Finally, I perceived a tremendous utility, both political and theoretical, in the new concept of an antiessentialist, postidentitarian, strategically fluid 'queerness.' It was through participation in Queer Nation-particularly its San Francisco-based spin-off, Transgender Nation-that I sharpened my theoretical teeth on the practice of transsexuality. 4 Feinberg linked the drive to inhabit this newly envisioned space to a broader struggle for social justice. Feinberg took a preexisting term, transgender, and invested it with new meaning, enabling it to become the name for Stone's theorized posttranssexualism. The third moment was Leslie Feinberg's little pamphlet, Transgender Liberation. 3 I considered my article on transgender rage an explicit answer to that call. Raymond's paranoiac Transsexual Empire and called on transsexual people to articulate new narratives of self that better expressed the authenticity of transgender experience. The second moment was the appearance of Sandy Stone's 'The 'Empire' Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,' which pointedly criticized Janice G. 2 A critical reappraisal of transsexuality, I felt, promised a timely and significant contribution to the analysis of the intersection of gender and sexuality. Gender's absence renders sexuality largely incoherent, yet gender refuses to be the stable foundation on which a system of sexuality can be theorized. The first was Judith Butler's then recent, now paradigmatic linkage of gender with the notion of trouble. 1 The article addressed four distinct theoretical moments.

In the first volume of GLQ I published my first academic article, 'My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,' an autobiographically inflected performance piece drawn from my experiences of coming out as a transsexual. If queer theory was born of the union of sexuality studies and feminism, transgender studies can be considered queer theory's evil twin: it has the same parentage but willfully disrupts the privileged family narratives that favor sexual identity labels (like gay, lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual) over the gender categories (like man and woman) that enable desire to take shape and find its aim.

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10.2 (2004) 212-215 In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Stryker transgender