Calls for Papers

Volume 14 CFPs

Although some issues of TSQ are special issues devoted to a particular theme, two issues each year are general, open-call, non-themed issues. We are pleased to invite submissions for TSQ 14.2 and 14.4, our next two open-call issues. We welcome works on any topic that substantively engages with "trans" as a subject of inquiry, methodology, or field of study. We especially encourage submissions that consider intersections of trans studies with other fields of study rooted in the critical analysis of minoritized populations such as people of color and people with disabilities, that engage with feminism, challenge trans studies’ emphasis on the global north, disrupt or productively complicate the dominance of English in trans studies, or which include and esteem the embodied knowledge of trans persons outside of the academy.

We also invite submissions for 14.3, the Trans Reproduction special issue. See description below.

Issue Deadlines

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 14.2
General Issue (open submission)
Deadline: 3/30/26

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 14.3
Special Issue: Trans Reproduction
Deadline: 7/17/26

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 14.4
General Issue (open submission)
Deadline: 10/9/26

Submission requirements

  • Length: 5,000–7,000 words for scholarly articles; 1,000–2,000 words for shorter essays
  • Format: Double-spaced, anonymized throughout, with abstract, keywords, and biographical note
  • Art and media submissions encouraged; some may appear in TSQ*Now

  • Please consult TSQ’s detailed Style Sheet

    tsq_style_sheet.pdf (481.88 KB)
  • Any questions about the issue should be addressed to our editorial office: tsqjournal at gmail.com.

Submission platform

To submit a manuscript, please visit us at ScholarOne Manuscripts. Please note that TSQ, like other Duke University Press journals, has moved to ScholarOne, replacing the prior Editorial Manager platform. If this is your first time using ScholarOne, please register first, then proceed with submitting your manuscript. If you have any difficulties with the process, contact the journal at tsqjournal at gmail.com. 

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly: 14.3: Special Issue on Trans Reproduction

About the issue

Deadline: July 17, 2026

Since the incorporation of trans healthcare into international diagnostic standards in the mid-twentieth century, litigation-averse doctors and policymakers have often centered concerns about reproductive loss. In recent years, the maintenance of fertility has become a central rhetorical component of calls to restrict pediatric trans healthcare – an argument that has expanded toward adult bans in 2025. Across legal, medical, and cultural domains, trans people are framed as reproductive anomalies who must be explained, disciplined, or exceptionalized to preserve a normative order where reproduction remains the privilege and burden of cis women. All the while, of course, trans people have engaged in projects of gestation and care of children.

This special issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly seeks to reorient these debates around the desires, experiences, and conceptual provocations that trans people pose to the biological and social work of gestation and reproduction. Rather than treating trans reproduction as aberrant, impossible, or sensationalized, we ask: What becomes possible when we begin from the premise that trans people have always done the work of reproduction?

We welcome contributions that explore trans engagements – both historical and new – with fertility, pregnancy, family-making, and reproductive desire, while foregrounding the racial, colonial, and economic structures that shape reproductive life.

Submissions may include, but need not be limited to, the following themes:

  • Histories of reproductive governance: sterilization mandates, legal regulation, and medical gatekeeping
  • Embodied practices: fertility preservation, pregnancy, abortion, parenting, and hormonal self-management
  • Kinship and care: chosen families, queer parenting, and collective survival strategies
  • Cultural and theoretical interventions: representations of trans gestation, critiques of reproductive futurism, and speculative visions of kinship and continuity
  • Intersecting structures: the ways race, colonialism, disability, class, and migration shape trans reproductive life

This issue emerges amid intensifying backlash, as gender-affirming care and abortion access are targeted through overlapping legal strategies that collapse bodily autonomy into moral panic and child protection into eugenic control. These are not separate crises: from the sterilization mandates historically imposed on trans people of color seeking recognition, to the criminalization of queer kinship, reproduction has always been a political battleground.

At the same time, trans people continue to make life possible under siege. Underground hormone-sharing networks, informal reproductive arrangements, and practices of mutual aid and collective care resist containment and open other ways of imagining continuity and survival.

Trans reproductive life exposes the assumptions undergirding dominant reproductive logics and insists that reproduction is not simply about children, but about sustaining life, kinship, and futurity under conditions designed to extinguish them.

We welcome both scholarly essays and creative interventions that illuminate how trans reproductive practices disrupt cisnormative assumptions and open alternative visions of continuity, kinship, and care. Together, these contributions will trace how trans life makes and unmakes reproduction, and how reproductive justice requires centering trans experiences in order to imagine livable futures.

See above for information about submission requirements and submission platform.

Issue Editors

Emma Heaney (NYU)

Emma Heaney is a scholar of comparative literature, trans studies, and Marxist feminism. She is the author of The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory and This Watery Place: Four Essays on Gestation. She is the editor of Feminism Against Cisness. She teaches in the XE Program at NYU, where she serves as faculty advisor for the Advanced Certificate in Experimental Writing.

Carlo Sariego (Yale University)

Carlo Sariego is a PhD candidate in sociology and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Yale University. Their interdisciplinary research spans transgender studies, medical sociology, disability studies, feminist STS, and queer of color critique, with a focus on race, reproduction, and state power. Using qualitative and feminist methods, Carlo examines how shifting borders and fluctuating bodies shape reproductive politics, family formation, and gendered violence.

Their recent work in Signs and Feminist Theory theorizes racialized reproductive coercion and advances a transfeminist approach to pregnancy.