Lal Zimman, who uses the pronouns he/him or they/them, is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at UC Santa Barbara on Chumash land

Lal Zimman Hello! I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Affiliated Faculty in the Department of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Barbara, where I run the Trans Research in Linguistics Lab (TRILL). I'm also General Editor of Oxford University Press's Studies in Language, Gender, and Sexuality Series. I received my PhD in Linguistics at the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2012, where I was involved with the Program in Culture, Language and Social Practice (CLASP). Since then, I have also worked in the Linguistics Departments at Reed College and Stanford University.

My research is situated in the interdisciplinary field of sociocultural linguistics and takes a mixed-methods approach to the relationship between language, identity, embodiment, and social power. It also grows from a community-based agenda that centers the experience of transgender people, broadly defined. Major areas of investigation include the gendered characteristics of the voice, trans-inclusive language practices and linguistic activism, the discursive construction of "biological sex," the changing status of singular 'they', and the relationship between gender and race in drag-related media. Doing this work over the past 15 years has led me to formulate a framework I call trans linguistics, which is laid out in my chapter "Transgender language, transgender moment" in Rusty Barrett and Kira Hall's Oxford Handbook of Language and Sexuality.