CFP: The UK Workshop in Trans Philosophy

CFA: UK Workshop in Trans Philosophy

Deadline: February 1 2022

The first UK Workshop in Trans Philosophy will take place over two days on 24th and 25th March. Whilst nominally based at the University of Glasgow, the workshop will take place online.

Trans philosophy - philosophy that speaks to the experiences of, politics, and cultural production of transgender people - is one of the fastest-growing fields in contemporary philosophy. In addition to hallmark papers such as Kapusta (2016), Bettcher (2013, 2019), and Dembroff & Wodak (2018), last year saw the publication of the ground-breaking volume of trans political theory and philosophy Transgender Marxism (Gleeson and O’Rourke 2020). Beyond the realm of published work, a new generation of PhD and early career trans philosophers is beginning to produce exciting new thought.

This rapid growth has come against a difficult political background, especially in the UK. Transgender people have become the political football du jour in the UK, facing what Meg John Barker (2017) has called a “moral panic” that has only intensified in the past three years. Moreover, trans people face ongoing legal and political challenges to their rights, to say nothing of spiking rates of hate crimes and the high rates of poverty and homelessness among trans people. 

In this workshop we seek to bring together new and established scholars to develop the trans philosophy community in the United Kingdom, break new philosophical ground, and help set the agenda for transgender philosophy going forward.

We are happy to invite abstracts of between 500 and 1000 words prepared for anonymous review to be submitted to [email protected]. We welcome early work in progress alongside more polished papers. The deadline for abstract submission is 1st February 2022. 

Potential topics for papers at the conference include (but are certainly not limited to):

• Transgender themes in, and reappropriations of, the history of philosophy,

• Trans aesthetics,

• Afropessimism, black philosophy and transgender theory,

• Rainy fascism island: what the hell is going on in the UK right now?

• Trans Marxism, Trans anarchism,

• Trans epistemology,

• What is the relationship between transness and disability?

• The metaphysics of gender and identity,

• Healthcare: must we do away with the GIC?

• Jurisprudential perspectives on recent legal judgments on puberty blockers, protected beliefs, Gillick competence, and so on,

• t4t and the philosophy of sex,

• Does the liberation of trans people require the abolition of the family?

Accessibility

We seek to make the conference as accessible as possible. We hope to provide live-captioning of talks, and aim to provide financial support to enable those with caring responsibilities to attend. We will do everything we can to meet other access needs; please contact [email protected] if you want to discuss this.