The 2025 Pembroke Publics Lecture | Gillian Branstetter

How we got here

In the spring of 2023, faculty and organizers for the Gender & Sexualities Department at Brown University asked me what my availability was like for April 2025. They wanted me to give that year’s iteration of the Pembroke Publics lecture series reserved for “activists and academics who engage with issues of gender and sexuality in a transformative manner”—a description certainly fit for their previous honorees, including foundational scholars like Dr. Dorothy Roberts and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. At the time I received the invite, I was fighting somewhat fruitlessly to stop a wave of laws banning hormone therapies for transgender youth, while the media landscape I had made my purview was shifting under my feet, and liberal hesitancies over transgender rights had launched itself into a full-on retreat. I was not feeling very accomplished or like my expertise had done anyone much of any good; in many ways, I felt like I was failing the people, families, and communities I had dedicated my career to fighting alongside.

While I was honored and humbled by the invitation, I wondered how I could possibly be the right person to speak to even the narrow set of feminist demands called “transgender rights.” The more I thought about it, however, the more I wanted to use this lecture as a means of exploring how we—that is, mainstream transgender advocacy—had gotten here. No small part of that story is the failure of many institutions much, much more powerful than we to prevent this moment—”Everyone who was supposed to protect you from this failed miserably” read a memorable Rolling Stone headline on the day of Donald Trump’s return to the presidency. But it would be a missed opportunity to address our, and my own, role in that failure.

So I wanted to chart that story—where transgender rights was before its inclusion in the 2010s narrative of inevitable social progress, why its inclusion in that story failed to stick, and why so many failed and still fail to grasp the power of trans misogyny to unite very old and very powerful narratives within the American psyche. Many of these ideas will not be new to readers of this newsletter or followers of my work elsewhere, and the breadth of the topics I cover means I only touch on some issues—trans misogynist violence, the medical history of sex changes, the power exchanges between social and prestige media—that could themselves be the topic of entire seminars.

I’m very thankful to the Pembroke Center and Brown University for hosting me, specifically Wendy Lee, Helis Sikk, and Diane Straker. Closed captions are available on the video below: