During the past eight years, as far as she has been able to confirm, Gabrielle Bychowski, Ph.D., created the first university-level courses on transgender literature in the United States.
“A lot of people don’t know that transliterature is not only an existing but growing and evolving genre of literature that has more than enough to establish an archive, a canon and a syllabus,” said the Anisfield-Wolf SAGES Fellow and lecturer at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU). “We’re at the point now where there’s no one way to teach transliterature because there are multiple, distinctive genres.”
When it comes to the transliterature field of academic study, Bychowski’s an unqualified superstar. Her contributions to scholarship publications have led to invitations to speak throughout the U.S. and Europe. Her website “Transliterature: Things Transform” recently surpassed a million viewers. In September 2024, one of her articles was cited in an amicus brief for the Supreme Court case regarding transgender healthcare.
Bychowski pioneered the field of study while completing her doctoral dissertation, “Transgender Literature,” at George Washington University (GWU) in Washington, D.C.
“I had to plant a flag saying transliterature exists, it is important, and it is worthy of study,” she said. “Thus far, the scholarship has been generated by only a few emerging scholars, including myself, but it’s a growing field.”
Bychowski and other scholars are working to rebuild the immense archive of transgender literature and scholarship first assembled by Magnus Hirschfeld in Germany in the early 20th century, until the Nazi’s destroyed the collection in May 1933. An accomplished sexologist and activist, Hirschfeld founded Berlin’s Institute of Sexual Sciences in 1919 as a clinic and research center to study homosexual rights activism and support transgender people.
“We are only now starting to get back to coordinated forms of research, and unfortunately, Hirschfeld was doing this work as a Jewish man in Germany during the rise of the Nazi party,” Bychowski explained. “His archive was one of their first targets, and many of the photos of Nazi book burnings are from a single book burning, which is the destruction of Magnus Hirschfeld’s archive.”
Fortunately Hirschfeld was traveling through Europe and the U.S. at the time and was warned not to return to Germany.
During her decade in Washington to earn her master’s and doctoral degrees at GWU, Bychowski started doing consultation work on transgender, critical race and disability issues. She was invited twice to the White House during President Obama’s administration to discuss ways that LGBTQ+ media could lay the path for legislative successes to further trans rights. On Nov. 23, 2015, she was a part of the “LGBT Champions of Change” forum held in conjunction with President Obama declaring Stonewall a national monument.
In August 2017, after earning her Ph.D. in English Literature, Bychowski accepted her position at CWRU. In addition to a Transgender Literature class, she taught courses entitled Queer Christianity, Trans Narratives on Color, Women of the Civil Rights Movement, Disability History, and Intersectional Feminisms. While at CWRU, she has published more than 20 peer-reviewed research papers that solidify her scholarship credentials in the field of transliterature.
“Gabby is the early creator of the field of transliterature and transgender medieval studies,” said her friend and academic collaborator Dorothy Kim, Ph.D., assistant professor of English and Women and Gender Studies at Brandeis University in Boston. “The field is indebted to her early work on the topic in terms of what she has published and said as well as getting people connected to the field.”
As part of her responsibilities, Bychowski consulted for the Cleveland Foundation on the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, founded in 1935 by Cleveland poet and philanthropist Edith Anisfield-Wolf as the first prize to recognize books that contribute to our understanding of racism and diversity of cultures. She also ran related annual conferences, symposia, seminars and working groups, and she consulted for the Cleveland Foundation’s Inter|Urban public art project that created murals about Racial Equity as an art and culture connector along the RTA Red Line between downtown and Public Square.
“I saw a unique opportunity because if another faculty member had suggested the class, they probably wouldn’t have gotten it approved,” Bychowski said. “But because I’m a scholar in the field and I had the backing of Anisfield-Wolf, the transgender literature class was approved, and I was able to go ahead.”
Unfortunately for CWRU students, the courses Bychowski taught will be discontinued.
“Few scholars have the specific skills and experience to teach at least half of those seminars,” she explained, adding that the university typically does not have people teach seminars developed by someone else. “Transgender Literature is so new that only a handful of scholars in the world right now would be especially qualified to teach it.”
Karen Long, former manager of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards for the Cleveland Foundation last year, believes that the awards founder, Edith Anisfield-Wolf, “would have been giddy” about having a transgender woman as an Anisfield-Wold SAGES Fellow.
“Our question was always, who have we not invited to the table, and that seemed an ideal advancement into that thinking,” said Long, former book editor for The Plain Dealer. “Gabby is first of all a scholar with a wonderful sense of humor who cares deeply for her students.”
Long cites an essay Bychowski wrote for the Anisfield-Wolf website, “A Shelf of One’s Own – An Argument for Transgender Literature,” as an example of one of the writer’s superpowers: “wit matched with grit.”
“She used Virginia Woolf’s book [about women’s rights] as a springboard about what it would mean to hold space for the stories yet to come that would get a place on that shelf where the told stories would outweigh the untold stories and the erased people,” Long said. “ I just thought it was so beautiful and important, and her students responded to her in a similar way.”
A specialty focus on medieval transgenderism
In 2019, “Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality” invited Bychowski and Kim to co-edit a special edition of their journal entitled “Visions of Medieval Trans Feminism.”
The two co-wrote an Introduction to the issue, and Bychowski contributed an article, “The Necropolitics of Narcissus: Confessions of Transgender Suicide in the Middle Ages.” The publication enabled open access so that anyone worldwide could access the issue.
“If we want to talk about the impact of this work, last year one of our articles was cited in an amicus brief for the U.S. Supreme Court in relationship to the transgender healthcare case before the court,” Kim said. “This scholarship is also about activism, so the two go hand-in-hand, and Gabby is deeply committed to both, especially at this fairly precarious time for the transgender community.”
Dealing with current political pushback
As a transgender woman and university professor whose work centers around a DEI-related work, Bychowski is hyperconscious of the growing political challenges regionally and nationally. Earlier this year, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed SB 1 into law. This bill restricts DEI-related activities and curriculum on public college campuses, and has already resulted in the announced closures of several LGBTQ+ centers. The bill also bans transgender students from using public restrooms that match their gender identity.
“I am not the first person to say this, but where oppression exists anywhere it is a threat to equality everywhere, so I hope this awakens many of us to the work of coalition and community building,” Bychowski said.
Despite clear and present challenges to the LGBTQ+ community and transgender individuals nationally and worldwide, Bychowski remains sanguine, bolstered by her prodigious knowledge of the past.
“As a scholar of transgender history, I know that we have been illegal longer than we have been legally tolerated, and we have experience on how to get through hard times,” she said. “This is a particular moment where we have been targeted like never before, but these things at their worst have not had the capacity to eradicate us.”
Bychowski’s next chapter
Although Bychowski is leaving CWRU this spring because the Anisfield-Wolf funding for her fellowship position has expired and the university has ended its SAGES program, she has firmly ensconced herself as a scholar throughout the U.S. and beyond. She has guest lectured at Columbia, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, California (Davis), and Yale universities and the Newberry Library in Chicago. Additionally, she served as a consultant on the development of a new play at Georgetown University and participated in a book launch at the University of York in England.
In May, she will attend The International Conference of the German Institute in London to present a talk about transgender saints, one of her specialty areas of medieval scholarship. Next spring, she will give a keynote speech sponsored by the English Department at the University of Oxford in England.
“My keynote’s title is not yet determined,” Bychowski said. “But I am certainly thinking about the role of transgender history in our current political moment in the U.S. and the U.K., where [in April] the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom has ruled against recognizing the legal existence of transgender and intersex people.”
In the meantime, Bychowski is applying primarily to visiting professorships and other temporary faculty roles or positions at nonprofit organizations that support and promote DEI and building diverse communities. She is excited about two pending visiting professorship positions on the East Coast. 🔥
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