For this piece of writing, we were particularly interested in how embodiment is gendered and vice-versa. In the article, we draw on interviews with trans men and non-binary people to explore the lived, bodily complexities of trans pregnancy. We consider the strategies trans men and non-binary people engage in to manage their gender presentation during pregnancy, and the degree to which pregnancy might disrupt their ability to control the presentation of gender.
The published article is currently behind a paywall, but you can download a free version here from the University of Glasgow’s Enlighten repository, or from the publications page of this website.
This is likely to be the last published article from the Trans Pregnancy Project, an international study which ran 2017-2021. Together we have written around 15(!) other articles and book chapters, and edited a special issue of the International Journal of Transgender Health. You can learn more on the Trans Pregnancy Project website.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission’s segregation consultation is a horrible document to look at. But if you’re planning to fill it in, you needn’t do so alone.
Tomorrow evening (Tuesday 10th June) I’ll be joining Katy Montgomerie on her livestream from 8pm to talk about and work through the EHRC consultation. We’ll hopefully make the process that bit less grim together, and also highlight other important and perhaps even joyous things that are going on.
If you can’t make it, Katy will also hopefully be able to put a recording of the stream up on her channel at a later point.
On the evening of Tuesday 15th April 2025, I was widely perceived to be a British lesbian, both legally and socially. By 11am the following day, that was no longer the case, following a ruling by the UK’s Supreme Court.
I was not actually in the UK for this momentous occasion. I was instead in the Swiss city of Lausanne, for a workshop on standards of evidence in sex and gender policy. I was there to consider the very questions the UK’s highest court, in their supreme ignorance, had effectively dismissed. Their ruling determined that the term “sex” in the Equality Act referred to “biological sex”, which in turn should be understood as “the sex of a person at birth”. But what do we actually need to know about when we make policy around sex and gender, and what is the role of evidence in this?
The Tuesday evening found me hanging out in a second-rate Thai restaurant with Professor Sarah Lamble, an esteemed criminologist and fellow dyke. Lamble and I spent some time talking about how conspiracy theories around “disappearing lesbians” highlighted the strange ironies inherent in British anti-trans discourse. The anti-trans movement has been extremely successful in raising “reasonable concerns” around supposed problems that are completely ungrounded in reality, to the point where that reality itself begins to warp.
Mainstream political discourse in the UK increasingly reflects anti-trans claims that lesbians are somehow threatened by trans people, or are even being transed en-masse in gender clinics and youth groups. The true biological attraction between two adult human females is disrupted. Young people are tempted away from lesbianism with promises of luxurious facial hair and male privilege; meanwhile, horrifically manly and/or confusingly attractive trans dykes are introduced to the dating pool.
If these claims were true, we might expect to see some kind of reduction in the number of homosexual females. Instead, the evidence we have indicates quite the opposite. Surveys such as the Annual Population Study show a rising number of lesbians over recent years, part of a wider increase of 1.2 million in the recorded lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) population of the UK. This is driven especially by young people coming out, with over 10% of people aged 16-24 identifying as LGB as of 2023.
But what about the lived reality of queer womanhood? Well, there’s great news here too: we are living in a truly historic time for sapphic culture in the UK. Proudly out lesbian and bisexual women can be found across the pop charts, on TV, and across social media. Queer bookshops are on the rise. Pop-up butch bars and new queer cafes can be found in major cities and small towns. And, excitingly, even the much-maligned lesbian bar is making a comeback, with three permanent venues and numerous occasional nights now running in London alone. It’s all got so out of hand that in 2024 the Queer Brewing company sold a juicy pale ale named Dyke Renaissance, which conveniently listed an educational series of cultural milestones on the can.
If trans people are trying to disappear lesbians, we’re doing a really bad job of it.
Meanwhile, queer cis women tend to be pretty supportive of trans people. In fact they’re one of the single most supportive demographics in the UK – which is presumably why the Equality and Human Rights Commission is, right now, attempting to ban trans dykes such as myself from associating with any more than 25 biological lesbians at any one time.
On evidence
As lesbian conspiracy theories show, the very concept of evidence has had a bit of a hard time over the past decade.
In the UK, this was perhaps best encapsulated in 2016 by the Conservative politician Michael Gove. While campaigning for Brexit, he declared that the British people “have had enough of experts”. Gove’s claim is echoed in a growing anti-intellectualism across the globe. From the mass purge of universities in Türkiye, to the post-truth bizarro world of Donald Trump, to Israel’s scholasticide in Gaza, this trend manifests in blunt and brutal ways. Anti-expert authoritarianism doesn’t care about your facts or your feelings.
However, attacks on evidence can also be more subtle. Gove’s comments are widely quoted, but it’s less well-known that he singled out a particular kind of expert for criticism: “people from organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong”. While this was gloriously vague in a way that allowed the listener to project all kinds of things onto Gove’s words, in context it was nevertheless evocative of the kind of group that tends to advocate for social justice. LGBTQQIAAP groups, perhaps.
From academic thinktanks, to charities, to campaigning organisations, the implicit problem was any kind of challenge to conservative common sense. The UK’s political mainstream has since doubled-down on this approach. In the run up to the 2024 general election, Tory home secretary Suella Braverman criticised “experts and elites”, while the secretary of state for science, innovation and technology, Michelle Donelan, promised to “kick woke ideology out of science”.
One of Donelan’s targets was the “denial of biology” in research by feminists, social scientists… and biologists. The problem here is that supposedly common sense notions of sex and gender, which assume clean and tidy biological divisions between male and female, collide violently with the beautiful messy reality of the material world. At this point in history, it is well-established that sexual diversity exists throughout nature, that men are not biologically superior to women, that social advantage is not conferred or denied by chromosomes, and that queer, trans, and intersex people exist in the world. The evidence for this is gloriously multifaceted. We find it in laboratories, in systematic reviews, in surveys and questionnaires, in the way that men shout abuse at us in the streets, in how our sexed bodies shift and change under hormonal influence, in the way we feel when we finally have a language that describes our experiences.
Michelle Donelan decided to tackle the thorny problems of feminist science, intersex bodies, and trans existence by commissioning a research project by Alice Sullivan, a supposed sociologist who doesn’t care one jot for any of the evidence outlined above. Published in March 2025, the Sullivan Review insisted that data collection relating to sex and gender should rely on a very narrow definition of biological sex: one that ignores trans and intersex women’s real lives, bodies, and experiences of misogyny, while promoting a sexist model of essentialised womanhood. Her findings were echoed in those of the Supreme Court judges a month later, whose pronouncements on biological sex were made without any reference to relevant social, scientific, or philosophical research on how this might actually be understood or defined in practice.
To position this as a wholly new trend would, of course, would be inaccurate. Western jurisdictions have long used and abused pseudoscience to oppress minoritised groups, especially in colonial contexts. This can be seen for example in the British state’s shameful embrace of “race science” and eugenics in the 19th and 20th centuries. What we are now witnessing is an example of the imperial boomerang, in which the logics of colonialism are turned inwards, resulting in increasingly fascist domestic politics.
But did you have a nice time in Switzerland, Ruth?
On that fateful week in April, I joined a group of feminist, trans, and lesbian researchers and activists for the workshop at the University of Lausanne. In the face of increasingly ill-informed policymaking across multiple contexts, it provided us a space to think together about the lessons we might learn collectively from our very different work on healthcare, sports, and prisons.
One overarching theme was the importance of evidence in understanding human experience, in terms of rigorous data collection, careful analysis – and accounting for the lived reality of actual people’s actual lives. A powerful account of the latter point was provided by Dinah Bons, a veteran campaigner for HIV prevention. She pointed out that if a sex worker repeatedly attends a community clinic for her STI tests, this provides evidence that the clinic feels safe enough for her to return regularly, which is far from a given. Such matters are often highly evident to service users and providers on the ground, without any need for a survey or interview.
Another key theme at the workshop was the extent to which various principles of evidence are increasingly abused by politicians, journalists, and institutions.
The concept of evidence has not been rejected wholescale by sexist, transphobic, and lesbophobic policymakers. Rather, “evidence” is increasingly a buzzword to justify particular approaches or points of view, rather than something grounded in a commitment to scholarly standards or an acknowledgement of lived experience. At the workshop, we explored how flawed notions of evidence have been used to support misleading statements or outright lies about human bodies or human experiences. We heard about the use and abuse of evidence in justifying invasive sex-testing for woman athletes, misrepresenting research on young people’s ability to engage in informed decision-making, and defending conversion practices. Notably, while most of these abuses arose from a specifically transphobic politics, they have far wider consequences: especially for women, intersex, and queer people, but also for scientific processes, community consultations, and informed advocacy more broadly.
You can see an example of this in the Cass Review. Through successfully performing the aesthetics of acceptable expertise and science to the satisfaction of the British public, the Review has become what one workshop participant described as a black box. By this they meant that it has become an abstracted justification for policy and practice, handily replacing any ongoing discussion of evidence regarding young trans people’s health and wellbeing. You don’t need to know what the Cass Review actually says or how rigorous it actually is, only that it exists. Well-documented criticisms of the review from healthcare practitioners, academic experts, trans community groups, and (most importantly) young trans people themselves are been rendered irrelevant. The Cass Review is the evidence, and no other systematic review, original research, or personal testimony can henceforth count against it. Not, at least, until 2031 at the earliest: the official end-date of a single £10 million study, based on the Cass recommendations and featuring precisely zero trans researchers.
The British establishment is now attempting to repeat this trick with the Sullivan Review – never mind that projects such as MESSAGE have conducted more extensive and nuanced work on the same topic with a far wider group of experts – and, of course, with the Supreme Court judgement.
Beyond doom
As with Cass, as with Sullivan, it is difficult to capture the sheer enormity of harm caused by the Supreme Court’s pronouncement on biological sex. The consequences are still playing out, and will no doubt continue to do so for many awful months and years.
At the time of writing, the Equality and Human Rights Commission have proposed a programme of mass segregation, designed to discriminate against trans people in the workplace, in public services, and in social groups. The guidance they have written is just that: guidance, not law. Nevertheless, major organisations such as the Football Association, the British Transport Police, and Barclays Bank, all of whom shamelessly paraded rainbows through their social media profiles last Pride season, are falling over themselves to comply. We are witnessing the attempted complete exclusion of trans people from public life, in the latest culmination of a transparent attempt to eliminate us altogether.
In such moments, it can be easy to despair. This is in part because it is easy to forget the strength, resources, power held within trans communities and by our allies. That includes the knowledge and evidence we have access to.
Don’t get me wrong. The people who want to eliminate us are better-funded, better-connected, and now have the Labour government on-side as well as the UK’s traditional right-wing parties. We are not going to win trans liberation overnight.
But then, again, we never were.
Everything I said about lesbian culture earlier is true of trans people too. There are more of us publicly creating art and culture, more of us creating events and running nightclubs and playing in bands and writing essays (hi). There are more community groups providing mutual aid and support when charities and state bodies fail us. And, importantly, we are not alone.
Trans women and non-binary people are a part of the dyke renaissance. We are at the butch bars, and bemoaning the top shortage. We are dancing to Le Tigre and to Chappelle Roan. We are reading Gideon the Ninth and watching We Are Lady Parts and having all the feelings. My partner of the last decade was probably the most surprised of all to learn from the Supreme Court that I am not, in fact, a lesbian, as every bit of evidence from our shared personal lives points to quite the contrary.
I will concede that some trans people are not in fact lesbians, or even queer. Nevertheless, there are somany other places to find us in community with others. Trans people are in trade unions. Trans people are in workplaces. Trans people are in schools and colleges and universities. Trans people are in the streets. Trans people are on the bus. Trans people are in families. Trans people are making families. Trans people are playing football (suck it, Football Association). Trans people are eating pizza. Trans people are restoring the countryside. Trans people are hanging out beside Lake Geneva in the glorious sunshine, enjoying a much-needed break.
There are more of us than ever, and it is too damn late to put us back in a box.
Resistance is fertile
I was honoured to present the keynote presentation at the Swiss workshop. I spoke about the findings of the Trans Pregnancy Project, a study that produced enormous amounts of evidence on the experiences, needs, and perspectives of men and non-binary people who conceive, carry, and give birth.
No matter how much our findings are slammed by the media and billionaire children’s authors and washed-up comedy writers, our peer-reviewed work has demonstrated the lived reality of male and non-binary pregnancy over and over again. Most importantly, it has helped people. We are part of a far wider movement of parent groups, midwives, and researchers who are collectively building knowledge. I am constantly hearing from people who describe how much this knowledge has resulted in better care for them and their child. This kind of story drives everything I do.
Towards the end of my talk, I discussed the anti-trans moral panic, and the Supreme Court judgement. I then showed the below table of findings from the National Maternity Survey. This annual survey involves those who have recently given birth every year in many (but not all!) English hospitals, over the course of a few weeks. Since 2021, they have started asking whether the person giving birth has a different gender to the sex they were assigned at birth – i.e. are they trans?
Two things leap out from this table for me. Firstly, the 2021 data shows a very similar proportion of people indicating they are trans when compared to the 2021 censuses in Scotland, England, and Wales. This suggests that, contrary to assumptions around trans infertility or undesirability, trans men and non-binary people may well be just as likely to give birth as cis women are to become birth mothers.
Secondly, the number of trans people giving birth has risen dramatically over four years. Even as the anti-trans moral panic has deepened. Even as attacks on even recognising the existence of trans people in perinatal services have increased. As Del La Grace Volcano once it put it: “resistance is fertile!”
In the face of growing oppression, trans people are simply refusing to disappear. In fact, we are doing the opposite.
This, then, is the power that the anti-trans movement, the Labour party, and the Supreme Court cannot possibly take away from us. The more trans people are out and visible to one another, the more trans people come out and become visible to one another. Sure, we will unfortunately need to think more carefully about where and when we are out, and where and when we are visible, if this is something we even have any power over in our specific lives. I am sure that more trans people will be going stealth in future years, if they can. But regardless – there are more of us in community, more of us organising protests, and more of us than ever in the lives of our friends, families, colleagues, and allies, showing that it possible to have a good life while being trans.
In this context, it is important to know that people from many parts of the world gathered in Lausanne this April to pool our knowledge and skills and experiences. It is important to know that we have each returned to our home countries to share what we gained. It is important for people to know that similar meetings are happening across the world, in community centres and on university campuses, in board rooms and in bedrooms, involving trans people, and feminists, and yes, lesbians. We are constantly building a movement for positive change, and you do not have to be an academic or veteran activist to be a part of it. Trans power is for everyone.
There is much to say what needs doing in the current moment. We need allies to continue fighting alongside trans people for our collective liberation. We need to be demonstrating in the streets, funding mutual aid and legal action, actively resisting complicity in Labour’s eliminationist agenda, and encouraging every public body under the sun to do the same.
Evidence will be helpful for this. Evidence from academic research, sure, but also – as Dinah Bons pointed out – testimony from the everyday reality of trans people’s lives. And oh boy, do we have that evidence.
More of us than ever are producing evidence of trans existence, and trans persistence.
On 8 February 2021, Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust published a series of groundbreaking resources on perinatal care for trans people, written by their Gender Inclusion Midwife team. As of March 2025, the Trust no longer exists, the midwives in question work elsewhere, and the resources page was sadly taken down – a sadly all-too common experience with NHS guidance for working with marginalised peoples.
Given the importance of these materials, for which I was part of a large team of expert reviewers, I am reproducing them on my website today for Trans Day of Visibility 2025, alongside some related resources.
I hope these will be of interest and use to anyone interested in improving perinatal care for trans people, including midwives, nurses, doctors, policymakers, commissioners, advocacy groups, and of course also families and prospective parents.
Professional guidance and protocolsby the Gender Inclusion Midwives
It’s been a long four years since the Gender Inclusion Midwives resources were published. Here, therefore, are a few additional materials that may be of help to people working in this area.
National Maternity Survey data on trans birth parents Since 2021 the Care Quality Commission has collected data on gender modality as part of its annual National Maternity Survey. The most recent findings indicate a significant rise in the number of men and non-binary people giving birth since 2021, with 1.58% of 2024 respondents indicating a gender that differs from the sex they were assigned at birth. This shows that hundreds of trans people are giving birth in England every year. See: Open data > 2024 Maternity survey National tables > page g9.
Improving Trans and Non-Binary Experiences of Maternity Services (ITEMS) 2022 report published by the LGBT Foundation, looking at the findings of an English study on the experiences of 121 trans people who conceived and gave birth. It found that many trans birth parents do not feel safe sharing their identity in perinatal services, with a large proportion not feeling comfortable to access any support at all from an NHS or private midwife.
Trans Pregnancy Project website I reviewed the Gender Inclusion Midwives resources as part of my work on the Trans Pregnancy Project, which was an international study of trans people’s experiences of pregnancy and childbirth. This year we launched a new website. This includes links to all our peer-reviewed publications, on topics including conception, pregnancy loss, midwifery, gender and embodiment, domestic violence, racialisation, and media representation.
Caring for Everyone: Effective and Inclusive Communication in Perinatal Care One of the key recommendations of the Gender Inclusion Midwives’ guidance on Gender Inclusive Language in Perinatal Service is the adoption of “additive” language. This approach acknowledges male and non-binary birth parents alongside mothers, rather than simply replacing woman-centred language with a gender-neutral approach. This 2025 academic article by Matthew Cull, Jules Holroyd, and Fiona Woollard provides advice on a “pluralist” approach to language, which builds upon the additive model by offering a more contextual approach. It includes clear examples of what best practice can look like.
In early September I recieved an email from the Department for Health and Social Care, inviting me to participate in a closed consultation on the Labour government’s proposed extension of the Tory ban on puberty blockers. The deadline was 1st October 2024.
September was already extremely busy. I started the month at the International Trans Studies Conferencein Chicago, and ended it at the WPATH Symposium in Lisbon. In the meantime I was faced with various writing deadlines, administrative tasks, and the start of a new teaching semester. The small number of other academic experts and voluntary organisations who were also invited to respond no doubt faced very similar challenges with the short notice and unforgiving deadline.
Nevertheless, I scrambled to respond. Like Cal Horton, I regard government consultations on trans healthcare to be inherently abusive at this stage; as I wrote to the Nuffield Council on Bioethics in 2018, “we respond not with hope or optimism, but in fear. This is the power you wield over us”. Given the turgid vibes found in recent political discourse, I also held little hope of a long-term ban being prevented. However, it seemed worth using what little prestige I have as an academic to at least try to encourage the government to listen to actual evidence.
Trans Writes are now reporting that an extension of the ban until 2027 is on the cards for Britain, following a unanimous vote on the same by the Northern Ireland Assembly. With this in mind, I am now publicly sharing the evidence I provided in the closed consultation, plus slides from an oral presentation to the Commission on Human Medicines, who advised the Government.
I don’t think for a moment that sharing these materials will change anything in the short term. However, I feel it is important to put them in the public realm now for the sake of transparency.
Going forward, I hope the work that many of us have done in building and sharing an ethical base for the ethical provision of trans healthcare will make a difference. In the meantime, there is an important lesson here about relying on existing, unequal systems of power and control. As Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift argue in their new book Trans Femme Futures, making demands of institutions leaves the power in their hands. It is more important than ever for trans people to build power and knowledge within our own communities, in collaboration with others.
We have survived worse in the past by sharing information, ideas, and life-changing medication between us, and we will do so again.
2024 has been a good year for the publication of articles I’ve been working on with colleagues for a long time. Hot on the heels of recent pieces on microaggressionsand domestic violence comes the latest peer-reviewed work from the Trans Pregnancy Project, published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy. It’s open access, which means you can read it for free or download a copy to share here:
The article opens with the titular question, “why is the chubby guy running?” – drawn from a story shared by a research participant who ran a 5k race while thirty-nine weeks pregnant. We use this as the starting point for exploring the topic of fatness in respect to trans men and non-binary people who experience pregnancy, addressing the gendering of both pregnancy and fatness, stereotypes associated with fat men, and how certain bodies become legible or intelligible.
A lot of research participants in the project described complex relationships to fatness during their pregnancy, especially where their bump was inaccurately read as a “beer belly”. The writing of this article was led by fat studies expert Francis Ray White; I really appreciated the opportunity to work with them on making sense of these stories, and thinking through what they might mean both for trans birth parents and for our understanding of gender and pregnancy more widely.
This is likely to be one of the last published works from the Trans Pregnancy Project (although we do have at least one more article on the way!)
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!
This morning I logged into instagram and watched, transfixed in amazement and worry, as a young person scaled the walls of the Department for Education.
The aspiring spiderman is part of the activist group Trans Kids Deserve Better. At the time of writing they are staging a multi-day protest at the Department for Education building in London, for the right to a safe and inclusive education.
Watching the video, I fear for Squirrel, the anonymous activist who is genuinely risking their life to stop government employees from taking the group’s banner. It’s very apparent that Squirrel is a skilled climber who knows what they are doing – equally, one wrong move could result in a deadly drop to the concrete pavement. This is not safe.
But of course, the entire reason this protest is happening is because young trans people are not safe.
Trans Kids Deserve Better launched their campaign for youth autonomy, safety, respect, and inclusion in July, from a dramatically high ledge of an NHS England building. In an interviewwith Jess O’Thompson for Trans Writes, the emergency doctor and children’s TV presenter Dr Ronx Ikharia argued that “our young people deserve better than suffering, and shouldn’t be scaling walls”. But they added that for this to happen, trans kids must be “believed, supported, affirmed, and loved”.
And this is the crux of the issue. Under the Conservative and Labour governments, we have seen a policy environment in which teachers, doctors, therapists and parents are actively discouraged or prevented from believing, supporting, affirming, or loving young trans people. Instead, families face prison sentencesfor supporting young people’s continued access to medication, NHS England is expanding the provision of state-funded conversion clinics, and a growing number of schools are refusing to allow even the discussion of trans experiences.
Trans kids are not safe because they have been entirely failed by the adult world. They have been failed by politicians, failed by civil servants, failed by the NHS, failed by the voluntary sector, failed by researchers, and in many cases also failed by their doctors, teachers, and parents or carers. This is why the activists from Trans Kids Deserve Better are literally scaling walls in their fight for an actual future.
Looking at the challenges facing young trans people, it can be easy to lose hope. But the actions of Trans Kids Deserve Better show that there is a better way. Doomerism helps nobody. The successes of successive liberation struggles have come about because people have continually dared to believe that a better world is possible, and fight for it. The young people currently sat outside the Department of Education are not bemoaning what they have lost: they are insistently demanding change.
Image from Trans Kids Deserve Better
What can we do? In their conversation with O’Thompson, activists from Trans Kids Deserve Better explained that while trans adults often want to “protect” trans youth, they would rather we “amplify” them: “we don’t need sympathy, we need support”. This is a call to action, with a focus on solidarity, rather than trying to speak for young people or bemoan their situation.
Many adult trans people and allies have complained about the lack of mainstream media coverage for the actions of Trans Kids Deserve Better. But we should not simply wait for the papers or news programmes to start caring. It’s up to us to talk about what’s happening. Today’s queer and trans communities only exist at scale because we made our own media, told our own stories, and forced the mainstream to catch up.
So I encourage everyone who reads this to share the story of what is happening. Share it on social media, share it with friends and family, share it in conversations at work and in bars and in cafes and in parks and at gigs and festivals. A few days ago I was at a pub in Bath, fresh from Pride, still holding a placard that read “Ban Wes Streeting” (copied shamelessly from someone else in Glasgow a couple of weeks prior). Someone asked what Wes Streeting had done, so I told her. She was appalled, but grateful to have learned what is happening, and better informed to act. Information spreads when we spread information.
If you, like me, would rather not see young people risking life and limb by climbing public buildings, it is time to fight with them, not “for” them. Together we can build a safer world.
I have co-authored an article with Cal Horton for the science magazine Scientific American. We take a concise look at what the Cass Review is, what it found, why the methods used were troubling, and how it is being used to harm young people.
You can read the article here. I hope it will be helpful as a basic explainer for why trans community groups, academic experts, and clinical specialists are so concerned about the Cass Review.
Writing for Scientific American was a really interesting experience. It was of course radically different to publishing in a peer-reviewed journal: we put the piece together in a matter of weeks, and it was not scrutinised by academic experts from our specific field of study. At the same time, there was an extremely rigorous editorial, fact-checking, and copyediting process that also made it very different to publishing in most magazines or newspapers.
I was deeply impressed with the sheer amount of time and care the Sci Am editors put into this piece. On one hand, their contributions ensured the piece is written in accessible language, with an international (and especially US-based) readership in mind. On the other hand, we had extensive discussions to ensure that all points made in the article could be rigorously evidenced, including some very detailed exchanges about the specifics of UK law, and what exactly the Cass Review document does and does not have to say about exponential growth over different periods of time. We had to be able to strongly back up any even slightly contentious point.
It was a challenging experience, but one I felt very held by as an author committed to consciencious research practice. Publishing this piece in Sci Am definitely ensured that it was as good as it could possibly be.
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 Projecttook 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.
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.
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.
Dr Ruth Pearce 