My research agenda responds to the contemporary and transnational rise in anti-trans politics by explaining why transphobia appeals to ideologically and geographically diverse reactionary actors spanning a wide (and often oppositional) range of issue areas and partisan commitments.

My dissertation problematizes dominant understandings of transphobia as an inherently conservative project by identifying how anti-trans traditionalist and feminists develop shared strategies and practices of transphobia while simultaneously attempting to either strengthen or dismantle patriarchal sex/gender orders. I find that anti-trans feminists and traditionalists generate fear via shared threat constructions but frame threat differently in order to mobilize affective energy in service of contradicting sex/gender orders. I argue that the illogics produced by contradictions within this incompatible coalition benefit both camps by maximizing affective disorientation and generating momentum through paradoxical and circular relationships between the threat of transness and the formal and informal regimes designed to ameliorate that threat.

My work beyond my dissertation builds on my findings about what makes transphobia affectively flexible to explore when and how different movements appeal to transphobia to serve their broader agendas. 

Through a comparative critical discourse analysis of anti-trans texts from politically progressive and conservative LGB groups, I account for the flexibility of anti-trans lateral hostility in serving a wide range of goals. I find that despite some shared language and strategies, LGB conservatives pursue transphobia toward the end of assimilating within heteronormativity while LGB progressive and radical feminists pursue transphobia as momentum for separatist strategies.

"The Other Other: Transphobia within Reactionary Movements"
While there is a growing body of scholarship exploring the integration of transphobia into populist and other reactionary political movements, much of this work centers on how transphobia functions within right-wing agendas. I demonstrate the flexibility of transphobia by identifying how actors on both sides of transnational contestations over issue areas such as migration, climate change, and global racial hegemony use transphobia to advance their positions.