Disability and Trans Literature

Connections between disability studies and trans studies remain complicated. In Transgender History (2008), Susan Stryker shows how Victorian sexological discourse pathologized transness through the rhetoric of inversion, a category that prefigured without neatly mapping onto distinct modern transgender, bisexual, gay, and lesbian identities. This pathologization continues into the present as Jasbir Puar argues that trans bodies have been linked to disability through discussions of gender identity disorder, a classification that appeared in the American Psychiatric Association’s third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (1980) until the fifth edition replaced it with the less stigmatizing term “gender dysphoria” (2013). Amid this ongoing struggle for depathologization, Cameron Awkward-Rich notes the exclusion of trans people from the Americans with Disabilities Act, which “framed transness as an impairment but not a protectable disability.” Tobin Siebers argues that such histories must inform attempts to theorize transness and disability because “disability, sickness, and injury come to signify inferior human status.” Although trans studies scholars have often disavowed disability, Awkward-Rich argues that the two fields share a common sensibility and can be productively coupled. This chapter draws attention to how late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors created a discourse of disability by associating trans characters with functional injury, illness, and impairment and argues that trans authors construct a reverse discourse of resistance in landmark novels, such as Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness ([1928] 1990) and Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues ([1993] 2004), as well as contemporary American- and Canadian-penned Lambda Literary Award Finalists such as Imogen Binnie’s Nevada (2013) and Kai Cheng Thom’s Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars (2016). In the process, this chapter outlines key definitions and distinctions within disability studies, including the difference between disability and impairment and the medical and social models of disability.

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