Braedyn Ezra Simon, PhD Candidate

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Academic Areas of Interest: Social and Feminist Philosophy, Decolonialism, Queer Theory, Transgender Studies, Discourse Analysis, Critical Theory, Sociology of Knowledge, Belonging, Borderlands Theory, Intersectionality, Marxism, Convivality, Qualitative Methods

I am a queer, Jewish, transgender sociologist originally from Phoenix, Arizona, now based in Berlin. My intellectual and political formation is grounded in working-class, community-rooted experience. Before entering academia, I spent years working as a dog groomer, bartender, and nightlife organizer. These roles taught me more about survival, solidarity, philosophy, and gender than any textbook. I earned my B.S. in Sociology from Arizona State University in 2010, where I minored in Women and Gender Studies and received an additional certificate for LGBTQ Studies. My early research and activist experiences included internships at Phoenix’s Stonewall Institute, supporting LGBTQ clients navigating substance use recovery, and working with Prof. Dr. Mary Margaret Fonow on feminist political theory. It was in those crowded classrooms that I first encountered sociology not only as a discipline but as a tool for making sense of my own trans embodiment and the world’s resistance to it.

After coming out as a transgender man, I moved to Seattle, where I lived for seven years. There, I built a life in queer nightlife and grassroots community spaces. I organized events, led trans outdoor groups, and raised funds for gender-affirming care. Yet as Seattle rapidly gentrified and transformed into a neoliberal tech capital, I experienced deepening displacement. Seeking new horizons and intellectual community, I relocated to Berlin in 2019 to pursue an M.A. in Sociology – European Societies at Freie Universität Berlin. I completed my degree in 2021 with a thesis on anti-trans feminism and the colonial residues of gender discourse in the UK.

Since 2022, I have been an independent doctoral researcher at Freie Universität Berlin, supervised by Prof. Dr. Sérgio Costa in the Department of Sociology and Latin American Studies. My dissertation, titled To Belong or Not to Belong? Embodied Borders and the Politics of Sex and Gender Knowledge in Anti-Trans Feminist Discourses, explores the epistemic and political struggles over sex, gender, and belonging across feminist, academic, and public arenas. I analyze anti-trans feminist discourse in the UK, US, and Germany through the lens of the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD), in dialogue with decolonial theory, trans*feminist thought, and border epistemologies. I understand epistemic disobedience as both a methodological imperative and an ethical-political stance. My research promotes trans knowledges as forms of critical insight that confront dominant regimes of truth and unsettle naturalized understandings of gender, science, and embodiment.

I am currently working on a book chapter for an edited volume on resistance to anti-gender movements in Europe. My chapter examines anti-trans discourse in Germany’s feminist EMMA magazine and situates it within broader transnational patterns of exclusion, rightward alliance, and symbolic violence. Through this work, I trace trans*feminist strategies of refusal, disidentification, and knowledge production that resist the institutionalized suppression of trans life.

Outside the university, I work part-time in a queer pub in Berlin, celebrate Jewish holidays through cooking, and find peace in the city’s parks, lakes, and forests. I share my home with my partner and our cockatiels, Porco and Fievel. I enjoy film photography, horror films, speculative fiction, and listening to dream pop and various electronic music. Above all, I remain committed to building forms of life that defy containment and to creating worlds grounded in justice, care, and collective possibility.

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