Braedyn Ezra Simon Schertenlieb, PhD Candidate

Course Announcement:

“Making Kinship Legible: Trans Family Recognition, Care Practices, and Belonging in Berlin”
X-Student Research Group, Winter Semester 2026/27 at Freie Universität Berlin, funded by the Berlin University Alliance

“Trans/Forming Sociology: Disciplinary Borders, Gender Politics, and the Power of Discourse”

X-Student Research Group for Summer Semester 2026 at Freie Universität Berlin, funded by the Berlin University Alliance

Click here to view my CV

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. In August 2026 I submitted my dissertation, Womanhood, Terms and Conditions Apply: Boundary Governance and Sex/Gender Knowledge in Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist Discourses in Germany, the U.S., and the U.K. (1984–2024), for review, with a defense expected later this year. The project examines the epistemic and political struggles over sex, gender, and belonging across feminist, academic, and public arenas. Using the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD), I analyze anti-trans feminist discourse in the UK, US, and Germany, reading it as a bordering project in which “sex” is made to function as a reality-credential that some bodies are required to verify and others are not. In dialogue with decolonial theory, trans*feminist thought, and border epistemologies, I treat epistemic disobedience as both a methodological imperative and an ethical-political stance, and I foreground trans knowledges as forms of critical insight that unsettle naturalized understandings of gender, science, and embodiment.

Looking ahead, I am developing a postdoctoral project that turns from anti-trans discourse to the politics of kinship and family recognition. It asks how “real family” and “real parenthood” are produced and contested as a bordering process, taking trans parenthood as the site where the sexed truth written into parentage law collides with the biogenetic and documentary truths demanded by the state. Working with English-speaking trans migrant families in Berlin, I bring together Nira Yuval-Davis’s politics of belonging, Anzaldúa’s border epistemologies, and a Jewish diasporist ethics of doikayt (hereness) to ask what recognition costs, and what forms of relation exceed the two-parent, biogenetic template the law can currently see. I am now seeking a postdoctoral home for this research.

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 celebrate Jewish holidays through cooking and find peace in the city’s parks, lakes, and forests. I share my home with my partner, our child, and our cockatiels, Porco and Fievel. I enjoy film photography, horror films, speculative fiction, and 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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