QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking

The First 90 Days–Part 1

2025-08-27T12:27:42-04:00

This is an introduction to the First 90 Days section, including papers on policy and resistance to the Trump Administration's brazen assault on GLBTQ rights, funding and other social justice endeavors.

Backsliding on Progress: The Trump Administration’s Assault on LGBTQI+ and HIV Health Equity—A Domestic and Global Reckoning

2025-04-15T22:46:12-04:00

The Trump administration wasted no time undermining LGBTQI+ health and the health of people living with HIV both globally and domestically, including through attacks on PEPFAR, the world’s largest HIV/AIDS program. Two senior officials from the Biden Administration, one who led LGBTQI+ policy at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the other who was acting chief of staff for PEPFAR at the State Department, propose a response to the impact of these drastic, chaotic, and unprecedented attacks on global health and the human rights of LGBTQI+ and people living with HIV from both a global and domestic health security lens. The co-authors plan to highlight the anticipated long-term impacts on the health and wellbeing of LGBTQI+ and HIV+ people and the organizations who care for and support them, and PEPFAR’s ability to sustain progress on programs for key populations. Their analysis will explore how these destructive actions will lead to worsened health disparities and new outbreaks of preventable disease.

On activism, knowledge generation, and global movements for human rights

2025-04-14T10:00:50-04:00

In this essay, we discuss the cancellation of research and evaluation as one of many attacks on systematically collected evidence. Such attacks have the intended purpose of opening entry points for the flow of disinformation; undermining the ability to make the case for the importance of human rights; and discrediting human rights defenders and the community organizations they lead. We make the case that knowledge generation and movement building are intertwined and challenge the false dichotomization between researchers and activists. We provide an alternative framework for continuing the necessary work of activism and research as funding becomes even more scarce.

Fragmented, Frustrated, Hurting and Holding

2025-05-09T00:58:45-04:00

The term "transition" is inadequate for the shocks, disruptions, infringements, detentions of the first 100 days of the second Trump administration. In this short time, we are having common experiences while also feeling and undergoing specific forms of fear, anxiety, loss of safety, stability. The specificities of our experiences of the present moment reflect and refract through our lived and professional experiences and expertise. Being together and holding space for each other in this moment of shared and specific rupture presents its own challenges, as we discovered when we began to have a collective conversation about the possibilities of doula’ing the destruction of the US foreign aid architecture in this time of national “transition.”

In this piece, we share the work of a subset of WWHIVDD? who responded to a February 21 email from one of the collective’s members, Emily Bass, an activist historian, AIDS worker, and author who focuses on transnational solidarity supporting the HIV response in low-income countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. We share that email and some of the exchanges from other members that flowed from it to begin this piece as a way to show our process. Once we were writing, we thought it might make sense to share our concerns, and knowledge, outside our collective, given that others might not be as focused on how Trump was undermining, cancelling, and changing the world of HIV/AIDS.

On Trans-Generational (Well)Being and the Rising Threat of Erasure

2025-04-14T21:33:53-04:00

A cascade of executive orders issued within the first few months of the second Trump administration has jeopardized the well-being of transgender and gender-expansive (or trans) people of all ages. These abuses of power have restricted gender-affirming care for youth; replaced gender with a binary definition of sex on government documents; withdrawn funding from trans-focused research; and removed data related to trans health from government websites. Foreseeing the mounting threat of erasure facing the trans community, an older trans participant from a recent study reported with alarm, “They’re trying to legislate away my existence.”

This essay explores the threat of erasure that trans people of all ages are facing in the first 90 days of Trump’s presidency. Writing as a nurse researcher and nonbinary person living somewhere between youth and elderhood, I weave together elements of gender studies, health research, and my lived experience to illustrate the impact of these threats on the well-being of trans Americans across generations. Drawing from scholarship on care work in the trans community, I describe the ways in which trans-generational acts of “showing up” for one another may enable trans Americans to resist erasure, to be and to be well in the world.

Exclusion Under the Guise of Readiness

2025-04-18T10:34:29-04:00

With the passing of the Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness Executive Order (EO) 14183 by the Trump Administration, signed on January 27, 2025, members of the United States Military who "express a false gender identity divergent from an individual sex" are being forced to resign. The new guidelines exist alongside a series of executive orders that target marginalized communities, with a specific focus on harming transgender people. By emphasizing "military readiness", the order undermines the constitutional rights of transgender personnel, suggesting that their existence “dilutes” the military’s effectiveness and that they are “harmful to unit cohesion.” EO 14183 also perpetuates that gender dysphoria is not only a crucial part of the trans experience but also that it is akin to personality disorders. According to the EO, service members have 60 days to comply with DoDI 6130.03. This classifies the following as failures to meet standards: urogenital reconstruction, gender-affirming hormone therapy, and/or a history of gender dysphoria. The order supports an archaic portrayal of transgender folks as lacking the ability to uphold an “honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle.” These policies seek to establish a norm of transgender exclusion that bars transgender people from workplaces within and beyond governmental fields. Transgender individuals already experience high levels of financial and social hardships. This article puts forth that the EOs signed by Trump will cause significant material harm to already marginalized transgender people and, in fact, continue the US’s legacy of anti-trans workforce practices.

New executive orders impact on research and clinical trajectories: Barriers to the development of early-stage investigators

2025-04-15T15:43:10-04:00

Introduction: Since the inception of the second Trump Administration multiple executive orders (EOs) have adversely impacted research, grant funding, career advancement, and community partnerships. These EOs disproportionately affect early-stage investigators (ESIs) by hindering key milestones such as graduate admissions, promotion, and tenure. This paper critically examines the implications of these EOs on ESI’s scientific careers.

Research: Due to today’s hostile political climate exacerbated by multiple EOs, many research participants are being erased due to limits and mistrust regarding personal demographic data disclosure. Ultimately, this reduces the ability to draw meaningful conclusions about disparities in research.

Grant Funding: Federal grant review and funding have been disrupted by EOs and federal employee terminations, leading to grant cancellations, deferred study sections and council meetings, and defunding of critical datasets, reducing access to preliminary data and federal grant funds.

Career Advancement: Amid funding cuts and resulting uncertainty due to the EOs, U.S. graduate programs admissions have diminished, preventing the career advancement of ESIs. This reduction will derail scientific and medical advancements— compromising the integrity of clinical care outcomes for the foreseeable future.

Community Partnership: Engaging with both academic and community groups is crucial for developing ESIs. The institutional compliance with the disbanding of special interest workgroups for ESIs from underserved communities (whether pre-emptive or legally mandated) ultimately negatively impacts relationships between the community and the academy.

Conclusion: By restricting research and funding opportunities, limiting advancement, and disbanding community spaces, the EOs have a negative impact on the trajectory of many ESIs.

A Burning of Books: Another Attempt to Continue Erasure and Necropolitics

2025-04-15T11:27:00-04:00

In this article, I will explain how the erasure of digital resources is a continued white supremacist attempt to not only strengthen the U.S.’s colonial power but also erase people with intersex variations, trans, non-binary, and gender-diverse groups, and migrant communities of color. Through my reflexive account, I will elaborate on the real-life effects of these acts and how I proceed with the chaos and targets that surround me and other intersecting communities. Lastly, I urge the public naming of these oppressive acts to resist these attacks of necropolitical violence.

Constellations of Resistance

2025-04-14T21:24:36-04:00

This article reflects on the positioning of trans identities and intimacy in the January 20, 2025 executive order on "defending women" and argues that, despite the order's positioning, intimacy, and especially trans intimacy, is one of the many necessary resistance strategies that are crucial for this moment. To examine how intimacy is and has always been a resistance strategy, especially for trans folx in the Deep South, the authors use a blend of scholarship as well as their experience as two trans people living in Alabama, who have fallen in love against the backdrop of this regime's rise to power.

When your Existence is a Political Act: Rural Queers during Trump’s (Second) First 90 days

2025-04-13T21:45:35-04:00

Trump’s second administration highlights the limitations of existing metronormative framings of queer people’s safety and wellbeing; are LGBTQ2S+ people safe anywhere in the U.S. under Trump's second term, be it urban, rural, or somewhere in-between? What lessons can we learn from queer communities in rural environments who have been at the front lines of resisting anti-LGBTQ2S+ policy? This essay explores the perspectives of rural LGBTQ2S+ people during Trump's first 90 days, and explores the implications of the anti-LGBTQ2S+ policy that has been sweeping conservative states well before Trump's second rise to power.

Critical Hope and Resistance through Collective Poetic Inquiry: A Response to Federal Attacks on Queer and Trans Communities by Scholar-Advocates

2025-04-12T11:05:58-04:00

In early 2025, the U.S. federal administration has made sweeping and targeted attacks that impact queer, trans, non-binary, and gender expansive (QT and TGE) communities across the U.S. with the most harmful attacks directed at TGE youth and adults and those situated at marginalized socio-structural intersections (e.g. TGE immigrants (particularly those who are undocumented), people living with HIV, racialized, and disabled individuals). As scholars in an academic social work program who sit at the intersections of marginalized socio-structural locations, are allies/accomplices to QT/TGE communities, and/or engage in scholarship that promotes equity for QT communities, we have felt the impacts of these attacks daily since day one of the administration. The new and rapidly escalating federal threats compound the already hostile and increasingly anti-TGE political climate across states. We find ourselves grappling with chaos and a multitude of challenges: the erasure of federal funding for TGE-related research, the urgent need to bolster safety and ethics plans for our QT research participants, and the looming fear and worry that our research could be twisted and manipulated to further an anti-QT agenda. Moreover, we have been forced to curtail our social media presence, identify safety plans for ourselves and our families, and confront and cope with the collective trauma we are experiencing; we have been consumed. Together, in the face of these daunting obstacles, we have not faltered and have re-committed ourselves to building community and identifying strategies for resistance.

It is with this spirit of critical hope and determination that we engaged in a process of collective poetic inquiry[i] to process, share, and illuminate how the first 90 days of the administration has impacted us personally, professionally, and communally. The use of poetry as a scholarly method aligns with our values of challenging stigma[ii] and using research as a form of resistance[iii]. Poetry and the arts can serve as powerful tools to disrupt traditional academic conventions, amplify marginalized voices, and confront oppressive systems. We center our own experiences as queer, trans, and non-binary people; allies/accomplices; white, BIPOC, and Latina communities; parents; tenured, pre-tenure, and non-tenure track faculty; graduate students; U.S. citizens and immigrants; Disabled, neurodivergent, mad, and non-disabled individuals; scholars who engage in QT research; social workers, community organizers, and activists; and as a community committed to promoting intersectional social justice — always, and, in particular, during this time when attacks on marginalized communities are increasing at an exponential rate.

Our process of collective poetic inquiry began with a process of sharing our own experiences, thoughts, and emotions and then using these experiences to create a collective story in the form and style of a poem. Our finished product illustrates raw emotional twists and turns; our process of resisting the psychological experience of fragmentation forced upon us by an individualizing, neo-liberal structure[iv]; our movement from individual reactions to collective action; and the necessity of critical hope in our endeavors. We invite readers to journey with us as we build communal spaces, resist attacks on our communities, and hold hope towards a better, more just future.

[i] Sandra Faulkner, “Poetic inquiry: Poetry as/in/for social research,” In P. Leavy (Ed.), The

handbook of arts-based research (2017): pp. 208-230. Guilford Press.

[ii] Jen, Sarah and Paceley, Megan Sophia, “Capturing queer and trans lives and identities: The

promise of research poems to inform stigma research,” Stigma and Health, 6, no 1 (2021): 62–

https://doi.org/10.1037/sah0000282

[iii] Strega, Susan, and Leslie Allison Brown. Research as resistance: Critical, Indigenous and anti-oppressive approaches. Canadian Scholars Press (2005).

[iv] Singh, Sukhmani, Linda Salgin, Daniel Kellogg, Paris DaSilva, Emma Woodman, V. Paul Poteat, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, and Jerel P. Calzo. "Complicating critical discussions in gender sexuality alliances: Youth desire for intersectional conversations and the experience of fragmentation." Journal of Research on Adolescence 34, no. 3 (2024): 987-1004.

Holding Boundaries and Building Guardrails in an Era of Strategic Visibility

2025-04-11T15:17:49-04:00

In an era of intensifying anti-trans rhetoric and policy, visibility has become a fraught and contested terrain. This research centers the experiences of parents of transgender youth as they navigate the emotional, political, and ethical complexities of raising children in a hostile sociopolitical climate. Drawing on a framework of queer world-making, we explore how families engage in acts of resistance through strategic boundary-setting, collective care, and intentional silences. Visibility, often heralded as liberatory, can instead expose families—especially those who are Black, Brown, Indigenous, or undocumented—to heightened surveillance and risk. Through academic-activist collaboration, we argue that research can be a form of resistance, co-creating space for reflection, storytelling, and survival. Parents of trans youth are not merely witnesses to cultural conflict—they are agents of change, crafting alternative infrastructures of care and advocacy. Strategic invisibility emerges not as retreat, but as a radical tactic for protecting trans joy, autonomy, and futures.

Resistance or Surveillance: The Complexities of Being Counted in Trans Research “Right Now”

2025-04-14T13:57:38-04:00

In a society bent on eradicating transness entirely, being counted can be a double-edged sword. In this paper, I use my current study – which uses a participatory approach to develop a quantitative measure of trans-specific dissociation – to consider the complex ethical questions involved in conducting quantitative trans research in the context of the Trump administration’s attacks on trans people. I address the opposing perspectives of quantitative methods as surveillance versus resistance, discussing how these methods may be used by a hostile state to further surveil and control trans lives, but may also be leveraged to counter the erasure that functions as a primary mechanism of trans oppression. I conclude that counting trans lives can be one way that we resist our eradication, but only if we use these methods critically, actively counter pathologizing and normalizing narratives, and place data in the hands of trans communities outside of state and psy/medical institutions.

Global Action for Trans Equality (GATE)

2025-06-10T13:53:29-04:00

Global Action for Trans Equality (GATE) is a global trans-led advocacy organization dedicated to advancing gender equality for all. Founded in 2009 by Mauro Cabral Grinspan and Justus Eisfeld, GATE was born out of a need to address the exclusion of trans and gender diverse communities from international human rights spaces.

“If we control our narratives, we shape our destiny.” Spotlighting The Counter Narrative Project

2025-06-09T23:47:12-04:00

Founded in 2014, The Counter Narrative Project (CNP) uses storytelling to advance social justice for Black queer men by challenging harmful narratives that shape discriminatory policies. CNP operates through three central interventions and strategies: producing original content, training advocates, and establishing partnerships with theaters, researchers, and media outlets to amplify the voices of Black queer individuals. By deliberately adopting an intergenerational framework that captures diverse perspectives across income levels and lived experiences, CNP demonstrates that narrative change constitutes structural change, reclaiming storytelling power for communities that have been historically silenced or misrepresented in the dominant discourse.

Queer Conversation with Martin F. Manalansan IV

2025-08-27T12:36:38-04:00

This conversation between Pilipino scholars highlights the complex ways that queer identities show up across diaspora. In it, Manalansan expands on notions of "mess" in his work, especially as it relates to queer movements and migrations.

Swasarnt Nerf's Calculus of the Closet

2025-08-21T16:23:11-04:00

This article examines Gaedicker’s Sodom-on-Hudson and related mid-century guides attributed to “Swasarnt Nerf” (likely Edgar Leoni) as rare archival artifacts of postwar queer life in New York City. Emerging in the liminal period between the Pansy and Lesbian Craze and the consolidation of the “closet,” these mimeographed publications mapped a commercial geography of bars, bathhouses, theaters, and cruising sites while codifying a lexicon of “Gayese.” Drawing on Jeffrey Escoffier’s analysis of the “closet economy,” the article conceptualizes these guides as “club goods”—information and cultural scripts accessible only to initiated members—whose circulation balanced the rewards of connection with the risks of visibility, surveillance, and police repression. Escoffier’s framework clarifies how the closet was structured by the dialectic between information management and the threat of violence, imposing transaction costs on queer life while fostering resilient cultural institutions. The guides’ humor, coded language, and discretionary strategies illustrate how queer networks adapted to state regulation, media exposés, and shifting racial geographies, including the decline of Harlem’s Black queer nightlife under postwar policing and segregation. By tracing the spatial, linguistic, and economic contours of this underground, the article argues that Swasarnt Nerf’s work both reflected and reinforced the infrastructural logics of the closet, even as growing cultural visibility in the late 1950s and beyond eroded its protective secrecy. Ultimately, these publications offer historians a tangible record of a deliberately ephemeral world and the precarious balance between concealment and community in mid-century queer America.

Escaping the Point

2024-04-25T11:52:49-04:00

Since TIME magazine’s declaration of the “transgender tipping point” in 2014, images of transgender identities in US film and television have more than quadrupled. And yet, these efforts to make transgender bodies “visible” within popular media often reproduce a tacit cissexist optics that remains intact. Trans activists, creators, and scholars have pointed out that this increased representation offers transgender people a paradox: What seems like a “door” into recognition and acceptance also enacts a “trap of the visual” by which trans bodies are simultaneously objectified both against and under an implicitly cissexist gaze. In this essay, I draw on trans artist Edie Fake’s work to explore how trans aesthetics might resist this trap by escaping the point of tipping-point optics. By “point” I mean the interpellative pointing of media at the transgender body as well as the assumption that the “point” of transgender visibility (both its purpose and direction) is to improve transgender lives. I offer Fake’s work here as a transfixing response to the paradoxes of tipping point optics—one that cuts through our assumptions about the value of representation, demonstrating why and how we should resist the current fixation on transgender visibility.

Capturing Jeff

2025-04-24T21:21:29-04:00

Memories can be retained through objects.

Fugitive Freedom Dreaming

2025-04-13T20:57:09-04:00

Fugitive Freedom Dreaming: Claiming a Queer Afrofuturist Lens of Resistance

Fugitive Freedom Dreaming (2024) is a cinematic poem filmed at Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose in St. Augustine Florida between 2022-2023. Also known as Fort Mose, this territory was established in 1738 during the Spanish occupation. Guiding the reader through the film which structures the work offers a way to read the film as a means of claiming queerness as an integral component of Black liberation. The work is a counter narrative to the dominant perceptions of the Spanish Florida colonial period for which evidence of rebellion is more often than not erased, overlooked, minimized, and/or for all intents and purposes, made absent from Floridian collective memory. In this piece, I contextualize the historical context of the film, the visual and aural strategies employed in filmmaking, and the means by which the piece is a poetic intervention for celebrating the underrecognized histories of maroon cultures in the United States. From this praxis of spiritual and intellectual curiosity, I assert a queer Black aesthetic that opens up space for me as a Black artist living, surviving, and thriving in the midst of the contemporary reality of the settler colonial state of what is now called the United States of America.

The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment by Cameron Awkward-Rich (review)

2025-03-05T13:06:23-05:00

The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center. By Rhaina Cohen. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2024; pp. 308, $29.00 hardback; $14.99 ebook.

2025-02-28T10:45:25-05:00

Editors' Introduction

2025-08-27T12:50:35-04:00

This introduction by the new co-editors of QED raises questions about the meaning of queer and queer publishing as there are new challenges to GLBTQ livelihoods, education, economic opportunities, capacity for civic participation, and organizations.