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This article elucidates the connection between anti-trans and anti-abortion political movements, looking closely at laws banning gender-affirming care in the wake of the Supreme Court's Dobbs v. Jackson decision in 2022. In particular, the article claims, "anti-abortion and anti-trans political successes are floated by a moral crisis over a fantasized, imperiled child."

In this special issue, the contributors argue that plasticity, the capacity of living systems to generate and take on new forms, is a central axis of biopolitical governance. While plasticity has a specific meaning in the life sciences, conceptually it has infused a broad range of theoretical, material, and scientific idioms for describing the malleability of a given body or system. Each of these conceptions of plasticity provides an account of malleability that, seemingly inexhaustible in its disorganizing qualities, has sometimes been framed as a resource for the disruption of normalizing systems of power. The articles in this special issue show that, by contrast, plasticity does not resist but is actually enlisted by state power through biopolitics. "The Biopolitics of Plasticity" investigates how race and state power actually depend on and enlist malleability and formlessness to govern living populations and individuals. By unevenly distributing the capacity of corporeal malleability, plasticity functions as a key logic underpinning the modern notion of racial difference. The issue's introduction proposes a critical reckoning with the racial politics of this important concept to ask new questions about how to understand the organic malleability of the body and such categories as race, sex, gender, and sexuality.

Abstract
The following introduction provides an overview to the Dossier on COVID-19, curated by Jules Gill-Peterson and Grace Lavery. This introduction explores how the pandemic has intensified the inessential denotation grafted onto trans people's material lives through health care, policing, incarceration, immigration, and racism. The ongoing crisis in academic labor and its uncertain pandemic futures are, similarly, an important place for trans studies to attend in this moment.

During the 1920s, French surgeon Serge Voronoff became an international sensation for his technique of grafting chimpanzee testicular matter into human testicles. Félicien Champsaur's 1929 popular speculative fiction novel, Nora, la guenon devenue femme (Nora, the Ape-Woman), imagines the possibilities of human-ape ontological and erotic proximity suggested by Voronoff's practice of gland xenotransplantation, or transspecies transplantation. This article puts Nora and the early twentiethcentury science of ductless glands (ovaries, testicles, thyroid, thalamus, etc.) into conversation with trans* new materialist science studies around their shared investment in plasticity. In so doing, it contributes to the burgeoning inquiry into transsex, tranimal, and transspecies plasticity— which the author terms, jointly, trans* plasticity—while interrogating the affirmative and even utopian valance of such inquiry. Trans* plasticity describes the capacity of organic matter to transform itself in ways that transgress ontological divides among sex, race, and species. Building on Eva Hayward and Che Gossett's claim that "the Human/Animal divide is a racial and colonial divide," this article zeroes in on the historical process by which race and animality were produced in relation to each other. Ultimately, the author argues that gland xenotransplantation was a use of trans* plasticity that generated rather than troubled the ontobiological concepts of sexual, racial, and species difference.

This article critically examines the role of neurobiology in the work of Sylvia Wynter through her own "pieza framework." Wynter argues that the pieza, the figure of exchange invented at the beginning of the slave trade, haunts contemporary political economy through multiple forms of human fungibility. Reading this intervention alongside and against her deployment of neural plasticity, the author reconsiders the relationship between race, gender, and class in the field of Wynter studies and argues for recentering the pieza framework in struggles against racial capitalism. Wynter warns how quickly a vision of the world otherwise can become a source of neoliberal regeneration and how a new critique of political economy must begin with the ruthless rejection of fungibility in its many guises.

This article traces the emergence of racial plasticity in the discourse of midcentury liberal internationalism and antiracism, focusing on the 1950 Statement on Race by the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The author argues that the statement is both an important precursor to contemporary celebrations of plasticity and an object lesson in the conceptual and political limitations of plasticity as a response to race and racism. Paying particular attention to the statement's treatment of plasticity as synonymous with educability, the author argues that plasticity's centrality to the race concept at midcentury was driven by a pedagogical aspiration to make not just racial ideologies but racial form itself subject to reeducation. In UNESCO's discourse, plasticity, or the idea that race is changeable and malleable, represents both the promise of freedom from race and a biopolitical imperative. Even as UNESCO sought to dispel the scientific racism it associated most closely with Nazism, the statement's privileging of plasticity accommodated and extended strategies of colonial racial management. While UNESCO's antiracism found it easier to imagine an end to race than to imagine that racism could be contested in political terms, anticolonial politics challenged both the colonial ordering of the world and the biopolitical logic of racial plasticity.

This article explores the history and practice of rectal feeding, an anachronistic obstetric practice used recently as a form of medical rape in US Central Intelligence Agency prisons. The article outlines how racialized themes of counterterrorist interrogation intersect with behavioralist logics of torture in CIA uses of rectal feeding on Muslim prisoners captured in Pakistan and Afghanistan, linking these prisoners to US security state fears of domestic Black Muslims. Exploring how fantasies of the plastic reorientation of prisoners' bodies and minds frames state conceptions of rectal feeding and other forms of torture, the article further argues that understanding the racialization of Islam in the current wars requires analysis of the racial materiality of interventions that exploit the plastic potentials of the body.

This roundtable considers trans theory's status as a site of thinking racialization, empire, political economy, and materiality in the current historical, institutional, and political moment. We ask, what does it mean to think trans in a time of crisis?, and what is the place of critique in a crisis?, acknowledging that global crises are not insulated from trans, and trans is not insulated from the world. This roundtable looks to materialist formations to think trans now, including a new materialism premised on thinking about trans embodiment outside of trans as subject position, the materialism of objects and commodities, and a historical materialism shaped by queer of color critique.

Frontmatter --Contents --Notes on Contributors --Introduction: The Political Landscapes of American Health, 1945-2020 --Part I: Geography, Community and American Health --Introduction --1 Health and Inequality in the Postwar Metropolis --2 Poverty, Health and Health Care in Rural Communities --3 The Politics of Immigration Meets the Politics of Health Care --4 Latinxs and the US Health Care System --5 American Indian Health: The Medicine Wheel versus the Iron Triangle --Part II: Critical Health Conditions: Debates and Histories --Introduction --6 The Politics of Polio Vaccination in Postwar America, 1950-60: Detractors and Defenders --7 Beyond the Cancer Wars --8 A System in Crisis: US Health Care Politics and the AIDS Epidemic --9 The Politics of 'Obesity': Medicalization, Stigmatization and Liberation of Fat Bodies --10 Revising Diagnoses, Reinventing Psychiatry: DSM and Major Depressive Disorder --Part III: The Politics of Children's Health --Introduction --11 US Children's Health Insurance: Policy Advocacy and Ideological Conflict --12 Autism and the Anti-Vaccine Movement --13 Diagnosing Deficit, Promising Enhancement: ADHD and Stimulants on Screen --14 On the Possibility of Affirmative Health Care for Transgender Children --15 Black Infant Mortality: Continuities, Contestations and Care --Part IV: The Institutional Matrix of Health Care --Introduction --16 The Regional and Racial Politics of Postwar Hospitals --17 Health Activism in the 1960s and the Community Health Center System --18 The Veterans Administration and PTSD: Challenges and Changes from Vietnam to Iraq --19 The Pharmaceutical Industry, Drug Regulation and US Health Services --20 The National Institutes of Health: Courting Congress, Creating a Research Infrastructure --Part V: The White House, Congress and Health Reform --Introduction --21 Left Out: Health Security and the American Welfare State, 1935-50 --22 Medicare and Medicaid after the Great Society: Containing Costs, Expanding Coverage --23 Mental Health, Stigma and Federal Reform in the 1970s and 1990s --24 The War on Drugs: Nixon, Reagan, Trump --25 Obamacare and Its Critics --Part VI: Justice, Ethics and American Health --Introduction --26 Roe v. Wade and the Cultural Politics of Abortion: The Shift from Rights to Health --27 Genetics, Health and the Making of America's Triracial Isolates, 1950-80 --28 The Rhetoric and Politics of American Ageism: Notes from a Pandemic --29 Towards a Structural Competency Framework for Addressing US Gun Violence --30 Mass Incarceration and Health Inequity in the United States --Part VII: Public Health and Global Health --Introduction --31 Occupational and Environmental Health in Twentieth-Century America --32 Environmental Health beyond the State: Thinking through the 1970s --33 Bioterrorism, Pandemic and the American Public --34 Health Internationalism in the US and Beyond --35 Pandemics and the Politics of Planetary Health --Bibliography --Index