Black Transfeminism: A Radical Way of Thinking About Gender

Yarlenis M. Malfrán’s “El transfeminismo negro: un pensamiento radical sobre género” is an explicitly situated opinion essay, not a comprehensive survey of Black feminism or trans feminism. It first resists reducing Black feminism to “race” as a single issue, and cautions against turning intersectionality into one theory, one author, or a fixed formula. This does not rule out dialogue among traditions. It sharpens the question: when we translate ideas from different contexts into concepts already familiar to us, do we sometimes erase the histories and languages in which those ideas took shape?

The essay makes that risk concrete through a debate about intellectual genealogy. Malfrán rejects the claim that Lélia Gonzalez had already “formulated intersectionality” as a way to establish Gonzalez’s importance. Such a retrospective can fold Gonzalez’s thought into a U.S. theoretical lineage named and systematized later by Kimberlé Crenshaw. Malfrán is not saying the two thinkers cannot be read together; she argues that related concerns are not automatically the same concept, and that thought from the Global South should not have to resemble Northern theory to count as valuable. She then turns to Brazilian Black transfeminist knowledge, discussing Silvana de Souza Nascimento’s naming of this emerging field and the work of Jaqueline Gomes de Jesus and C. Riley Snorton. The essay’s discussion of slavery, medicine and gender classification draws on those cited lines of scholarship; it is not a single account of all Black or trans experience.

The feminist force of the essay lies in making the authority to define “woman,” gender and experience part of the political question. Black people have been hypergendered in some systems and denied recognition as gendered subjects in others; trans people confront norms that naturalize gender as fixed and binary. Bringing these histories into relation does not make racialization and trans experience interchangeable. It asks how medicine, colonial knowledge and racial power have jointly shaped which bodies are recognized as fully human. Knowledge production is therefore not a detached academic dispute: when concepts travel through a single center’s classifications, people at the margins can again appear only as “cases,” rather than as creators of theory.

Read the essay as a map whose standpoint is stated, not as a final definition. Its short form concentrates on conceptual disputes and the visibility of Brazilian thought; it cannot represent the full range of Black trans feminist practice worldwide. Pair it with FemRes’s Black on Both Sides by C. Riley Snorton to examine how U.S. racial history and trans identity are constituted together in a particular setting, and with Kimberlé Crenshaw’s talk on intersectionality to compare different ways of naming structural power. The point is not to decide who “invented” whom, but to follow concepts through their origins, translations and irreducible differences.

Original and further reading

• Yarlenis M. Malfrán’s original essay (Spanish)
• Black on Both Sides; Kimberlé Crenshaw on intersectionality