issues. Malatino’s respect & admiration for his queer & trans elders is quite touching and provides a model for honoring those that have come before us.

There’s a lot to be said for this book, but it also suffers from its diminutive length. Some of Malatino’s ideas and arguments arrive and are gone in a flash, as he’s moved onto another topic. At times, the text feels very rushed & unfinished.

I wish he’d been able to dwell more on some of the ideas, but I also understand that the point of the Forerunners series is to give short introductions to new projects & ideas that will no doubt get expanded in further writings down the line.