Description
In recent years, IR has increasingly committed to a substantive engagement with the politics of transness. From early theorizations in relation to gendered practices of surveillance to more recent calls for engagement with trans* studies, work on the topic of transness in IR is gathering pace. In this context, I draw on interviews with UK-based trans refugee solidarity organizers and trans people with experience of seeking asylum in the UK to argue that trans anti-border political praxis represents a theoretically significant body of knowledge on borders as a site for the violent reproduction of racialized gender. In doing this, I hope to both further disrupt accounts of transness as an abstracted theoretical category in IR and advocate for an approach to engaging with contemporary trans political practice as an ongoing site of knowledge production with implications for how we understand borders and the state.
