Iowa

ABSTRACT

This essay centers my own experiences on the day Iowa banned trans-affirming healthcare for children and considers the rhetorical significance of daily life in the face of state sanctioned denials of care. I draw on the work of trans rhetoricians and trans scholars more broadly by attending to the limits and possibilities of care in the face of institutional denials of trans people’s lives and livelihoods. Drawing out my own erotic experiences, I ultimately argue for the transfeminist potency of t4t relationships. t4t, shorthand for trans4trans, symbolizes trans practices of mutual care and coalition. I extend theorizations of t4t intimacies by emplacing them in the context of anti-trans legislative actions.

KEYWORDS:

• Trans
• care
• disorientation
• T4t

Acknowledgments

Thanks to E Cram for convening this forum and for repeatedly reading versions of this essay. And thanks to the anonymous reviewer whose suggestions improved this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Iowa City sits at an odd crossroads in Iowa. It is a liberal bastion in a now-conservative state that still fails to live up to its progressive values. Recently, for instance, the school superintendent initiated a state-required book ban without protest. The library, on the other hand, continues to hold drag-themed book readings despite conservative pushback.

2 Dar Williams, “Iowa (Traveling III),” Mortal City (Dar Williams Records, 1996).

3 Katarina Sostaric, “Reynolds’ Bill to Define Man and Woman Advances as Transgender Iowans Call It Discriminatory,” Iowa Public Radio, February 6, 2024, https://www.iowapublicradio.org/state-government-news/2024-02-06/reynolds-bill-to-define-man-and-woman-advances-as-transgender-iowans-call-it-discriminatory.

4 Missouri recently banned trans-affirming healthcare for adults with untreated mental illnesses. Jason Rosenbaum, “Missouri to Restrict Gender-Affirming Care for Trans Adults This Week,” NPR, April 24, 2023, https://www.npr.org/2023/04/24/1171293057/missouri-attorney-general-transgender-adults-gender-affirming-health-care.

5 Hil Malatino, Trans Care (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 3.

6 Morgan DiCesare and E Cram, “Transfeminist Possibilities and Remembering the 1970s,” Women’s Studies in Communication 46, no. 2 (2023): 249.

7 Twenty-nine anti-LGBTQ bills were introduced in Iowa in 2023. “Anti LGBTQ Bills 2023—One Iowa Action,” https://oneiowaaction.org/anti-lgbtq-bills-2023/.

8 Michaela Frischherz, “Listening to Orgasm: Hearing Pleasure Sounds in the Normative Noise,” Argumentation and Advocacy 54, no. 4 (2018): 271.

9 Stephen Gruber-Miller, “Kim Reynolds Says Iowa Ban on Gender-Affirming Care Is in the ‘Best Interest of the Kids,’” The Des Moines Register, March 21, 2023, https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/2023/03/21/kim-reynolds-says-iowa-should-pause-gender-affirming-care-to-trans-kids/70034427007/.

10 t4t, taken from Craigslist’s personals categories, stands for trans for trans. The term has become a colloquial marker of trans love and solidarity, which Hil Malatino discusses at length in “Future Fatigue: Trans Intimacies and Trans Presents (or How to Survive the Interregnum),” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 6, no. 4 (2019): 656.

11 Malatino, “Future Fatigue,” 656.

12 For a longer discussion of the connections between fascism and trans exclusionary radical feminists, see the forum in Women’s Studies in Communication 46, no. 2 (2023).

13 Marquis Bey, Anarcho-Blackness: Notes toward a Black Anarchism (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2020), 75.

14 Malatino, “Future Fatigue,” 656.

15 Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018), 18.

16 Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work, 18.

17 Viji Kuppan explicitly discusses the relationship between Hsu’s work and care webs in Viji Kuppan, “Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics,” Disability & Society 38, no. 5 (2023): 899.

18 V. Jo Hsu, Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2022).

19 E Cram, Violent Inheritance (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2022), 196.

20 E Cram, “Queer Geographies and the Rhetoric of Orientation,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 1 (2019): 101.

21 Hil Malatino, Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2022), 53.

22 Malatino, Side Affects, 53.

23 Hélène Cixous, Keith Cohen, and Paula Cohen, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Signs 1, no. 4 (1976): 876.

24 Frederick C. Corey and Thomas K. Nakayama, “Sextext,” Text and Performance Quarterly 17, no. 1 (1997): 58.

25 Charles E. Morris and Catherine Helen Palczewski, “Sexing Communication: Hearing, Feeling, Remembering Sex/Gender and Sexuality in the NCA,” in A Century of Communication Studies, ed. Pat J. Gehrke and William M. Keith (New York, NY: Routledge, 2014), 128–165.

26 Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (1998): 547.

27 Catherine R. Squires, “Rethinking the Black Public Sphere: An Alternative Vocabulary for Multiple Public Spheres,” Communication Theory 12, no. 4 (2002): 446.

28 Mira Bellwether, Fucking Trans Women: A Zine about the Sex Lives of Trans Women (New York, NY: Mira Bellwether, 2013), 1.