This special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly explores the vital and contested place of surgical intervention in the making of trans bodies, theories, and practices. It investigates surgery as an institutionally, culturally, politically, and personally situated practice.
Surgery is hard to talk about. This has been the case in transgender studies since the emergence of the field, often dated to the publication of Sandy Stone's essay “The Empire Strikes Back” in 1991 (2006). Perhaps the most influential of Stone's arguments was the call then for transsexual people—and, later, for scholars of transgender studies—to decenter, refract, complicate, or refuse the medical discourses that had for decades defined transsexuals as a group constituted by the desire for sex-altering surgical intervention. Even the handful of extant transsexual autobiographies circulating at the time, Stone argued, placed a too large and often magical focus on the kind of total transformation that surgery...
