Abstract
This roundtable channels the conference theme “Feminisms and Rhetorics” toward justice for multiply marginalized transgender people. Building on GPatt Patterson and K.J. Rawson’s special issue of Peitho on “Transgender Rhetorics,” panelists adopt a multiaxis, interdisciplinary approach to interrogate the hierarchies of power within trans, queer, and feminist movements that stratify the rhetorical agency of trans people. Given the exponential rise in gender fascism across the globe, including the exponential growth of anti-trans bills introduced in the United States since 2018 and now this year, engagements with trans rhetorics have never been more important. To do justice to this work, however, the panelists insist that scholars must avoid siloing gender as an isolated category of analysis or propping up cissexism as a unique or even the most pressing form of subjugation facing trans people. Centering the trans margins, as this roundtable aims to do, is to peripheralize those trans rhetorics that gain traction in the public sphere, opting instead for the voices, energies, and actions of trans people who have been silenced, sidelined, or overlooked. As this roundtable insists, trans people at the margins are speaking too.