I went to graduate school for many reasons, not all of which I was conscious of at the time. Toward the end of my undergraduate degree, I had been a bit listless. Coursework in history and French had held my attention, but living in Canada's capital city had disillusioned me to the empty liberal promises of the grown-up office jobs my peers were landing. I contemplated applying to law school but resented the idea of taking the law so seriously. Around that time my mentor, a historian of sexuality, called me into her office and slyly asked where I was going to apply for PhDs, as if it were a matter of fact that I would. And before I could shrug, she supplied an answer: the United States. There, I could study the history of sexuality and queer theory, two subjects I had fastened myself to in her classes. I remember walking home that day, a little wide-eyed at twenty years old, thinking she had changed the course of my life. I was fixated on the peculiar prospect of moving to the United States, but it was also the idea of getting a PhD itself. I grew up in a working-class family of Punjabis who had immigrated before Canada engineered its immigration policy to drain the world of its most educated. We weren't exactly the model minority trope, replete with doctorates and doctors. It was hard to see myself as a professor-to-be. Looking back, there was a submerged notion underneath each of those thoughts: I might go to graduate school to meet trans people. Part of the indescribable reward of working with trans graduate students is the gift of a set of experiences I didn't have while earning my PhD. When I teach specialized seminars on trans femininity, or the racial history of trans medicine, I think back on how I learned the field in two wildly asymmetrical installments. I was incredibly lucky to attend a seminar at Rutgers University in 2012-13, "Trans Studies: Beyond Homo/Hetero Normativities." Aren A. Aizura, then a postdoctoral fellow, was building the first trans studies infrastructure at Rutgers. He generously and tirelessly led us in a yearlong exploration of trans studies that combined a wide range of disciplines. Aren's pedagogy was much more than I deserved, being an anxious big thinker-and far too closeted to admit it-ready to break any field of what I saw as its metaphysical limitations. I'm embarrassed to recall what a bad student that made me. The overly ambitious paper I delivered in the seminar hardly earned me the opportunity, but Aren mentored me in its revision, landing me my first publication in TSQ in the journal's second issue, "Decolonizing the Transgender Imaginary."
