feminism

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What we have won

It was the largest trans protest in British history.

We travelled from across the country to central London. We were joined by allies, especially cis gay, lesbian, bisexual, and queer people who recognised the importance of solidarity, of standing together in this moment. Wielding bright flags and banners, we gathered in unprecedented numbers. We to were here to raise our voices against the institutionalisation of transphobic hate and abuse, to oppose calls for exclusionary policies and trans healthcare bans.

I couldn’t possibly miss this, so travelled down on the train from Leamington Spa with my home-made placard. Looking around after I arrived on that cold winter night, I marvelled at the sight. There were so many of us. Maybe as many as 150, or even 200! And my friend Jo even brought a home-made trans flag with them, which was an amazing thing to see outside of the internet.

Photo by Guido. I’m in this – can you spot me?

The year was 2008, and we assembled outside the Victoria and Albert Museum to protest the annual Stonewall Awards. The UK’s largest LGB charity had nominated the Guardian journalist Julie Bindel for an award, despite – or perhaps even because of – her notorious transphobia. The protest was called by the London Transfeminist Group, and supported by a range of other organisations, including Queer Youth Network, Trans Youth Network, and the National Union of Students (NUS) LGBT Campaign.

Afterwards, we gathered at a local pub and talked excitedly. The protest was a massive embarrassment to Stonewall, and through grassroots organising we had shown we could bring trans people and allies together on a scale that never before felt possible.

How could we build on this power, and what might the future bring?

***

It was the largest trans protest in British history.

Trans people travelled from across the country to central London. They were joined by allies, especially cis gay, lesbian, bisexual and queer people, plus parents and family members, trade unionists, and celebrities who recognised the importance of solidarity, of standing together in this moment. Wielding bright flags and banners, they gathered in unprecedented numbers. They were there to raise their voices against the institutionalisation of transphobic hate and abuse, and to oppose exclusionary policies and trans healthcare bans.

Photo by Aaron Chown/PA. Compare and contrast…

I wasn’t in London for Trans Pride 2026. I’m involved in plenty of protests and community events in Glasgow these days, from last year’s noise demonstrations outside the EHRC headquarters, to the incredible Solidarity Pride Hub, which filled the Pyramid at Anderston with amazing talks, workshops, and stalls led by trans and queer organisations. Nevertheless, watching online as the images came in was pretty incredible. A reported 150,000 people took to the streets, just one week after thousands more gathered for Trans Pride Brighton.

How can we build on this power – and what might the future bring?

***

For decades, the trans liberation movement has fought to change the world. We found new ways of being, and created language, art, and culture to name and explore these possibilities. We won new civil rights. We achieved incremental improvements in the provision of healthcare and education. We have made it a fair bit easier for many people to exist in the workplace, and to survive on benefits. We have built community: feeding each other, housing each other, and providing advocacy for each other, and partying together.

As the UK enters a new era of state-mandated segregation, I find myself asking: was it all worth it?

***

For all the achievements of the trans liberation movement, many of us have continued to struggle enormously in the face of interpersonal and institutional violence. This is especially the case for those more likely to be left behind by liberal trans activism, including disabled trans people, trans migrants, trans people of colour, and trans sex workers. Trans communities have also handily replicated the structural misogyny of the wider world. As a result, paid roles in advocacy, charity work, and the arts remain dominated by trans men and transmasculine people.

Meanwhile, through becoming more visible, we have become more vulnerable. Through being acknowledged within institutional frameworks, we have become more identifiable. Through asking for respect, we have become a problem. Through entering political conversations, we have become scapegoats.

Cis “centists” are often swift to blame trans people for our own problems. If we’d just been more polite, more accommodating, and less demanding.

Trans people also frequently assess our movement’s activist strategies. Sometimes this will be helpful. For example, there are lots of productive discussions happening right now about the respective merits of lobbying people in power vs building power in our communities from the ground up. Other times, certain trans people will say we have gone too far, demanded too much. If only we’d been more respectable. If only we’d laid off the pronouns. If only we could agree on a nice, clear definition of “trans”. If only we gave up on those confusing non-binary identities. If only we’d let children be children.

***

I came out to myself and my friends while in school, transitioning as a teenager in the early 2000s. I cannot emphasise enough how unusual this was – and consequently, how lonely and isolating my experiences were. We had so little information. Most out trans people at this time were middle-aged or older, and I didn’t have any opportunity to meet them. Being a trans teenager felt like a complete impossibility.

My transition had three key enablers. The first was my own sheer bloody-mindedness. The second was the support I did find and receive from others. And finally, I benefited from an enormous dose of luck.

After years of fruitless online searches for anything that would explain my feelings and my needs, I found a US web forum run by and for young trans people, providing invaluable advice and a sounding board. I wasn’t sure at the time whether I was a real transsexual, or just one of them fake cross-dressers. The broad, fluid language of transgender identity and experience meant that this artificial distinction didn’t actually matter. The important thing was solidarity: gender diverse people standing together in the name of our shared interests. This enabled me to explore what I might need and desire in an open-ended way with other people my own age, without feeling that I had to transition in any specific way or on any particular timescale.

In the offline world, none of my teen friends understood what I was going through. But they supported me unconditionally. My early romantic partners also had my back. One took me shopping, and helped me figure out my style. Another gave me my name.

I first went to see a doctor for help with medical transition aged 15, but I failed to receive a gender clinic appointment until I was an adult. This didn’t feel lucky at the time, but looking back, it was an enormous stroke of fortune. Through spending years on waiting lists, I avoided the conversion therapists who then – as again now – dominated child and adolescent services.

During these teen years, a schoolteacher – unable to provide me direct advice herself due to Section 28 – referred me to a free counselling service provided by a local charity. I remember my counsellor asking me, “do you think you are part of oppressed minority?” I wasn’t quite sure. Maybe? Probably?

Given the luck I had experienced, I did not understand how much I had already been let down. I did not fully comprehend the sheer void of information on trans existence. I did not realise that my self-hatred and self-denial was the fault of damaging social norms and expectations, rather than something broken in me. Nor did I understand how massively vulnerable I was as a result. The support of my peers meant that unlike many other young trans people, I was not subject to sexual predation: a topic later explored in my research, plus stories such as Paris Lees’ autobiographical book and TV series What It Feels Like For A Girl. I did not see how much my own internalised sexism had already warped my sense of what might be possible for me, leading me to take on a passive role in friendships with male friends who I watched play music and video games. And while I had already been beaten up or groped multiple times in the playground and the street, I was yet to experience much of the targeted transmisogyny that would accompany me into adulthood: the continued sexual assaults, the verbal abuse, the harassment, the stalking.

I didn’t know it at the time, but what I needed was trans community, and feminism.  

***

I became an activist in the mid-2000s, during my early 20s. Again, a few chance events spurred me along. But I also benefited from the care and energy of others who wished to change the world.

One of the first trans people I knowingly met in person was the professional speaker and advocate Rikki Arundel. A young gay man had booked them to speak for a student event at the University of Warwick, where I was studying for my undergraduate degree. Rikki took me to a café immediately after the talk. “So”, they asked, “you want to be a trans activist?” I hadn’t asked.

Rikki nevertheless spent some time outlining advice. Get to know people in your area: community members, local politicians, policymakers. Go to meetings and become known. Build a reputation as a helpful and reliable point of contact. At every possible opportunity, leverage this to demand change, positioning it as a sensible, reasonable course of action.

Rikki’s advice was invaluable for working within liberal systems. These days, I am wary of trans liberal approaches, as these can be individualising, and lead to concessions that leave many behind. But you do not need to believe in or support a system of power to work within and against it.

Around this time I also went to my first NUS conferences. Through the NUS LGBT Campaign and later also the NUS Women’s Campaign, I shared knowledge and skills with other young people, and went to my first protests. Through these campaigns I met other young, openly trans people in person for the first time, including Mallory Moore. I learned great deal from organisers such as Mallory. They appeared to have very different beliefs to Rikki, but were, in fundamental ways, doing very similar work. Get to know people. Build connections. Identify points of common interest. Figure out where and how to apply pressure to achieve change. Where Rikki spoke to the local council, Mallory worked with local feminist groups. I found myself doing both.

***

The isolation of my teen years continued into my early adulthood. Encounters with people like Rikki and Mallory were fleeting, one-off events. I would then go entire months without knowingly meeting another trans person.

To break this isolation, I began to travel. I took a day trip to Birmingham to hang out with a slightly older trans youth activist from Queer Youth Network, an internet community I’d recently joined. I travelled to Bradford and Manchester to speak at student union meetings, arguing for the introduction of all-gender toilets. I travelled down to London to attend an event hosted by a new organisation called Gendered Intelligence, and marvelled at being in a room with over a dozen other young trans people. This event wasn’t actually very good: it only happened because it had been funded by cis academics who wanted to do some boring research. But I left to sit in the corridor and chat with other trans girls, who would become lifelong friends.

There were so few of us out because there was still so little information available, and so little in the way of community support for those who did try to come out or transition. Most trans people were spending years, decades, lifetimes stuck in the closet. But this was beginning to change.

Trans communities in the UK were benefiting from a virtuous cycle of coming out. The internet helped a great deal with this, as new resources and information spread online. But the real change came with trans people simply being a visible part of public life. Transphobes like to call this “social contagion”. I prefer Laverne Cox’s term, “possibility model”. You see a trans person getting on with their life, and realise that sex change is possible for you, too.

In so many spaces, I was patient zero for the viral spread of trans possibility. I cracked eggs everywhere I went. Every time I spoke at an event, or attended a conference, or hung out with other queers at the pub, I showed that another world was possible. Young trans people came out all around me, and in turn they became visible to others.

But coming out is just the first step. For trans lives to be liveable, we need support from other people. We need to share resources and information. We need community.

***

I remember speaking in the late 2000s or early 2010s with an older trans woman at an event in Wolverhampton. Following the repeal of Section 28 some years before, she was keen to work with schools to ensure that young trans people were never as isolated and confused as I once was. “We need education at an early age”, she said.

We did this. It was not the action of any one person or group at any moment in time, but the action of a movement across many years. Organisations like Schools OUT produced material and information for schools. Groups like Gendered Intelligence helped support the development of a knowledge base to evidence change. Individuals like myself spoke with our local councils about how they could change their policies. Thousands of teachers across the country quietly changed their curricula, introduced new approaches, and created clubs for trans and queer kids.

Meanwhile, others created blogs, youtube videos, social media posts that circumvented schools entirely, speaking directly to young people. Importantly, much of this material sought to break away from the old binaries that used to divide trans communities: male-to-female vs female-to-male, transsexual vs transvestite. With “trans” we were imagining solidarities across difference, a context in which those who did not seek medical transition sought commonality with those who did, and vice-versa. We were collectively imagining a world in which sex norms and gender stereotypes no longer governed our lives, and in which we might work together to achieve our varying desires and needs.  

It is interesting to think about this former progress at a time when the UK government has produced incredibly transphobic new legal guidance for English schools, and when NHS England is actively pushing conversion practices. Trans kids now face an incredibly hostile policy environment: one that refuses to even name their existence even as it demands that they be segregated and abused.  

Yet, young trans people continue to come out, to seek support and support one another, in numbers that would have been inconceivable to the protesters gathered in London on that cold night in November 2008.

***

The strange irony of trans life in the 2020s is that there are still more of us than ever. Even as external conditions become more and more hostile, the virtuous cycle continues.

Some of this is about possibility models. You can see this in Trans Pride London 2026. We are talking 150,000 possibility models on the streets in central London in one day alone. Every single one of these people sends a message to those thinking about coming out. That message says: you are valued, you are loved, and support is available. You are not alone.

Some of this is about trans-led support. While the NHS, crisis services, shelters, housing services (etc etc) have variously got better and worse over the years, they have always let many of us down. In light of this, trans people have built mutual aid networks to get vulnerable people out of dangerous accommodation, house those in need, produce and share medication, and disseminate harm reduction resources. In this context, trans diversity is vital: we need strong communities that are more interested in how we might bring our myriad of skills and experiences to bear in caring for one another, rather than obsessing over how our language and identities might differ.

Some of this is about trans art and culture. You can turn on the TV and see trans actors, comedians, politicians, and experts, on shows written or produced by other trans people. You can turn on the radio and hear trans people playing music or speaking about their experiences. In some towns and cities, you can even can go to your local gallery and see work by trans artists, visit your local pub or club or DIY venue and see trans performers, and they might even give out handy little flyers telling you where you can get your hands on HRT.

Some of this is about solidarity work from cis people. All that endless work of education over the past decades has not been in vain, however much the politicians and hateful people of this world would like it to be. Through incessantly speaking out and demanding change, and in joining with others to support their struggles, trans people have made allies everywhere. Teachers and lecturers, doctors and nurses, administrators, hospitality workers, lawyers, and many more are more likely to have access to information through their family or friends or trade unions, which help them in turn to support trans people in a hundred thousand little ways every day.

***

In 2008 we found hope in the possibility of community connection, solidarity, collaboration, and friendship. In 2026, we see what was successfully built from that hope and that possibility.

Over the last two decades and beyond, we have won trans community and connectivity on a scale that was once unthinkable. We have made allies across every part of public life. We have helped hundreds of thousands people to improve their lives. This is a historic achievement.

Today, the trans liberation movement faces off against vicious foes and their allies in the Labour government, who would see us eliminated altogether. Trans people of all ages and backgrounds are forced to navigate laws and policies designed to make our lives more difficult and more dangerous.

It is all too easy to think that the trans activism of the past has failed, that every gain has been reversed in an orgy of hate and bigotry. Yet this is simply not true.

The achievements of the past have helped prepare us collectively for the demands of this moment. There are more of us than ever, and we have successes as well as failures to learn from.

Let’s see what we can do with that.

Some relevant resources:

Trans Actual: Know Your Rights

Trans Actual: Segregation in Practice Report

Trans Learning Partnership: Stronger Voices: Trans Housing, Community, & Livelihood

Good Law Project: We’re supporting a legal challenge against the code of practice

Good Wee Place: EHRC Sex Segregation. Staying safe and responding well. (guidance for venues and individuals)

Gendered Intelligence: EHRC Code of Practice Guidance (guides for Young People, and for Adults)

Good Night Out Campaign: Pee In Peace

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I won an Emma Goldman Award!


Trans feminist scholar Dr Ruth Pearce honoured with prestigious Emma Goldman Award
Scene Magazine

Group photo of women posing with awards in a library


In January, I received an unexpected message. And at first, I thought I was being scammed.

Actually, I received several unexpected messages, over a couple of weeks. These comprised direct messages to my social media accounts, a comment on this blog, and – eventually – an email to my work account.

The purported person urgently trying to contact me was Mieke Verloo, Professor of Comparative Politics and Inequality Issues at Radboud University in the Netherlands, and Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria. I was familiar with her extensive feminist scholarship, especially her work on gender equality policies and anti-gender movements. Given the overlap in our interests, I wasn’t surprised she reached out. I speak with a lot of other researchers and activists on a pretty much daily basis. What was surprising was how keen and persistent she was to speak with me.

As a social researcher, my work is all about people – and our interactions with policy, institutions, and community organisations. To do my job well, I need to speak with people, all the time. Outside of teaching, this can consist of formally conducting a research interview, sharing advice or information, or just having a chat to maintain a relationship. I’m grateful that my research been highly read and impactful: that has happened because I have worked closely with others the whole time, to inform, design, undertake, and share my studies.

The problem is that academic employment does not leave much time and space for this people work. I do it on top of my teaching and administration load, plus reading, planning, writing, and so on. So I squeeze it in: a meeting here, a blether there. It’s increasingly difficult. I have a growing list of people who want to speak with me about their project idea, the latest insider scoop on NHS policy, next steps for their organisation, or their proposed PhD or postdoc. It takes me increasingly long to reply to emails, and I’m booking meetings months in advance. I am, to put it bluntly, overwhelmed.

So that’s a normal academic problem. It’s even worse for those of us working in fields such as gender studies at a time of far-right backlash. I have started to develop a trauma response to opening my emails. I am always anticipating the next terrible news, the next round of harassment, the next legal threat from a “gender critical” scholar who has decided I am a problem. There is, sadly, a reason why my work email can no longer be found on my university profile. Like many minoritised scholars, I have removed it, making it harder for hostile individuals to contact me.

This is a systemic issue, not just a “me” issue. Universities like to say that they value community engagement and impact. But we are never really provided time for it in our workload, especially if we are part of a targeted minority group. I feel like a one-woman gender clinic, gradually amassing my own ridiculous waiting list.

Professor Verloo did not want to wait. Her numerous messages indicated that what she wanted was clearly very important. I wondered, is this actually the real Mieke Verloo? Is this part of some elaborate harassment campaign? Am I being catfished?

Eventually, I set aside a bit of time, and asked Mieke to prove her identity – which, very kindly, she did. As a leading feminist academic who has studied anti-gender movements, she got it.

I had a flexible hour the next day, so I set up a Zoom meeting, to see what I could help her with.


On receiving awards

I don’t do the work I do to win prizes. I am not saying this to be humble – I am saying this because it true, and realistic.

While some of my work is highly-read, I think the most impactful things I’m involved in tend to be invisible. And that’s okay. I organise with others, and share ideas and information with various people and groups, without any of this ever being visible to the wider world (let alone seeing academic publication). This is the work of social movements, and untold millions of us do it.

Meanwhile, on the occasions when I have sought academic awards, it has been very difficult. I’ve really struggled to land research funding, in spite of my profile, in spite of cis mentors pulling baffled faces and saying things like “I have never seen a proposal this strong fail in the first round”, over and over again. Again, this is a systemic issue. I’ve seen enough trans studies scholars go through the same to know that we are being quietly discriminated against. The same is true of other marginalised groups, such as academics who are Black and people of colour.

I have also, very occasionally, won something that feels entirely hollow. A few years ago I received an “LGBT+ Advisor Award” from NHS England. This was announced in a ceremony I wasn’t invited to, and was not publicised outside of a tweet from someone who was there. I received a small badge in the post, which is now displayed on my office pinboard, a focal point for conflicted emotion. For several years, I put enormous amounts of time and energy into working for a more trans-friendly NHS. Now, many of the very NHS commissioners and policymakers I used to meet with are mainstreaming pseudoscience and conversion practices. It hurts.

So when I asked what I could help Mieke Verloo with, and she said, “we would like to give you a prize”, I went into shock.


Recognition and recovery

I think I have become too acculturated to the idea that there is no external recognition for trans liberation work. This is an important reminder that people outside of trans communities care about us, and care about our role in wider struggles for social justice.

I have been a part of a feminist movements my entire adult life. For many years I have campaigned for and within women’s services and women’s political spaces, and fought back against systemic sexism and misogyny. Nevertheless, as the anti-trans movement has grown more powerful, I have felt the walls closing in. Powerful forces are trying to separate women like me from our sisters in struggle.

In a world of divide-and-rule, it matters that we extend recognition to one another, in whatever ways we can. Often, this means just telling someone that they are seen, and that their work matters. It means so much when I hear this, and I try to make a practice of doing the same for others.

But Mieke Verloo is part of the FLAX Foundation, a Dutch organisation with some funding for Europe-wide feminist research awards. It seems that FLAX seeks to extend recognition in ways that are as useful as possible for prize recipients.

The recognition alone is the most powerful and beautiful thing about the Emma Goldman. I think it will provide me with greater strength going forward, a sense of togetherness with other feminist activist-researchers across Europe.

However, the award also comes with funding. So I will also be considering how best to use this to support my work going forward. My hope is to focus on finding more time and space for restoration and slowing down, for existing collaborations and research dissemination rather than starting something new. I hope to focus on writing up findings from work undertaken with colleagues in the Trans Learning Partnership, and finish my next book. I will also look into paying for services that might help me better manage my experiences of overwhelm, ideally in a way that puts money back into queer and trans communities. It is rare indeed to obtain funding for this purpose.


The Emma Goldman Award

Every year, between five and ten people receive an Emma Goldman Award. Several more can win a different prize given by the FLAX Foundation, the Snowball Award. Two weeks ago, we gathered in Vienna for an awards ceremony, and for a budgeting workshop to support the best use of the funding we have received.

It was quite overwhelming to be in a room with a group of such highly accomplished women. We came from a great range of backgrounds, in terms of nationality, heritage, culture, discipline, field, and medium. It was amazing to hear about the work everyone was doing: as academics, as journalists, as filmmakers, as comic artists – and, inevitability, as collaborators and organisers. Every one of us was involved in community-building in one way or another. And everyone seemed pretty shocked to be receiving an award, because each one of us feels the pain of oppression, and none of us do what we do to win prizes.

The award ceremony was filmed, and I’ve put a link to the youtube video at the bottom of this post. It’s worth a watch simply to hear about the exciting things every single award winner is up to. It expanded my sense of possibility, of what is happening in the world and can happen in the world, and who I might work with or be inspired by going forward.

It meant a great deal just to spend time with each other outside of the formal sessions, speaking and listening and learning together, building new friendships. This is something I have taken away from my time in Vienna, something I will sit with for a long time. I believe this is another intention of the Emma Goldman and Snowball Awards: to go beyond themselves, to support networks of research and activism, to enable new connections and collaborations across borders. In this sense, the prize couldn’t be better named.

The thing that struck me most after the award ceremony – and I mean this in a really good way – is that it made our collective achievements feel unexceptional. I don’t say that to talk down myself, or any other winner. Quite the opposite: I feel that recognising this kind of work collectively reminded me that none of us are alone, that we are part of a movement.

It is enough for any of us to simply do the work – of fighting for a better world.


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DJ setlist and review: There Will Be Blood! @ Stereo, Glasgow

I’m currently in the middle of a busy fortnight for work-related travel (more on that soon!) But last night, I managed to make the most of a brief return to Glasgow.

The occasion was There Will Be Blood! a fundraiser at Stereo for the brilliant group Trans Healthcare Access Glasgow. They are helping to provide free laboratory testing for bloods. This is really important for trans people on HRT who are increasingly denied monitoring by GPs. If you couldn’t make it but would still like to donate, you can do so here.

The organisers put together a fantastic lineup and there was a great turnout – especially for a Monday night. It was exciting to see so much talent from within our community, and loads of people come out to support both the cause and a pretty eclectic collection of artists. And exciting for me to be a part of it, performing a DJ set as ROGD.

In which I am going for it. Photo by Onni Gust.


The night kicked off with a luscious set from singer-songwriter and drag artist Sersi. He’s probably the first person I’ve ever seen sport a Britney mic at a DIY gig, which was very cool but sadly couldn’t quite capture the sheer dynamic range of his vocals on the night. At the same time, it enabled him to completely own the stage for a series of ballads that were by turns beautiful and strange. Sersi was ably supported by a pal with a laptop, and Johanna Kirkpatrick (of trad folk bands Chanterelle and Madderam) looking dead dykey on acoustic guitar.

Next to take the stage were Deep Filff. I hadn’t had a chance to look them up before the gig so had zero idea what to expect, although they did arrive with an absolutely enormous inflatable swan. Deep Filff turned out to be a two piece, with Nadia Fiffsky playing bass and belting out epic sun-baked vocals, while Jenny Tingle methodically destroyed the drumkit. As purveyors of some of the dirtiest psychedelic grunge-punk riffs I think I’ve ever heard, they were extremely well-named. It was engrossing, hypnotic stuff. Eventually the swan came out and bounced around the audience, most likely representing a serious hazard to some of the important-looking wires and glitterball hanging from the ceiling.

Local heroes comfort never fail to disappoint, and this evening they truly tore up the stage as the final live act of the evening. The sibling duo have a truly unique sound, with Natalie’s staccato vocals punctuating a skitterish soundscape of totally artificial electronic sounds, underpinned by Sean’s assertive drumming. It was impossible not to dance. My favourite moments came whenever the band’s weird, abrasive noise would suddenly gave way to a transcendentally beautiful synth melody for a minute or two, before we all dived collectively back into the tumult.

Finally, following a quick raffle, I was up! The gig was due to end at a remarkably civilised 10pm, so I had a tight half hour DJ set.

I’ve thought a lot since returning to DJing that the landscape of queer and feminist music and activism has completely changed. Back in the day, I used to do quite a few “Women’s Voices” DJ sets, especially for feminist events such as Reclaim The Night afterparties, and the woman-only Women’s Aid and NUS Women’s Conference discos. The idea was that every song played (sometimes for sets of up to four or five hours) had a woman on lead vocals, and ideally women also playing instruments. Finn Mackay always used to refer to me as “feministDJRuthPearce” (all in one breath!) which was never failed to be delightful.

Unfortunately, many of the people who were only too happy to join the dancefloor for those events are now either actively backing trans-exclusionary politics and the grossest forms of transmisogyny, or otherwise failing to speak out again them. (Junior equalities minister Liv Bailey, I’m looking at you – remember when you hoped I’d DJ your wedding one day?!) It’s odd to reflect on just how normal it was for trans women to be involved in woman-only politics spaces in the UK, given the extremity of the post-2017 moral panic.

Anyway, I digress.

Another thing that has happened over the last decade is the enormous influx of excellent trans artists to both underground and mainstream music scenes. We live in an age where I listened to jasmine.4.t for the first time because my mum told me she’d done a good interview with Craig Charles on BBC 6 Music(!) So, while I’d like to do more Women’s Voices DJ sets in the future, for the first time it felt realistic to put together a Trans Voices set, with a mixture of tunes fronted by trans women and men, and/or non-binary, genderqueer, or genderfluid people, that I could reasonably expect a large number of people in the audience to be familiar with.

So, here’s what I played:

Shopping – The Hype
My Chemical Romance – Teenagers
100 gecs – mememe
SOPHIE – Immaterial
underscores – Locals (Girls Like Us) [with gabby start]
Kae Tempest – Move
Ada Rook – BURY YOURSELF
Janelle Monáe – Make Me Feel
jasmine.4.t – Guy Fawkes Tesco Dissociation
G.L.O.S.S. – Outlaw Stomp
Against Me! – True Trans Soul Rebel

Obviously I could have kept going a lot longer, but I’ve got to say, it was one heck of a half hour. I have such enormous love for everyone who joined me to dance their arse off on a Monday night. And if you’d like me to DJ your event – I’m officially back behind the decks, so do get in touch!

Back home – sweaty and happy!

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Gig: inclusive football fundraiser in Leeds!

Next Friday I’ll be popping down to Leeds to play this amazing gig in The Attic with wormboys.

You can buy tickets here.

Friday 16 January 2026. We can kick it - a fundraiser for trans-inclusive football in Leeds. Live music, performances, DJ sets from Fig By Four, Faded Alchemy, Sophie and the Silhouettes, wormboys, Lick Quid Gold DJs, Shariz DJ, Ballz Deep, Plasma Anderson, Sunflower Thieves. Unwaged £5, face £10, solidarity £15. 7pm until late at The Attic, Leeds.

In the wake of the Football Association effectively banning trans women from playing even at an amateur level, it’s been heartening to see a lot of serious community organising happening around inclusive football. A lot of this has been led by women who have already been frustrated for years with the institutional sexism of the FA, and their effective control over many local pitches.

This gig will be raising money for those fighting back against a corporate, exclusionary approach to football, and working to build something much better in its place.

Plus, it’s a stonking line-up. If you’re local, come and see us all play!

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Activist pasts and imagined futures

Back in October I caught the train down to Coventry to visit my old stomping grounds at the University of Warwick. The occasion was the 20th Anniversary of Warwick Anti-Sexism Society (WASS), a student campaigning group at the university. Technically WASS was 21 this year, but whoever let technicalities get in the way of a good celebration?

Co-hosted by the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender, the event brought current WASS members, including WASS president Izie Lopez-Scott and Students’ Union sabbatical officer Ananya Sreekumar, together with former students and feminist academics, including founders Sam Lyle and Cath Lambert, and early member Maria do Mar Pereira.

As I arrived on campus, it occurred to me that I must have been one of longest-running members of WASS. In contrast to the likes of Sam and Cath, I never played an organising role, instead on volunteering my time with Warwick Pride (the LGBTUA+ society), Rocksoc (for the metalheads), and later also Bandsoc (for whom I still occasionally judge the university’s annual Warwick Battle of the Bands). Nevertheless, after originally joining WASS way back in the academic year of 2005-2006, I maintained an on-and-off membership through my undergraduate, masters, and PhD degrees, finally leaving in 2016. During that time I attended numerous talks, workshops, protests, and occupations as a member of WASS, and joined fellow members as a delegate to Women’s Conferences hosted by the National Union of Students.

I wasn’t quite sure how it would feel to participate in the anniversary event. I anticipated it would be somewhat nostalgic.

Certainly the event served me nostalgia in spades. A WASS exhibition featured numerous t-shirts, hoodies, zines, posters, and pamphlets produced by the society from 2004 to the present day. I brought along a couple of zines from the 2010s – Sam brought along a huge amount of old material, much of which dated back to my undergraduate days. In a panel discussion, we reflected together on the context in which WASS was formed, why it felt so difficult and important to name yourself as a feminist in the early 2000s, and how the society’s early campaigns reflected the priorities and debates of the day (lads’ mags! feminism for men! Page 3!)

Photo of WASS exhibition, with t-shirts, zines, and newspaper clippings.
Photo of WASS exhibition, with zines, flyers, t-shirts, a hoodie, a tote bag, and a progress Pride flag.
Photo of a t-shirt bearing the slogan FHM: Feminism Helps Men.


But my main takeaway was the way in which our actions can echo through time, informing and influencing others in ways we might never be aware of.

When Sam and Cath founded WASS, they were focused on the present. They didn’t think much about how it might provide a way into activism and feminist thought for hundreds of people over two decades. Looking at the exhibition, speaking in a session about what had changed and what happened, it felt clear to me that we are living in a world shaped hugely be the world of 00s feminism, even amidst an enormous misogynist backlash.

There is something here about the complexity of wins, and the importance of work over time. It is not simply the case that the world gets better or worse. At the event, we discussed the growing cultural impact of violent misogynists from the manosphere. Sam highlighted how rates of femicide remain extremely high, half a century after the second-wave feminist movement kicked into gear. Equally, we reflected on how there is far more mainstream acknowledgement, understanding, and support for survivors domestic violence than there used to be even 20 years ago. This matters: it provides more people with a way out, a route into rebuilding their lives with the support of their families and communities.

Similarly, even as racist rhetoric dominates mainstream political discourse, feminist movements have increasingly learned from the difficult discussions around intersectionality that have taken place across years, decades. Meanwhile, other social movements have got better at acknowledging sexism, and embracing feminist ideals. WASS was originally an all-white, all-cis, non-disabled collective, which struggled to build alliances with other student liberation groups. This has not been the case for years. Key issues for student feminists at Warwick in 2025 include the genocide in Gaza, and fighting back against the university’s attempts to implement anti-trans policies. Warwick’s liberation movements frequently collaborate and cross-advertise events, and current students described how activists were often involved simultaneously in anti-sexist, anti-racist, and pro-queer groups.

A young man at the event asked me how campaigners stay motivated when there is so much rollback. I said I was inspired by the fact that we can still help people, that we can still create ideas and resources that it turns out are useful to others years, decades later. This was illustrated perfectly by the most unexpected story I heard that day, from an early career academic who thanked me for my old writing on TeachHigher.

A decade ago, TeachHigher was the University of Warwick’s attempt to advance insecure employment on campus, and undermine trade unionism. Branded as “a more consistent approach to the employment of hourly paid staff who work in different departments”, TeachHigher would provide a framework specifically for casual teaching contracts, offering an alternative to full-time, salaried lectureships. As a “wholly-owned subsidiary” of Warwick, it would technically be a separate company, while still funneling profits directly back into the university. This meant workers contracted through TeachHigher would be unable to benefit from collective bargaining with the University and College Union (UCU). The intention was to expand the model already used by Unitemps, another Warwick-owned subsidiary which “offers flexible staffing solutions” (often zero-hour contracts) across the higher education sector.

An enormous struggle over TeachHigher happened in 2015. The scheme was pushed aggressively by management, and opposed vociferously by hourly-paid teaching staff: the very people TeachHigher intended to contract. In subsequent years, I spoke and wrote about how this model for internal outsourcing was defeated through collective action on the part of students and staff. Workers such as myself carefully scrutinised the university’s proposals, identified pressure points within our own departments, found allies amongst more securely employed faculty, and organised accordingly. We effectively took over our local UCU branch, while also planning outside of its structures. Loopholes in existing casualised contracts enabled us to circumvent the UK’s anti-union laws, through moves such as departmental teaching boycotts. Multiple departments declared that they would refuse to participate in the TeachHigher pilot. The final straw came when UCU announced a national demonstration on a University of Warwick open day, which would have been an enormous embarrassment to the institution.

The successful campaign against TeachHigher brought student groups such as WASS and Warwick Anti-Racism Society together with staff bodies such as UCU. Due to the unequal impacts of casualisation, we recognised – as my late, great colleague Christian Smith put it – that “TeachHigher is sexist, and TeachHigher is racist”. We built on tactics developed in previous years. For example, the idea of protesting on an open day was developed by the 2013 Protect the Public University campaign, which grew out of the 2011 Occupy Warwick encampment. WASS members, naturally, were involved in both.

The defeat of TeachHigher was an enormous win for campaigners. Not only was the scheme withdrawn: we also negotiated pay rises, better terms and conditions for all casualised staff, and pathways towards more secure contracts for some.

Photograph of trees with yellowed leaves lining a road on an autumnal day

Yet by 2025, there was very little institutional memory of TeachHigher. For all that we won, many teaching staff remained on casualised contracts, and Unitemps continued to prosper. Meanwhile, the vast majority of those involved in the struggle have moved on, to live and work elsewhere. The university was largely under new management, and there had been an enormous turnover within human resources as well as student bodies. For those who even know the dispute happened, it can be hard to find concrete information. News platforms delete old stories, and enshittification makes it harder to use search engines to find those that remain.

At the WASS Anniversary, I learned that a key source of information on TeachHigher today can be found in my past blog posts.

Old wins echo down the years. Temporary gains are gains nonetheless. I would guess that every one of us who benefited from the TeachHigher defeat is better off now as a result. Personally, I found myself in a better place financially to finish my PhD and continue an academic career. I also learned an enormous amount about the practicalities of collective organising. I know I have draw on those gains repeatedly over the last decade to continue supporting others in turn.

Even if pay rises for casualised staff were eroded over time, the fact that we fought and that we won can continue to inspire workers facing similar struggles. Just as TeachHigher was inspired by Protect the Public University, which was inspired by Occupy Warwick, which was inspired by the Red Warwick occupations of the 1970s as well as the US-led Occupy Movement, the Spanish Indignados Movement, and the Arab Spring. These long influences don’t just happen: they rely on people writing things down, saving artifacts, and remembering together.

The funny thing is, I had no idea anyone might find my old blog posts on TeachHigher useful after so many years. I was one small part of a far larger movement, and have been involved in so many other campaigns since. Nevertheless, through chronicling events it turns out that I created a resource that remains useful to this day.

At the WASS Anniversary, I was reminded how important it is to commemorate our local histories of activism, and to share what we have learned along the way. Social progress is neither linear, nor guaranteed. But if we imagine there might be a better future around the corner, and act accordingly, then we might change the world in ways we cannot possibly anticipate.

Photo of a poster with bold text and a small picture of a sapling plant. Text reads as follows "By choosing a feminist politics, you are making a commitment to a world that has not yet been built" - Lola Olufemi. Warwick Anti Sexism Society. Campaigning for gender liberation. @warwickantisexismsociety


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Endorsement: Writing Badly (2025)

In recent years I’ve provided a few written endorsements for cool books and other publications. I’ve decided to start sharing them to this site so more people are aware of these works!

I’m starting off with the first issue of Writing Badly. This is a new journal of letters, written by and for trans women on the subjects of misogyny and feminism. It is – intentionally – only available in print.

Here’s what I had to say about issue 1 of Writing Badly:

“Throw away your phone and read this instead. From cookery to consciousness-raising, from deep theory to casual misandry, from practical advice to impractical advice, the essays and letters of Writing Badly will help you build new worlds.

Imagine deep conversation with the cleverest women you know. Imagine organising with the coolest women you know. Imagine arguing with the most annoying women you know. Imagine being in community with women who will always have your back.

By turns profound and infuriating, beautiful and devastating, this collection has it all.“

Photo of Writing Badly Issue 1. The cover image is greyscale and features an abstract image of several fish.


On publication, I supported Writing Badly through buying myself a copy from my local independent bookshop, for the grand price of a tenner. They didn’t have a copy when I first went in, so I asked them if they could order one in for me. They instead ordered in a load, and now have them on the shelf for other women (and other people). Maybe you can do the same! Alternatively, it’s available to order online through ebay.

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International Trans Studies Conference Day 4: safety, synthesisers, and the future of the field

This is the fifth in a series of blog posts about the 2nd International Trans Studies Conference in Evanston (4-7 September 2024).

Read Part 1 here.
Read Part 2 here.
Read Part 3 here.
Read Part 4 here.

It’s difficult to put into words what an enormous experience the 2nd International Trans Studies Conference was: the power of being in community with other trans scholars, the benefits of sharing ideas across disciplines and borders, the frustrations that arose with technical difficulties and the academy’s complicity in so many forms of violence. I intended to reflect on some of these matters further in a final blog post, but for now suffice to say that I was by turns exhausted, joyous, and hopeful throughout the fourth and final day of the event.


On being a target: How trans studies scholars and practitioners can survive hate and harassment

Saturday morning featured a session I had put together, focusing on strategies for survival in trans studies at a time of increased negative attention on our work. I approached several colleagues who have encountered substantial challenges from anti-trans campaigns, three of whom kindly agreed to join me to talk about what we might do about this.

Asa Radix of Callen-Lorde Community Health Center (USA) and Samantha Martin of Birmingham City University (UK) were sadly not able to join us in person, but recorded brilliant videos describing practical and theoretical responses to their experiences of being targeted by hate movements, both externally and within the institutions in which they worked. Florence Ashley of the University of Alberta (Canada) brought their irrepressible physical presence to the room, exploring in a short talk how proposed police monitoring of their law classes threatened to undermine the academic freedom of their students.

I wrote my own short presentation based on my experiences, explaining the abuse and harassment that continues to disrupt my research, and ways in which I have sought to counter this in practice. Drawing on my 2020 article “A Methodology for the Marginalised”, I argued that it should not be our individual responsibility to look after ourselves. Rather, we need practical support from the employers who benefit from our work. We also gain from building communities and networks of mutual support among marginalised academics, both within and beyond trans studies. A copy of my slides can be found here.

For me the most important part of the session was not what the speakers said, however: it was the opportunity for attendees to discuss their own experiences and strategies for navigating institutional barriers and opportunities for support. Whereas most of the conference consisted of several academic presentations followed by a short Q&A, we intentionally structured this session to enable as much conversation as possible, with questions fielded by anyone and everyone in the room rather than just looking to the speakers as experts. As a lecturer in community development, I found myself almost surprised by the rigidity of the traditional conference format, and was glad that attendees felt they benefited from our more open-ended approach, and the opportunity to discuss and sit with ideas.

Sadly, our online attendees did not have the same experience as those in the room. Like many other sessions at the conference, ours was plagued with technical difficulties due to problems with the digital conference software Ex Ordo. Given this possibility, and the fact that our session featured two video presentations, I turned up early in the morning to strategise with our amazing technical assistant, Srishti Chatterjee. Unfortunately, the session before ours ended up overrunning due to their own technical issues, meaning that we no time to properly set things up. Under pressure, we managed to get the videos working, but weren’t able to monitor the online chat while this was happening, not realising until afterwards that they were not visible for those outside the room. It would have undoubtedly been worse if Srish was not present, highlighting the importance of having trained people with initiative on hand to respond to problems as they arise.

You can read a third party account of our session on Amy Ko’s blog (thanks Amy!)


Trans Synths and Synthetic Sounds

After our intense discussion of hate and safety, I sought refuge in a more joyous session. And so to synths, and synthetic sounds: to trans pop and hyperpop, music that brings me immense joy.

This session began with a talk titled Switched-On Reality: The Synthesizer and Trans Subjectivity, by Westley Montgomery of Stanford University (USA). Montgomery highlighted the enormous contributions to music made by two pioneering synthesiser artists: Wendy Carlos and Sylvester.

Carlos is famous for her arrangements of Bach for the Moog synthesiser, as well as her film scores for A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and Tron.  Sylvester was a member of the drag theatre group The Cockettes, before becoming known as the “Queen of Disco” with hits such as “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”. Both are therefore remembered for their major contributions to 20th Century popular music, but as Montgomery observed, can also be seen as “bad trans objects”.

Carlos transitioned in the 1960s and disclosed her trans history in the late 1970s, following her rise to prominence. In this way she became an extremely high profile trans musician. However, she also distanced herself actively from trans liberation movements, enabled by her relative privilege as a highly educated, white, middle-class woman. Montgomery wryly observed that people have asked ‘“where was Wendy Carlos [who lived in New York at the time] during Stonewall?’”, noting that, “the answer is most likely at home, playing Bach”. Sylvester, a Black middle-class person with an ambivalent public relationship to gender, famously proclaimed “If I want to be a woman, I can be a woman. If I want to be a man, I can be one”. However, Sylvester actively rejected transsexual identification, was uninvolved in the civil rights movement, and would later also reject disco music as it waned in popularity.

Both Wendy Carlos and Sylvester can therefore be understood as assimilationist figures who do not live up to liberatory ideals. But Montgomery argued that they must be understood within the context of the material conditions in which they lived. Moreover, their musical contributions are historically significant regardless, especially in terms of synthesiser use. Montgomery posited that the mainstream emergence of the synthesiser and of women and queer musicians happened in tandem, enabling a resignification of womanhood. Montgomery ended the talk by Hannah Baer, who argues moreover that the synthesiser is inherently not cisgender: “a synthesiser’s shape is not in any way where the sound comes from, and there’s something so free and trans in that. You have no idea what sound is going to come out of this thing. And maybe I don’t either!”

The next few talks shifted the focus to 21st Century synthetic sounds in the context of hyperpop. In Gender Knobs: Transgender Expression through Vocal Filtering Technology in Drag, Hyperpop Music and Beyond, Jordan Bargett of Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (USA) looked at the gendering of voice through pitch filtering. Her story began with the vocoder, originally invented to extend bandwidth in telefony, and later adapted for encryption in World War 2 before being adapted for popular music by artists including Wendy Carlos and Laurie Anderson. Anderson in particular used pitch filtering for gender drag in “O Superman”, using it to perform a masculine “voice of authority”. In the 2000s and 2010s pitch-shifting gained popularity with nightcore, setting the scene for trans-specific experimentation within hyperpop.

With hyperpop, Bargett explained that filtered vocals could be used for more nuanced gender expression as well as drag. They introduced the examples of trans women artists SOPHIE and Laura Les, who both used pitch filtering to create more “feminine” singing voices. In this context, authentic trans voices might be understood as both “synthesised and authentic”. At the same time, Bargett cautions that pitch alone does not, of course, gender a voice, and that hyperpop artists tend to be well aware of this. She presented the example of SOPHIE’s music video “It’s Okay to Cry”, in which the artist’s voice and body are “undressed”: an expression of trans vulnerability. The talk concluded with a screening of Bargett’s own short film “Transistor”, which explored how “technology can be an extension of the trans self and body”.

We heard more about SOPHIE from Gabriel Fianderio of the University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA), in Interpretation and articulation: Transphobia and Dysphoria Through SOPHIE’s “L.O.VE.”. Fianderio began by noting that “BIPP”, the opening track on SOPHIE’s debut EP PRODUCT, promises to make us “feel better”. But “L.O.V.E”, the closing track on the EP, is difficult to listen to due to the hostile noise of the dentist’s drill that recurs throughout the song. How to make sense of this disjuncture?

Fianderio posits that SOPHIE’s music provides a context in which we can move from “interpretation” (one truth) to “articulation” (space for multiplicity). Interpretation is often a problem with trans people. Citing Salamon, Fianderio  noted that “trans panic” defences for the murder of trans women often depend on the interpretation of gender expression as “an aggressive act, akin to a sexual advance or sexual assault”. Similarly, dysphoria can entail a range of complex feelings and sensations relating to ourselves and others. Forms of interpretation centring pain, disgust, and distress ignores the complexity of ambivalence, and the possibility for accompanying euphoria.

Fianderio’s argument was that “L.O.V.E.” problematises interpretation through its use of the drill sound. They drew on internet commentary to show how the sound is often described by listeners as a physical experience (e.g. “This unblocks my nose”). Complex textures underlie this painful sound of the drill, and complex articulations are subsequently appreciated by listeners who spend time with the song and come to enjoy it. In this context, “L.O.V.E.”’s rejection of singular interpretation enables listeners to read conflicting emotions into the same form, and hence articulate complex feelings around euphoria and dysphoria. This can take place with and through the drill sound itself, and/or the song structure itself, with its synthesised vocals and moments of relief and beauty.

The final talk in the session, by Lee Tyson of Ithaca College (USA), was titled Trans Hyperpop and the Synthetic Authenticity of the Digital Voice. Tyson asked how and why trans hyperpop artists are positioned as “authentic”. Their talk began again with SOPHIE, noting that she was widely celebrated for her “authenticity” following her accidental death in 2021, which appeared to potentially contract with the experimental approach and ironic sincerity she employed in much of her music. Tyson describes this as a form of “synthetic authenticity” that can be found among many trans hyperpop musicians.

Tyson returned to the topic of vocal manipulation, quoting Laura Les’ comments on her earlier work, in which she explained she altered her vocals because “it’s the only way I can record, I can’t listen to my regular voice, usually” [my note: interestingly, the most recent material from Les’ band 100 gecs features much less processing on her vocals]. By contrast, Dorian Electra artificially inflates the character of their voice: “My music is simultaneously artificial and authentic. It’s just as authentic to use the same sappy love song language that’s been used in a million ways. A person singing a love song is still putting on a character”.

Tyson contextualised these comments by noting that voice manipulation can be understood as part of a wider technological field, as with (for example) hormone therapy, surgeries, and voice training. Within this field, hyperpop can be understood as a form of simultaneous deconstruction/reconstruction [note: I have also written on this as a feature of trans music!] This is not always liberatory: Tyson outlined the examples of the commercialisation of hyperpop, and the white appropriation of tropes of Black soul music by artists such as SOPHIE. At the same time, by finding something “more real” in artificial sounds, hyperpop offers a productive challenge to contemporary trans advocacy strategies and neoliberal imperatives of self-actualisation which rely on norms of intelligibility.


Overall, this was one of my favourite sessions of the conference. Like much of the music under discussion, it was self-knowingly silly and playful – yet stuffed full of surprising depth and interesting ideas. I only wish that the presenters had spent less time critiquing the whiteness of hyperpop, and more time considering the work of groundbreaking artists of colour such as underscores. Meanwhile, I don’t think music in and of itself can change the world, but it can help change the way we think, and that’s powerful and important.


Caucuses

After lunch, I spent most of the afternoon in a range of caucus sessions. These actually ran throughout the conference, and offered more open discussion spaces for people to have conversations on the basis of shared personal/demographic experiences or disciplinary interests. For example, there was an Asian scholars’ caucus, and a caucus for people studying trans healthcare.

Unfortunately, the schedule for the event was so jam-packed that each of the caucuses took place alongside multiple parallel presentation sessions. As such, I didn’t get around to attending any of the ones relevant or open to me until the final afternoon, when I managed to go to three in succession.

The first of these was the Palestinian caucus. This was an informal but very well-attended event arranged by attendees who wanted to organise collectively against the ongoing genocide in Gaza. This felt particularly urgent at the conference given the absence of Palestinian speakers, the presence of corporations who invest financially in the Israeli regime, and the suspension of Northwestern University professor Steven Thrasher following his support for a student encampment.

The second was the trans women and transfeminine scholars’ caucus. I recommended this take place and volunteered to chair it after a callout for volunteers from the conference organisers. Like many trans professional and trans studies spaces, the conference was dominated by men and transmasculine people. One joke often repeated at the conference was that “trans studies is mostly trans men who talk about trans women to cis women”: it felt very different to consider the repercussions of this within a woman and transfeminine only space. I found it very meaningful and refreshing to connect with colleagues in this context, and there is at least one very cool idea which might come out of our conversations, so watch this space.

Finally, I attended a caucus on publicly engaged scholarship. This turned out to be a small number of us swapping career advice, which is perhaps not what I originally intended, but felt very productive nonetheless!


Closing plenary

The conference closed with a plenary titled Whither Trans Studies? Towards a Future for the Field.

First, organiser TJ Billard took to the stage to make some closing comments. They thanked their fellow organisers, plus the conference’s steering group and sponsors, reflecting on how important it is that various university departments (especially at Northwestern) and research institutions support trans studies. They then reflected on the conference’s ambitious approaches to accessibility and inclusion, which faced some significant hitches in practice.

Billard thanked conference attendees for being patient and forgiving when things went wrong, and encouraged future organisers to “learn from the things that we tried to do, learn that the things that we failed to do, shortcomings both technical and intellectual”. They noted, echoing the complaints of the Palestinian caucus, that this included the absence of Palestinian scholars at a time of ongoing scholaricide, and apologised for the organisers’ failings in this regard.

We then heard reports from a small number of the caucuses. The graduate student caucus asked, “where is trans studies going? There was lots of discussion, and no consensus”. The Asian scholars’ caucus noted how the needs of Asian scholars are not necessarily met in “standard” Anglophone trans studies classes or syllabi, and reflected on the importance of building a network and not being alone.

The most extensive report came from the disabled scholars’ caucus, and these reflected many of the major strengths and failings of the conference I and others have written about recently. For many disabled scholars, we heard, this was a first opportunity to know of one another’s existence. Nevertheless, “the absences at this conference [were] as significant as the presences”: a comment that reflected Kai Pyle’s statements on the absence of Indigenous scholars in the opening plenary. Disabled people were absent due to numerous barriers to participation: this included the extreme circumstances facing those experiencing disablement through genocidal actions note just in Gaza, but also in Sudan and Congo.

In this context, the disabled trans scholars who were present were broadly “grateful and somewhat okay with the access we have experienced this week”. However, we were left with a number of thoughts which will be vital for future organisers: “Access is about justice, and justice is about accountability […] Access is not simply a matter of getting into a building. It is about interrogating why a building is inaccessible in the first place”.

Then the conference closed with a barnstorming final speech from the legendary Susan Stryker. She began by thanking all the people who had approached her throughout the event to thank her for her significant body of work: “I appreciate that something that I did landed with you in some way”. She then turned to think through the purpose and importance of trans studies.

Stryker started by looking to the roots of her own oppression. She explained that this has informed her analysis of body politics that positions people within specific, given social roles. She argued that while this body politics is a lynchpin of the Eurocentric social order, it has not always been this way, and it does not have to by this way.

What does it mean to be trans in this oppressive social order? Stryker proclaimed that “transness is an affective experience, driven by suffering and drawn by desire […] it is a practice of freedom”. This presents the possibility of alliance across multiple liberation movements. As Black trans studies has shown, transness is not just about sex/gender, but also at least as much about race, and the ways that certain bodies are racialised through gendering and gendered through racialisation. It is also vital that trans people understand their commonality with feminism. Insofar as feminism defies biological determination, “feminism can be considered a trans practice of freedom”. What brings us together is our movement across the boundary of categories designed to restrict freedom: “it is wrong to believe that embodiment must be a trap”.

Consequently, trans studies is about the pursuit of freedom, and should be a liberatory practice. Stryker cautioned us that creating an institutionalised form of trans studies does not solve the actual problems we face. She wryly insisted that we learn from the student movements of the 1960s, which did not achieve revolution, but instead “achieved ethnic studies departments”. She encouraged us to consider how we might use what positions we have in the academy to create space for struggle: “If we are so damn radical, if we are so dangerous, why has the field not been oppressed more brutally?” Stryker explained that she wasn’t trying to deny the real oppression we face – but rather, to acknowledge that as we sat gathered in the state of Illinois, certain things were possible for us which are not necessarily possible elsewhere.

At this juncture, Stryker reminded us of Stephen Thrasher’s suspension for visiting a student camp that supported the Palestinian struggle against genocide. She invited us to consider what it is about a trans studies conference – sponsored by the very institution that suspended Thrasher – that makes us more acceptable than voicing support for people facing death in Gaza?

Stryker shared several concerns raised at the Palestinian caucus with the rest of the conference, asking: what might a post-disciplinary trans studies look like in light of an absence of meaningful, substantive engagement with the genocide in Gaza? Drawing on a statement put together by the caucus, she noted that the conference was not BDS compliant, that attendees were not made aware of Northwestern University’s complicity in genocide, that there was no explicit discussion of the scholarcide in Gaza in the official programming, and that there was no formal engagement with the large Palestinian diaspora community living near to the campus. She argued that a shared liberatory goal for trans studies should include solidarity with Palestine, and future organising should undertake a good faith effort to foreground Palestinian scholars and be BDS compliant. Stryker invited scholars to raise their hands if they were supportive of these statements of solidarity: a majority of the room immediately did so.

Finally, Stryker formally proposed the creation of a new International Trans Studies Association, as a context for trans studies scholars to organise for freedom. As the “largest, most diverse gathering of trans studies scholars to date”, she stated her belief that the conference had a mandate to make a decision on the creation of this new association. She proposed that this process begin by taking advantage of the international steering group assembled for the 2nd International Trans Studies Conference, with this group invited to create proposed bylaws for the new organisation, and all conference attendees invited to join as founding members and vote on the proposed bylaws. Stryker asked if the room was in favour of this process, and asked us to raise our hands if so: once again, there was an overwhelming expression of support.


And that was it!

I’m really grateful to everyone who has written to say how they have found this series of blog posts interesting or useful. I think it’s really important to share material from conferences with people who are unable to attend. I used to regularly livetweet, but this no longer feels like a productive form of engagement. Writing up my notes ended up taking a lot longer than anticipated, and the length of some of these posts has felt a bit unwieldy. It’s also a bit frustrating to be finishing off the series over a month after the conference ended! Still, it feels really important to have some kind of record.

I’m hoping to write a final post on the Trans Studies Conference, reflecting more broadly on my experiences and questions of accessibility and resourcing, possibly comparing and contrasting with the 2024 WPATH Symposium in Lisbon. Let’s see how I do!

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International Trans Studies Conference, Day 2: TERF wars, parenting, detransition, and decolonial theory

This is the second in a series of blog posts about the 2nd International Trans Studies Conference in Evanston (4-7 September 2024).


Read Part 1 here.

Photo of conference banner.

I began my second day at the conference Chicago-style – breakfasting on an enormous slice of leftover deep dish pizza. Suitably fortified, I strolled the sunny streets of the Northwestern University campus to the Technological Institute, a massive building in which the various conference sessions are taking place.

I was keen to arrive early for the first full day of the conference, as I had been asked to chair an early session. As described in my first post, the huge scope of this event means there are normally eleven simultaneous sessions at once, so there is sadly no way any one person can keep up with everything that’s going on.

Fortunately, the conference organisers planned long lunch breaks and multiple evening receptions, meaning there was plenty of time to meet and catch up with other people even if you hadn’t been able to see them present their paper.

In this post and others I’m therefore going to focus on the sessions and papers I did get to see. Bear in mind that this is just a tiny proportion of the material presented at the conference, and it reflects my own interests and ad-hoc decisions rather than the full scope of the event. It is also my interpretation of the papers I heard, so I may have missed nuance or got some things wrong! I’ve organised this post by the title of the sessions I attended, so do scroll down to whatever interests you most.


TERF Wars: The Battle for Feminist Futures

The danger of writing a book titled TERF Wars is that for years afterwards, people invite you to speak, write, and host events on the topic of trans-exclusionary feminisms. I suppose it was therefore almost inevitable that as a member of the steering group for the conference, I would be asked to chair this session! Fortunately, we were graced with a series of extremely interesting papers which shed new light on how best to understand and work through conflicts over “TERF” politics and essentialist ideas of womanhood, especially given their increasing alignment with far-right politics.

The first paper in the session was titled The Metaphysics of the Natural in TERF Discourse, and was presented by the American-Mexican independent scholar Julianna Neuhouser, based on her collaborative work with Siobhan Guerro Mc Manus. Neuhouser began by acknowledging the significant rise in opposition to trans people’s civil rights over the last decade, with an impact in turn on how a large portions of society think and speak. She argued that trans-exclusionary radical feminism (or “TERF” politics) has played an important role in this, enabling racist, ecofascist and anti-choice positions historically associated with conservative or far-right thinking to be presented as “legitimate” or even feminist within mainstream contexts.

Neuhouser traced a brief history of this process, beginning with the role of ecofeminist approaches which present women as more “naturally” connected to nature than men. In this context, trans women are positioned as a dangerous technological phenomenon, not fully women and perhaps not even fully human. Neuhouser noted the influence of Mary Daly – who infamously compared to trans women to Frankenstein’s monster in her 1978 book Gyn/Ecology – on later writers including the antisemitic conspiracy theorist Jennifer Bilek, and the UK journalist Helen Joyce. Antisemitism and transphobia are also entwined within ecofascist thinking around population control. Neuhouser discussed the example of Derrick Jensen, who turned to conspiracy theories about Jewish influence on trans-inclusive feminism to explain the collapse of his own political project.

Similarly, Neuhouser noted how trans-exclusionary logics have enabled religious right perspectives to be positioned as feminist, outlining the example of INAARGIT (the Feminist International Network Against Artificial Reproduction, Gender Ideology and Transhumanism). INAARGIT promotes the protection of women’s “natural” sexed bodies against “artificial” reproductive and body modification technologies, with consequences for assisted reproduction as well as trans existence. Neuhouser argued that this approach is tacitly associated with fears regarding a supposed Jewish and/or Muslim “replacement” of the white race, much like ecofascist perspectives that embrace the devastating impact of the AIDS epidemic in African countries as a net positive for humanity.

The second talk in the session was by Heng Wang from the University of British Columbia (Canada), on Cyber Trans Panic: The Transnational Circulation of Transphobia and the Mobilization of Vulnerability Among Chinese Trans-exclusionary Feminists on Social Media. Wang began their talk by noting the significant rise in anti-trans feminist discourse on Chinese social media in the last two years. She argued that while many contemporary arguments mirror those of Western trans-exclusionary radical feminists active in the 1970s and 80s, social media has enabled greater circulation of misinformation and disinformation in the present.

Wang explained that when queer and feminist community groups and NGOs first emerged in China in the 1990s, these were broadly trans inclusive. However, online debate and educational programmes led by these groups were restricted in the mid-2010s. Young women are now therefore turning to social media influencers for feminist understandings of sex and gender.

Wang identified the politics of translation as a key issue for influencers’ impact on both trans people and feminism. “Gender” is frequently translated into “social sex” (shehui xingbie). In the Chinese linguistic context, definitions such as this effectively work to essentialise sexual difference as natural, in opposition to the social. It has led to growing numbers of Chinese feminists defining womanhood in essentialist biological terms, and potentially confusing translation of Western commentary on trans women and feminism. Meanwhile, only a minority of individuals have access to Western social media platforms, meaning that content by figures such as JK Rowling as well as responses from trans-inclusive feminists are mediated by the influencers capable of both accessing and translating it. These acts of translation can be shaped by misunderstandings and a projection of the influencers’ own ideological positions.

Consequently, transmisogyny in China is on the increase due to an entanglement of global far-right politics, disinformation on social media, and the specific Chinese national context. Wang therefore argues for the importance of a localised Chinese vision of trans feminism.

The final talk in the session was by Alex Colombo and Gonzalo Bustamante Moya of the University of Oregon (USA), titled The feminist empire: toward an anti-fascist trans politics. The presenters’ starting point was a question posted by Ana Seresin: how might contemporary antifascist organising be strengthened by acknowledging that some feminisms can be fascist? In speaking of fascism, they drew on Aimé Césaire’s portrayal of fascism not as an exceptional form of politics, but as the application of colonial projects and procedures against a white population instead of colonised peoples outside of Europe. In this sense, fascism can be understood potentially as a logical extension of liberalism, rather than external to it. The presenters explored these ideas through a deep engagement with Judith Butler’s book Who’s Afraid of Gender? and Jules Gill-Peterson’s A Short History of Transmisogyny.

Butler’s book positions gender as a phantasm: a psychosexual phenomenon, a site where anxieties and fears are mobilised to incite passions. This causes a blockage of critical thinking and imagination. Butler demonstrates that anti-gender movements have successfully positioned gender minorities as a “threat to the nation” in many parts of the world, and have used fascist strategies to contain this threat: stripping people of their civil rights, and expanding the power of state control and surveillance. Butler’s proposed solution is to develop a “counter-imaginary” that organises reality differently and creates alliances against anti-gender movements. However, the presenters argued that this approach retains some reliance on the “liberal institutions” of the state, which do not provide the necessary resources to truly confront fascism.

Drawing on Gill-Peterson, the presenters argued for a colonial origin of trans-exclusionary feminist fears and anxieties. Gill-Peterson positions transmisogyny as “a mode of colonial statecraft”, used for the creation and management of sexual minority populations. In identifying some people as transfeminine and labelling this as a problem, colonisers gain a new rationale for surveillance and control. Transmisogyny can therefore be understood not simply as a form of individual prejudice, but as a mechanism of the liberal/colonial cis state, intended to ensure a “fear of interdependence and “refusal of solidarity”.

Consequently, anti-trans feminism’s alignment with anti-gender movements is not simply a matter of hatred, and liberal institutions cannot be relied upon to oppose this process. In mobilising the phantasm of gender there is a clear rationale for transphobic feminists to ally with fascists within liberal contexts. Consequently, trans politics must be explicitly anti-fascist, and anti-fascist politics must address trans liberation.


Mother Knows Best: Families and Parents of Transgender Children

I next decided to attend two different sessions about trans children and their families. In the first session, I heard two papers on how parents might actively support their trans children.

In How do parents become sensitive to their Nonbinary child’s identity? Noah Sweder of Tufts University (USA) reported on the findings of a research project looking specifically at pathways to support within families. They identified four themes from their interviews with parents:

  1. Parents hear and support their child’s nonbinary identity. Sometimes they might find it hard to adjust, but making their best effort makes a real difference.
  2. Parents learn about the ways cisnormative society harms their child. This can involve observing children’s experiences of joy in their identity and expression, and experiencing frustration at societal stigma and barriers to social participation.
  3. Parents take significant and proactive steps to affirm their child. This can involve identifying who needs to know that the child is trans in order to better support them and make their lives easier, with key examples being schools and doctors. It can also involve taking strong action against transphobia, including being prepared to challenge family members.
  4. Parents recognise that gender is just one aspect of their child’s life. The child has not essentially changed, but instead wishes to be seen and understood.

The biggest takeaway from these findings is that parents do not necessarily need pre-existing knowledge and understanding to be supportive of their child. Instead, they need to be prepared to listen, learn, and take action.

The second paper I caught in this session was by j wallace skelton of the University of Regina (Canada), titled Strong Parental Support From Parent-Advocates. Drawing on a larger dataset looking at parents’ experiences across Canada, skelton focused nine interviews from the largely rural province of Saskatachewan. In 2023 the Saskatachewan government introduced a policy requiring parental permission for name and pronouns changes in schools. This was repealed following a legal challenge in 2024, only for the legislature to hold an emergency session to bring in new policy.

skelton explained that while the researchers didn’t ask about the Saskatachewan’s anti-trans legislation, parents inevitably brought it up. They highlighted the emotional difficulty and exhaustion of receiving constant news around transphobic legislation, and the heartbreak of their children feeling unwelcome in the province.

In spite of this difficult backdrop, I found the paper optimistic in its focus on parent advocacy, echoing [NAME]’s research. skelton observed that the participant cohort had mixed experiences of advocacy before knowing they had a trans child, and many were targeted for supporting their child, for example being called “groomers” or “paedophiles”. In spite of this, all parents forefronted child agency, naming their child’s experiences as valuable basis for learning. Parents saw their children as educators, balancing this with a “team effort” approach to advocacy within families, and centring their children’s consent in acting on their behalf. For example, skelton cited a parent who said, “I think that’s the biggest advice is that you need to check with your child too if it’s okay”.

Often parental advocacy changed people’s relationship with their communities, for example through leaving unsupportive churches, or no longer meeting with hateful family members. Notably, this was typically positioned as a loss for the transphobes rather than their targets; as skelton put it, “what a shame for Aunt Bertha”.

At this point, I ran over to another session to catch part of a paper by my colleague Cal Horton from Oxford Brookes University (UK): Trans children and state violence: Solidarity and resistance in the UK. As the title indicates, Horton highlighted the horrific injustices young trans people are increasingly facing in the UK (see e.g. my commentary on the Cass Review). At the same time, it was great to see them emphasise the power of resistance from young trans people and their allies, especially the dramatic protests undertaken by Trans Kids Deserve Better.

Exhausted but full of ideas, I headed to the courtyard for lunch, presented in convenient little paper bags labelled according to dietary need and preference. This was a great chance to do the most serious work of the conference, which can sadly never be truly captured in a post such as this: meeting new people and catching up with old friends. I then headed to a session all about detransition.


Cease and Desist: New Perspectives on Detransition

This session opened with a paper by Leor Baldus of the University of Marburg (Germany), titled Detransition: Decisions, Perspectives, and Life Paths of Detransitioned Individuals. Baldus noted that there is very minimal community-based research on detransition, with discourse around the topic dominated by medical and psychological studies. This research therefore focused on detransitioners speaking for themselves, through interviews with six detransitioned people assigned female at birth.

The most interesting part of the paper for me was Baldus’ discussion of what she called the “paradox dynamics of gatekeeping”. This reflected my own observations that gatekeeping practices in trans healthcare can often cause rather than prevent forms of regret.

Baldus observed that diagnosis and therapy within gender clinics always takes place in a context shaped by societal norms, including sexism, heteronormativity, and transnormativity. As noted by numerous trans studies scholars over the decades, gatekeeping entails a feedback loop of verification to diagnose transness, as the person seeking transition has to intelligible to the gatekeeper, which reinforces the gatekeeper’s pre-existing assumptions regarding trans existence. This process inevitably insists on certainty on the part of people seeking transition, which creates little space for ambivalence or exploration. Baldus quoted a participant who said, “the demand for certainty during and in the process […] created a pressure I felt I needed to meet”.

Baldus also described how participants internalised “maladaptive coping mechanisms” in response to misogyny and lesbophobia they experienced while growing up. Where expansive gender options did not seem possible, trans identities offered an explanation and way of making sense of participants’ experiences prior to detransition. In this context, being male was seen as an alternative to being a woman (as opposed to being different kind of woman – or, presumably, a non-binary person, although Baldus did not discuss this).

Kincaid Moberly from the University of Idaho (USA) offered an entirely different angle on the topic of detransition in his paper Trans and detrans representation in the Remothered series. This paper explored the unusual portrayal of a “trans man bad guy”, Richard Felton, in the survival horror video game series Remothered. Moberly noted that where transmasculine people appear in video games, they are typically portrayed as friends or allies, often in victim roles that motivate cis characters. By contrast Felton is a violent adversary, playing the role of a male psychosexual killer and (when wearing a dress) fulfilling the transmisogynistic trope of a “lethal gender bender”.  

Felton also, unusually, has a detrans narrative. According to the game series’ storyline, he/she was forcibly transitioned into a male role as a young person, and his/her experiences of manipulation and abuse led to their own violence towards others.  

Moberly describes the games’ portrayal of Felton as an example of detransphobia: a phenomenon in which detransitioned people are exploited for their actual or supposed pain. He argued that the demeaning of detransitioned people’s bodies and experiences, as in Remothered, takes place in the name of protecting white cis children, rather than actually finding ways to support detransitioned people. A possible response to this can be found in the rejection of cisnormative expectations regarding both the body and life trajectories. Moberly highlighted media by and for detransitioned people that emphasises empowerment, fluidity, and agency, in stark contrast to discourses of pain and disempowerment.

Media portrayals were also explored by Kat Fuller of the University of Nevada (USA), in Gendering, Detransition, and Abjection: News Media Coverages. Fuller’s study analysed 130 media articles on Chloe Cole, a detrans activist and “former trans child” who positions herself as inherently damaged by her former detransition, stating “I feel like a monster”.

The articles in Fuller’s sample which were identified as aligned with centre-right and far-right perspectives emphasised discourses on “gender ideology”, “silencing”, and “cancel culture”. Cole’s experience was used to support idea that LGBT experiences should be criticised, and any kind of pushback on homophobia and transphobia in the media represents an attack on free speech. Narratives around a person’s original transition tended to represent this in terms of trauma and loss, highlighting (for example) a supposed loss of infertility or attractiveness, and decisions being made by children who are too young to understand.

Echoing Moberly’s paper Kinnon MacKinnon’s research on detransition/retransition, Fuller reminded us that Cole’s experience is not representative of all detrans people, given the great range of detransition narratives and retransition experience.

The final paper in the session offered a more reflective space. bush bashing, an excavation of detransition, was presented by Tait Sanders of University of Queensland, Australia. There was a great deal of visual imagery of the Australian bush in this presentation, encouraging attendees to be present in the story. In this mediative account, Sanders explained how bush bashing is an approach to foliage clearance and cutting that provides space for choices around what is cut back and what is not; which plants are removed and which are left or given more space to grow.

Sanders contrasted notions of “add on detransition” – in which non-binary or genderfluid understandings of the body are added like sticking plasters – to an approach in which “gender [is[ imagined as emergent in the space created by the cut”. In this context, a meaningful approach to detransition might involve the creation of space: “gender is embodied […] and all we need do is follow it”.


(Re)imagining Transness with Decolonial Theory

It is inevitable that a conference based in a country will feature many contributions from that country, and Anglophone trans studies has always been US-dominated. However, as one person noted in the Q&A for this final session I attended on the Thursday, a problem with this is that many US scholars fail to localise their own work. In this way, US perspectives stands in for the universal, whereas contributions from other parts of the world become peripheral. White perspectives in trans studies perform a similar function; as observed once again in the Q&A, “if you’re going to work on white transness, you need to name it”.

I felt like the first paper in this session, by Nat Raha of Glasgow School of Art (UK), happened to offer some insights on how to address these problems, drawing on material from her forthcoming book with Mijke van der Drift, Trans Femme Futures. In Transfeminism and affective economies: collectives contra separability, Raha reflected on how researchers and activists in trans studies and beyond might “stay with the trouble” and pursue abolitionist approaches. She encouraged us to think through the complicity inherent in our work, especially given dominant logics get reproduced. A practical example of this would be how to engage with Palestinian liberation activism within and beyond institutions hostile to it, for instance through participation in the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israeli apartheid. Raha outlined two key concepts for theorising the problem: separability, and affective economies.

Separability describes the reproduction of cultural difference through othering, as seen for instance in racist or xenophobic language or actions. Separability is enacted materially as well as in discourse, as seen for example in state borders, the arms trade, and deportations. Parallelling arguments made in the “TERF Wars” session at the start of the day, Raha explained that transphobia is part of the contemporary dynamics of separability, with gender norms folded into the enactment of white supremacy.

Affective economies describe how emotions and feelings provide motivation and structure for certain kinds of social order. Drawing on Franz Fanon, Raha provided the example of how emotional responses to the presence of Black, Indigenous and Brown people emerge in the context of specific histories and foundations of racialisation and inequality. In the context of these histories, mainstream conversations about racism tend to centre the feelings of white commentators. Similarly and relatedly, contemporary conversations about sex/gender are centring feelings of cis people. The structural impact of this is that the actual needs and perspectives of marginalised peoples are directly excluded.

Raha posited that a solution to these problems can be found in practices of abolitionist care. She encouraged us to think about our care practices in relation to separability, and invited us to consider how separability is reproduced in our personal and social lives. For example, who are we excluding in our work, and (to draw on the insights of the prison abolition movement) how might we stop treating people as disposable? How do we work through our affective investments in a way that manifests possibilities and togetherness?

In Conceptualizing Cuy(r)ness: Knowledge Production Regarding Gender & Sexuality in Ecuador, Nathan Campozano of SUNY Purchase College (USA) noted the oversaturated presence of the Global North in international conversations surrounding gender and sexuality. Relatedly, Andean perspectives are somewhat sidelined within Latin American studies. Campozano sought to counter this by exploring how people have challenged pre-conceived notions of gender and sexuality in Ecuador.

Campozano introduced “cuy” and “cuyr” as Ecuadorian responses to “queer”; unfixed terms that refuse direct translation. Understanding cuy(r) from a located Ecuadorian perspective enables a recontextualization of trans feminist activism from peoples including enchaquirados, a cuy(r) Indigenous community on the Ecuadorian coast. Campozano argued that a proper documentation of Ecuador’s cuy(r) history must cenre on localised language and understandings, lest these be displaced by Eurocentric or Americanised understandings of queer identity.

Two presentations then followed on the topic of Indian trans rights legislation. First, Sanjula Rajat of the University of Oregon (USA) presented their paper Beyond ‘Third Gender’: Coloniality and Hindu Nationalism in Indian Trans Rights Legislation. Rajat argued that the British colonisation of India required complicity and collaboration from portions of the Indian population, including in the imposition of the colonial moral order. An example of this was the “anti-eunuch” campaign which aimed to eliminate the hijra, culminating in the banning of their perceived cross-gender communities in the Criminal Tribes Act of 1891. While this law was repealed shortly after Indian independence, colonial logics remained in the new state. This can be seen broadly in continued processes of population surveillance and control, and specifically in continued state harassment and violence towards hijra.

In 2014, the NALSA judgement theoretically granted new civil rights to hijra and trans people, including a right to self-determination regardless of surgical status, and affirmative action to support employment. In practice however, hijra and trans communities continued to be targets for state criminalisation and control, especially in the wake of the ironically named Transgender (Protection of Rights) Persons Act in 2019. Rajat argued that the Transgender Act represents a continued expansion of state power, through the conflation of hijra and trans identities as “third gender”, and the logic for this made legible through appeals to nationalist myths of an accepting pre-colonial Hinduism. In practice, the Transgender Act has also made many people’s lives more difficult, for example through reversing elements of NALSA relating to matters such as affirmative action and legal recognition, and criminalising begging.

Rajat therefore positioned the law as a form of pinkwashing by the Indian government. They argued that British colonialism cannot be blamed alone for the difficulties faced by hijra and trans people in India, and that doing so obfuscates the ongoing impact of caste-based violence through Hindu nationalism.

Further analysis of NALSA and the Transgender Law was provided by Chandrasekhar Venkata Durga Sepuri of the University of Maryland (USA), in Weaving an Ambedkarite Theory of Transgender Justice. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar was a key figure in the Indian independence movement and a campaigner against the caste system. Sepuri outlined three key principles of the Ambedkarite theory of justice which are highly relevant to trans experience:

  • A grand vision of social justice, underpinned by commitments to liberty, equality, and freedom of expression.
  • Recasting social relations, emphasising the value of fellowship with all other human beings, in contrast to Brahmanic logics of caste distinction.
  • “Educate, agitate, organise”: a vision of political power in which education is central to liberation.

Sepuri observed that the recent rising power of ethnic democracy and Hindu nationalism in India has coincided with the increased “protection” of trans people in law. However, this has in practice involved increased regulation of trans people’s lives. Echoing Rajat, Sepuri argued that the NALSA judgement failed to recognise Brahmanical foundations of transmisogyny, instead helping to build Hindu nationalist rationales for governmentality. The text of the NALSA ruling invited trans people to “join the mainstream” within the implicit context of this Hindu nationalism.

These problems were compounded through the shift from a (flawed) rights-based approach in NALSA, to a welfare-based approach in the Transgender Act. In addition to the discriminatory provisions outlined by Rajat, Sepuri highlighted how the lack of specificity in the Transgender Act’s welfare provisions deny opportunities for trans people to gain social or administrative power, and provide no specific legal consequences for discrimination against trans people.

From an Ambedkarite perspective, therefore, trans people have been failed on multiple fronts. They are denied access to equality and freedom of expression outwith the limited context of Hindu nationalism, denied fellow feeling through the focus on welfare rather than meaningful access to work or power, and there is an absence of a coherent approach to education that recognises intersectional forms of oppression.


Final thoughts

Thursday was a long day. I received a lot of intense information, and also took part in many meaningful conversations which are not reproduced here. I found myself zoning out a bit during the sessions on parenthood and detransition, so took a break during the evening plenary. I had earlier advised a PhD student not to worry too much about constantly attending every possible session – I definitely needed to take this advice myself!

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New article: Trans Birth Parents’ Experiences of Domestic Violence

Through 2018 and 2019, I travelled across the UK and Germany to speak with trans men and non-binary people about their experiences of pregnancy and childbirth.

These research interviews for the Trans Pregnancy Project took place in kitchens, living rooms, and cafes, next to canals and rivers. We covered topics ranging from conception to pregnancy loss, taking in questions of masculinity and the body, relationships with family, friends, workplaces and social groups, interactions with medical practitioners, and people’s journeys through perinatal services.

I remain deeply honoured to have been trusted by participants to share and analyse their stories. The questions planned by our project team touched on deeply intimate and sometimes traumatic experiences, as well as joyful accounts of kinship and bringing new life into the world. These were by design long, deep discussions, covering a great range of issues that have been rarely discussed in academic literature to date.

And sometimes, an unexpected conversation would happen.

We – the research team – did not plan to study domestic violence. Instead, this topic was introduced by research participants. I will never forget the first time this happened, silently putting aside my planned questions as the man in front of me quietly, carefully disclosed what had happened to him, and how it intimately shaped his experience of pregnancy.

As others shared their stories in turn, I began to realise just how important these narratives are, and the need for peer-reviewed work that explored them in detail. The resulting article is now available following a long gestation period (pun intentional). I hope it will useful to a range of practitioners – educators, crisis workers, midwives, obstetricians, doulas, family doctors – as well as to academics and, most importantly, community members.

Read now for free:
Trans Birth Parents’ Experiences of Domestic Violence
Conditional Affirmation, Cisgenderist Coercion, and the Transformative Potential of Perinatal Care
by Ruth Pearce, Carla Pfeffer, Damien W Riggs, Francis Ray White, and Sally Hines


I am also really pleased that we have published in the “platinum open access” journal Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies. Launched in 2022 and hosted by Northwestern University Libraries, the journal is free to publish in and free to read, with articles shared under a creative commons license. We found this publication route offered an extremely rigorous double-anonymous peer review that really challenged us, and ultimately strengthened our arguments and use of evidence. Given the exploitation and profiteering that is rife in the academic publishing industry, supporting new journals such as the Bulletin feels like an important political move as well as the right scholarly decision.

Journal logo

Please do share this article in any context you feel it will be helpful to others. Remember, under the license anyone can distribute it as-is for non-commercial reasons: so download, print, and pass it around to your heart’s content.

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Remembering Lynn Conway

Lynn Conway in 2006. Photo by Charles Rogers.

I was sad to hear last week of Lynn Conway’s passing, at the age of 86. Equally, I’m extremely glad she got to live such a long and impactful life. She was an important pioneer in the field of computer science, where her innovations contributed to the development of the microchips we use in so much of our technology. She also played a vital role in promoting women’s careers in STEM, and in providing information for trans people at the turn of the century.

During the early 2000s, Conway uploaded a substantial amount of information about trans lives and transition to her personal website. This material was hugely important to a great number of people, while also reproducing certain forms of transnormativity and stereotypical notions of “success”.

For example, while there was some diversity among the women listed on her pages of “transsexual women’s successes“, most are white, cis-passing, and occupied middle-class professions.

I came across Conway’s site around the time I was coming out to myself as a teenage trans girl. Having grown up in a void of information about trans people’s lives, her website both created a sense of possibility, and made transition seem more fantastical and distant.

Nevertheless, I’ll always remain grateful for what Conway did for trans people, as well as so many others. The resources she put online, for free, were created with love, care, and hope for the future. That’s an example I am committed to following through my own life.