I entered the board room with some trepidation, amidst a gaggle of nervous colleagues. We were followed by the LGBT Equality Champion, and the Interim Head of Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion. The room itself was relatively mundane. Some chairs sat around a set of rectangular tables. A blank screen was linked to a computer in the corner. It could have been any room in the institution – if it were not for the view.

We were on the top floor of a shiny new building. Through floor-to-ceiling glass windows we could see a magnificent sweep of the city. I admired the soaring gothic tower of the university, the busy streets nearby, and the new blocks clustered around the river. A long march of tenement buildings to the south was ended by a wide semi-circle of high hills, with wind turbines working busily atop them.

We had gathered in this room to discuss national proposals for the mandatory segregation of trans staff and students. My colleagues had asked for the meeting to explore what – if anything – our employer might be prepared to do to counter these damaging proposals. We had taken time out of our busy schedules. There was no accounting for this in our workload. There was no guarantee we would achieve anything of use. We were concerned about the impact of the proposed segregation scheme on our work lives – but also about the impact of the meeting itself upon our wellbeing.

All of us, aside from the institutional equality leads, were trans ourselves. Many of us had previous experiences of equality schemes, having put countless hours into discussions intended to reshape policy to the benefit of minoritised staff and service users. We often felt isolated and bogged down in such conversations: finding it hard to explain the urgency of action, struggling to translate ideals into action, and fearing that we would be positioned as troublemakers.

As we sat down together, I found myself thinking about Toby Odland’s framing of the second law of thermodynamics:

Some input of energy is required to go between states of non-movement and movement. In large scale systems some of the energy put in to get an object to change state will be dispersed as heat into the environment. Not all of the energy put in is transferred to kinetic or static energy as may be the desire of the one providing the input. In other words, work wastes energy. (29)

In that room with the beautiful view, I was painfully aware of how inequalities can be reproduced in interventions designed to combat them. This phenomenon is a central concern of Toby Odland’s doctoral dissertation, Re-framing in friction: on Trans-inclusive enactment of gender equality aims. The dissertation offers a phenomenological interrogation of how gender inequalities persist for trans people in institutional environments, despite efforts to identify and tackle them.

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The above is an extract from my review of Toby Odland’s PhD dissertation Re-framing in friction: on Trans-inclusive enactment of gender equality aims. You can read the full review, published in Tidskrift för genusvetenskap, through either of the links below:

[Re-framing in friction review: xml link]

[Re-framing in friction review: PDF link]

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I was asked to write this review after acting as opponent in Toby Odland’s doctoral defence at Linköping University in Sweden, in June 2025. Unlike the UK’s PhD vivas – oral examinations which take place behind closed doors – Swedish doctoral defences are public events, usually taking place at a point where a committee of experts has already supported the provisional completion of the PhD. As such, the dissertation is distributed in print and in digital format ahead of the defence. You can download a free copy of Odland’s dissertation here.

The opponent’s role in a public defence at Linköping University is to present a short summary of the doctoral student’s work to the audience, before asking the student a series of scholarly questions about the work and its implications (you can download my presentation slides here). The student then takes questions from the audience, before an examination committee convenes to (hopefully!) confirm that the PhD should be awarded.

As you’ll see in the full review, I was extremely impressed with Odland’s account of gender equality work in Sweden, and I believe it will be highly relevant reading for people involved in equality work in other countries too.