Dreaming Trans: A Collaborative Zine
These conversations unfolded within a social landscape in which the figure of the trans//sexual continues to haunt the collective psyche, serving as a political scapegoat and repository for anxieties surrounding sex and the imagined cohesion of the nation-state. Together, we asked: What does it mean to think with trans livability within a social imaginary that insists, if not on trans destruction, then on making trans people bear its antagonisms and disavowed affects? And if we take seriously the psychoanalytic dream’s capacities to compromise, wish, overdetermine, and leak jouissance, what becomes possible for the trans dreamer within this field?
The need for these conversations became immediately apparent: registration for the seminar filled within twenty-four hours of its circulation through student networks. McGill University is home to a thriving community of transgender, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming students. Across the sessions, many participants shared a real longing for T4T intellectual spaces. Participants outside the university likewise emphasized the importance of free, accessible pathways into trans scholarship.
In planning the series, the two students recognized the importance of documenting this gathering and enabling its insights to travel beyond the seminar room. The idea for the zine emerged from this shared recognition. Across the three sessions, participants were invited to save their notes, draw, and imagine what contribution they might make to a self-published record of our time together.
Our conversations unfolded across three sites of inquiry, each tracing the tension between trans fantasy and the political fantasies organized around transness. We began by exploring the possibility of T4T methodologies and trans-specific approaches to research. The second seminar examined transmasculine sexuality across film, the archive, and the bathhouse through a screening and discussion of the hybrid film Desire Lines (2024). The third turned to the unconscious life of transphobia through an examination of transphobic countertransference. Across each session, we worked to “think trans” together, practising a collective opposition to ciscentrism through sustained psychic movement and play.
The closing evening included a reception at Bar Milton-Parc, a queer-focused, worker-owned co-operative. The gathering offered a moment of celebration and reprieve as we riffed on what we had learned, laughed together, and shared generous platters of fresh food that brought a much-needed sense of abundance.
The resulting zine was assembled by the student assistant Gabriel, who gathered drawings, notes, and stories contributed by participants. Colourful and collage-forward, the publication includes information on the seminar readings, reflections on the sessions, personal narratives, erotic and experimental drawings, resonant quotations, and T4T ramblings. Inspired by one participant’s description of the importance of giving one another “permission” to exist, the zine stands as a testament to the seminar’s collaborative work: experimental, generous, and manifesting novel possibilities for collective thought.
We were delighted to receive funding that made colour printing possible. Print copies of the zine will be available at Dick’s Lending Library and at the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (IGSF). A free digital copy can also be downloaded here: Dreaming Trans: A Collaborative Zine.
Dreaming Trans: Method, Sex, and the Unconscious and this collaborative zine were made possible through the generous support of the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies and the Sex in Theory Working Group at McGill University.