What is at stake in acknowledging transgender studies' Anglophone roots in the global North and West? What kinds of politics might emerge from challenging the assumption that biological sex—or the categories "man" and "woman"—is stable and self-evident across time, space, and culture? This collection asks how trans scholarship can decolonize, rather than reproduce, dominant imaginaries of sexuality and gender.
The issue highlights roadblocks as well as unexpected openings in the global circulation of trans politics and culture. A First Nations scholar recovers lost tribal knowledge of non-Eurocentric gender. A Thai trans filmmaker negotiates culturally incommensurable categories of self. Two contributors consider what is lost as the term transgender replaces local, vernacular categories of difference in India. A study of genderqueer childhood in Peru disrupts colonial ethnographer-informant roles, while another author critiques the colonialist ethnography on the sarimbavy, gender nonconforming categories of Madagascar. Another essay follows the global commodity chain of synthetic hormones to explore the biopolitics of transgender bodies and race. Finally, a roundtable discussion among a transnational panel of activists, culture makers, and scholars offers perspectives on decolonizing the transgender imaginary that range from the celebratory to the cynical.

The first famous transgender person in the United States, Christine Jorgensen, traveled to Denmark for gender reassignment surgery in 1952. Jorgensen became famous during the ascent of postwar dreams about the possibilities for technology to transform humanity and the world. In Mobile Subjects Aren Z. Aizura examines transgender narratives within global health and tourism economies from 1952 to the present. Drawing on an archive of trans memoirs and documentaries as well as ethnographic fieldwork with trans people obtaining gender reassignment surgery in Thailand, Aizura maps the uneven use of medical protocols to show how national and regional health care systems and labor economies contribute to and limit transnational mobility. Aizura positions transgender travel as a form of biomedical tourism, examining how understandings of race, gender, and aesthetics shape global cosmetic surgery cultures and how economic and racially stratified marketing and care work create the ideal transgender subject as an implicitly white, global citizen. In so doing, he shows how understandings of travel and mobility depend on the historical architectures of colonialism and contemporary patterns of global consumption and labor.