Publications
Academic Publications
My work can also be found on Google Scholar. Please feel free to reach out to me if you need assistance accessing my work.
Ph.D. Dissertation: Theorizing the Political Potential of Care through Digital Spaces of Trans Belonging
My mixed-methods dissertation on historical and contemporary care practices in online trans spaces has its own website! Feel free to view if you are interested in learning more about my project.
Uncomfortable Trans Care Politics: Normativity, Institutional Abandonment, and the Obligation to Care in New York City
Published in Gender, Place & Culture, 2025.
This paper draws from work across care geographies and trans studies to challenge cisgender assumptions in care ethic scholarship and complicate the romanticization of care as a one-size-fits-all solution to trans injustice. I draw from 25 oral history interview transcripts from the New York City Trans Oral History Project and use a framework of uncomfortable care ethics to highlight how trans care practices are enmeshed with politics of gender normativity, trans survival, formal care abandonment, and compassion fatigue.
Recommended Citation: Davenport, Theodore. 2025. “Uncomfortable Trans Care Politics: Normativity, Institutional Abandonment, and the Obligation to Care in New York City.” Gender, Place & Culture. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0966369X.2025.2477578.
Becoming Theodore: Spatial Legal Consciousness and Transgender Name Changes
Published in Gender Justice and the Law: Theoretical Practices of Intersectional Identity, 2020.
Legal name changes are a powerful way that transgender people render their gender transition visible to the state. Some prominent work within trans socio-legal studies exists on how the legal administrations that center binary sex uniquely affect transgender people and shape legal consciousness around identity documents with gender markers. However, little work has explored how transgender people experience legal name changes, which are a much more common and accessible legal signifier of gender transition than changing gender markers nearly everywhere in the US. Drawing from socio-legal studies and feminist geographies, this paper utilizes autoethnography to ask, how do transgender people experience legal name changes in everyday spaces?
Recommended Citation: Davenport, Theodore. 2020. “Becoming Theodore: Spatial Legal Consciousness and Transgender Name Changes” in E. Wood, ed. Gender Justice and the Law: Theoretical Practices of Intersectional Identity. Lanham, MD: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Preprint PDF available for download.
Public Writing
This Trans Couple Bought a House in the ’90s. It Became a Home for Unhoused Youth
Published in: Teen Vogue, 2025.
Drawing from my archival research, this popular article explores the history of a housing collective owned by two trans women in NYC during the 1990s and 2000s.
Recommended Citation: Davenport, Theodore. 2025. “This Trans Couple Bought a House in the ’90s. It Became a Home for Unhoused Youth.” Teen Vogue. Overlooked History Series. https://www.teenvogue.com/story/transy-house-overlooked-history