The following article is a rendering of the opening keynote speech given by Dr. V. Jo Hsu at the 2025 Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (RHM) Symposium that took place in Minneapolis, MN on October 17–18, 2025.

This essay examines how medical rhetorics helped justify the recent torrent of anti-trans legislation. Beginning with the “legitimacy wars” between psychiatry and psychology, I trace how competing disciplines established their own expertise by denying trans patients’ agency and self-knowledge. After identifying the “trans trickster” trope that emerges from these rhetorics, I trace how the trans trickster haunts arguments used to ban gender-affirming health care and sports participation for trans youth. I draw from sociologist Ian Hacking’s “looping effects” to explain how medical logics affect public perception and how those understandings loop back into medical research. The binary, linear models of gender transition established by trans medicine helped justify cisnormative policies around transgender identity, which in turn restricted further scientific inquiry such that more imaginative gender formations remain illegible. To conclude, I argue that medical paradigms work in relation with trans imagination would expand scientific explorations of human diversity, and that those understandings too could loop through public policy and perception.

Composed in a series of letters, this essay explores the interdependent knowledge and survival work of crip communities. The authors discuss their experiences of myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME or ME/CFS) in a practice of Akemi Nishida’s “bed activism,” which challenges ableist demands for productivity from spaces of rest and care. Hsu and Nish ask what we lose—in intellectual and cultural growth and in actual lives—when academic spaces continue to devalue physical and cognitive difference. The resulting conversation considers illness as both an inevitability of lived experience and something exacerbated and ignored by academic spaces. It then explores how crip communities expand definitions of knowledge and knowledgemaking—offering wisdom that is not only valuable for a more inclusive profession but also necessary for a world increasingly sickened by extractive economies.

This essay examines social panic surrounding trans youth, arguing that rhetorics supporting “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD) emerge from and reinforce hegemonic scripts about race, gender, sexuality, and dis/ability. Building from Jay Dolmage’s concept of “disability drift,” I demonstrate how anti-trans activists channel other social anxieties into transphobia. Arguments about ROGD frame trans people as infinitesimally rare and as threats to all other communities, but these claims rely on the same narratives used to stigmatize mental illness, to dehumanize people of color and queer people, and to police the bodies and behavior of cisgender women. Introducing the concept of “affective drift,” I consider how ROGD rhetorics draw from ableism, racism, and heteronormativity to fuel transphobia and vise versa. In direct opposition to the logics of ROGD, then, I propose that rhetorical studies is equipped to foster connections across contrived social divides, and to enact solidarity in one another’s struggles.

Building on studies of alternative rhetorics, this article envisions personal writing pedagogy as a relational endeavor that fosters rhetorical alliances among disparate communities. I detail a particular course design through which “personal reflection” becomes a means of enacting more radical forms of belonging.

Through ongoing circulation and discussion, personal narratives are continually resituated among different social bodies and institutions. The cultural impact of these stories then extends well beyond their initial publication. They perpetually renegotiate both the authors’ individual identities as well as their communal alliances. As an example, this essay considers how Richard Rodriguez’s autobiographical trilogy and its critical reception shifted not only his own self-description but also the boundaries of Chicano, Mexican-American, and queer communities. Personal writing becomes not a mere reflection of self, but a becoming—a way to write ourselves into other worlds and communities.