Beyond Personhood

An Essay in Trans Philosophy

Talia Mae Bettcher

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Hardback

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English

University of Minnesota Press
18 March 2025

Social & political philosophy; Gender studies, gender groups

A bold intervention in the philosophical concepts of gender, sex, and self

Beyond Personhood provides an entirely new philosophical approach to trans experience, trans oppression, gender dysphoria, and the relationship between gender and identity. Until now, trans experience has overwhelmingly been understood in terms of two reductive frameworks: trans people are either ""trapped in the wrong body"" or they are oppressed by the gender binary. Both accounts misgender large trans constituencies while distorting their experience, and neither can explain the presentation of trans people as make-believers and deceivers or the serious consequences thereof. In Beyond Personhood, Talia Mae Bettcher demonstrates how taking this phenomenon seriously affords a new perspective on trans oppression and trans dysphoria-one involving liminal states of ""make-believe"" that bear positive possibilities for self-recognition and resistance.

Undergirding this account is Bettcher's groundbreaking theory of interpersonal spatiality-a theory of intimacy and distance that requires rejection of the philosophical concepts of person, self, and subject. She argues that only interpersonal spatiality theory can successfully explain trans oppression and gender dysphoria, thus creating new possibilities for thinking about connection and relatedness.

An essential contribution to the burgeoning field of trans philosophy, Beyond Personhood offers an intersectional trans feminism that illuminates transphobic, sexist, heterosexist, and racist oppressions, situating trans oppression and resistance within a much larger decolonial struggle. By refusing to separate theory from its application, Bettcher shows how a philosophy of depth can emerge from the everyday experiences of trans people, pointing the way to a reinvigoration of philosophy.

By: Talia Mae Bettcher
Imprint: University of Minnesota Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 140mm, Spine: 16mm
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9781517902568
ISBN 10: 1517902568
Pages: 312
Publication Date: 18 March 2025
Audience: General/trade , Professional and scholarly , ELT Advanced , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Contents Preface and Acknowledgments Introduction Part I. The Central Concepts: “Worlds” Apart 1. Getting “Real” 2. On Intimacy and Distance 3. The Multiplicity of Meaning Part II. The Main Idea: Between Appearance and Reality 4. The Politics of Pretense 5. The Phenomenology of Illusion 6. The Operations of Theory Part III. The Buried Lede: The Liminalities among Us 7. The Coloniality of Intimacy 8. The Enslaving Self 9. Return of the Object Conclusion Glossary Notes Index

Talia Mae Bettcher is professor of philosophy at California State University, Los Angeles, and coeditor of Trans Philosophy, also published by the University of Minnesota Press.

Reviews for Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy

""This profound and provocative work magisterially demonstrates the maturation of trans philosophy as a subfield, as well as the vitality of a trans approach to philosophy in general. How Talia Mae Bettcher’s novel theory of ‘interpersonal spatiality’ explodes traditional concepts of person, self, and subject to display their colonial and racialist roots makes Beyond Personhood broadly relevant to many disciplines and social movements.""—Susan Stryker, Clayman Institute for Gender Research, Stanford University ""Talia Mae Bettcher’s eagerly anticipated book offers an account of trans oppression and trans experience that is rigorous, radical, and entirely original. Dispensing with old orthodoxies, her ‘ground-bound philosophy’ enjoins us to undertake trans philosophy anew by ‘abandoning the notions of person, self, and subject’ that have constricted our thinking and our world. It is only through moving beyond ‘the catastrophe we call personhood,’ she argues, that we can understand the roots of trans oppression and the fullness of trans possibility. Beyond Personhood is destined to be a canonical text in trans philosophy.""—Gayle Salamon, author of The Life and Death of Latisha King: A Critical Phenomenology of Transphobia