‘She’s a woman!’ The liminality of a trans gender identity

In this paper I use the recent UK Supreme Court ruling to surface and to examine the liminality of trans lives. I develop liminality as a way to make sense of trans experiences ‘betwixt and between’ understood gender and sexed body, how bodies are read and how they are wished to be read. In this context of liminality, I theorise gender identity as the dynamic interplay between identity work, body work and gender boundary work, and gendered self-identity as constituting the ongoing embodied experience and response to differently gendered spaces and regulatory regimes. I adopt this liminal reading and theorisation of gender identity to study my own trans body moment by moment across multiple situated contexts. My aim is to widen the possibilities of organising by offering an account of trans experience which broadly aligns with the Supreme Court judgement, and its implications for the liveable lives of trans people.