This issue explores and questions the issuance of blackness to transgender identity, politics, and transgender studies. The editors ask why, in its processes of institutionalization and canon formation, transgender studies have been so remiss in acknowledging women-of-color feminisms–black feminisms in particular–as a necessary foundation for the field’s own critical explorations of embodied difference. The essays also wrestle with the relationship between trans* studies and queer studies through the lens of blackness.