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Abstract
This essay contemplates an enduring form of reasoning it titles "egg theory": the type of reasoning that trans people use, prior to transition, to prove transition's impossibility or fruitlessness. It follows this reasoning in a critical and ironic framing in the work of the novelist and critic Sybil Lamb and then, in a less ironic mode, through some essays of Eve Sedgwick and, more broadly, the tranche of queer theory that her work continues to inspire. Egg theory's hostility to the logic of transition inheres in queer theory's own insistence on universality and virtuality as key aspects of queer politics. The essay concludes by considering, through Freud's "Schreber Case" and Dalí's "Metamorphosis of Narcissus," alternatives to egg theory for approaching the condition of the egg before it hatches, the trans person before transition.

"The King's Two Anuses: Trans Feminism and Free Speech" critically examines the discourses of trans feminism and free speech absolutism as they have converged in a number of public controversies in the wake of the 2016 election of Donald Trump. It argues that the crisis of democratic institutions precipitated by that election revealed the surprising susceptibility of the dominant strains of critical and queer theory to cooptation by the far right and exposed the inadequacy of institutionalized rhetorics of trans affirmation, which generally comprise defenses of indeterminacy or gender ambivalence—the very conditions many trans people contest. Drawing on the late work of Michel Foucault and the private writings of Ernst Kantorowicz, "The King's Two Anuses" articulates a critique of the Lacanian account of subjective sexuation (in the work of Judith Butler, Joan Copjec, and Slavoj Žižek), which it holds especially influential and especially inadequate to the task of accounting for the diversity and assertiveness of trans accounts of personhood.

Introduction: Techniques of trans feminism -- How to change sex like a pragmatist. Trans realism and its referents -- The king's two anuses -- Picaresque and pornography in The old curiosity shop -- Fear of commitment: Adorno castrating Brecht -- After negation. On being criticized -- The egg and the essay -- The cannibal's diagnosis (mirror/hole) -- Generic deductiveness: reasoning as mood in the stoner neo-noir -- Epilogue: Someone else's beauty and My beauty.

A leading trans scholar and activist explores cultural representations of gender transition in the modern periodIn Pleasure and Efficacy, Grace Lavery investigates gender transition as it has been experienced and represented in the modern period. Considering examples that range from the novels of George Eliot to the psychoanalytic practice of Sigmund Freud to marriage manuals by Marie Stopes, Lavery explores the skepticism found in such works about whether it is truly possible to change one's sex. This ambivalence, she argues, has contributed to both antitrans oppression and the civil rights claims with which trans people have confronted it. Lavery examines what she terms "trans pragmatism"—the ways that trans people resist medicalization and pathologization to achieve pleasure and freedom. Trans pragmatism, she writes, affirms that transition works, that it is possible, and that it happens.With Eliot and Freud as the guiding geniuses of the book, Lavery covers a vast range of modern culture—poetry, prose, criticism, philosophy, fiction, cinema, pop music, pornography, and memes. Since transition takes people out of one genre and deposits them in another, she suggests, it should be no surprise that a cultural history of gender transition will also provide, by accident, a history of genre transition. Considering the concept of technique and its associations with feminine craftiness, as opposed to masculine freedom, Lavery argues that techniques of giving and receiving pleasure are essential to the possibility of trans feminist thriving—even as they are suppressed by patriarchal and antitrans feminist philosophies. Contesting claims for the impossibility of transition, she offers a counterhistory of tricks and techniques, passed on by women to women, that comprises a body of knowledge written in the margins of history

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.