Transness is not a static existence, it’s rocky and messy but it’s survival. Debate forces transness to conform to an unrealistic ideal that prevents the messiness of survival and debate to occur.

Critical argumentation is an argumentative constellation and all critical arguments in the 21st are indebted to Black radicalism in the activity. And whether or not individual debaters recognize it, all critical arguments compound on one another. One set of arguments in the expanse of critical debate is what I will be describing here as trans argumentation. Trans argumentation is not static nor complete—it is continually unfolding in the classroom spaces of intercollegiate policy debate. Trans argumentation’s edges are jagged and its history holds complexities that shape the methodological choices of this essay. For instance, many times trans argumentation is not posted online in full transparency due to the risks of outing students that are running it in round, which also influences whether or not students want their debate rounds to be recorded. Furthermore, what is recognized as trans argumentation is racialized: Black critiques of gender imposition often are not optically situated within the vein of trans criticism, despite theorizing dualistic gender normativity and working to uproot violence against gender deviance. Wrestling with these questions, I have chosen to speak of trans argumentation broadly in terms of the conversations, questions, positions, interventions and strategies it often pursues instead of isolating a singular debate or debate duo as a case study to survey the field. At the core of trans argumentation is the idea that trans people are not merely a singular counterpoint to transexclusionary feminism or queer theory or but rather deserve foregrounded political attention, in particular to the ways in which surpassing the permissible limits of gender is scripted as a threatening deception and being identified or identifying oneself as trans accrues surveillance and attack. As I explain, in some instances this means that white and non-Black trans arguments end up isolating transphobia from other vectors of violence, namely white supremacy, settlement and capital accumulation. These veins of trans criticism foreclose on their debt to Black radicalism. But as I proffer, trans argumentation has and can instigate modes of argumentative relationality that compounds on and with Black intellectualism(s) to assemble alternative political blueprints and challenge the limitations of single-issue frames. Trans argumentation, like most trans scholarship and study, wrestles with its own subject matters, definitions, and limits. A key characteristic of trans argumentation is the problematization of the prevailing conception that there is a fixed, isolatable and identifiable population of transgender subjects and that the terms trans/transgender/transsexual, when used as self-descriptors, retain universal meanings. Trans argumentation queries: what is violence against gender transgression and what does it mean to face it and perpetuate it? How do we reckon with the fact that gender outlaws hold a variety of perspectives, politics and experiences? What does it mean to be cis and aspire to cisness? How can gender transition teach us about political transition? What trans pedagogies should we pass down (and up and across)? Why do so many people adhere to embalmed gender and sexual scripts that in so many ways, work to dictate and control our words, bodies and actions? How do trans phenomena assist us all in rethinking what is construed as impossible? These questions guide political and social demands against trans disenfranchisement and themselves are entangled with the questioning practices of Black radical criticism. Trans arguments present legal analysis of the reverberating consequences of criminalization of cross-dressing, sodomy and prostitution in and out of the United States. Trans argumentation presents negative criticisms and affirmative cases that ask their opponents to encounter and respond to trans pedagogies, theories, writings, poems, manifestos, films and music. In order to engage in this mode of study, trans argumentation turns back to the archive to present trans figures and collectives, such as the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) spearheaded by Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, and trans insurgencies against police and corporate repression such as the 1959 Cooper Do-Nuts riot, the 1965 Dewey's Sit-In, the 1966 Compton's Cafeteria riot, and the 1969 Stonewall rebellion (Stryker, 2008). Analyzed in round, students debate about the ways in which the collectives and insurgencies of trans political organizing should be analyzed and regarded. Instead of positioning trans insurgency in an isolated vacuum, debaters committed to interdisciplinary analysis situate trans resistance amid the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 60s. This includes the unintentional omission and intentional sacrifice of trans people from emerging feminist, lesbian and gay movements that in their own ways are also indebted to Black radicalism whether it with tactics (consciousness-raising and sitins) or slogans (gay is good).