Foreword

This special issue continues an ongoing process of thinking and doing trans legal studies in Canada. The project started with a panel, "On the Margins of Trans Legal Change," organized at the Law and Society Association 2018 annual conference in Toronto and chaired by Brenda Cossman. Building on the panel's conversations about those on the margins of recent trans law reform, four of the panellists, Nora Butler Burke, William Hébert, Ido Katri, and Samuel Singer, began the work of bringing together community advocates, lawyers, and scholars to discuss recent trans legal changes and their limitations.

From that panel emerged the idea for a public conference, an academic workshop, and a subsequent special issue of the Canadian Journal of Law and Society that forefronts advocates and scholars who centre the voices of trans people at the margins. William Hébert chaired the conference organizing committee, which was able to secure a SSHRC Connection grant through its applicant Robert Leckey and co-applicant Samuel Singer. In May 2019, the three-day symposium, "On the Margins of Trans Legal Change," was held at McGill's Faculty of Law, in partnership with McGill's Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies and Thompson River University's Faculty of Law.

The symposium launched with a public lecture by Samuel Singer on trans legal issues in Canada, which included an update by Dalia Tourki, Advocate and Public Educator from the Centre for Gender Advocacy in Montreal. The following day featured roundtable conversations between academics, policymakers, community workers, trans leaders, artists, thinkers, and community members. The public conference concluded with a keynote discussion on Trans Justice and the Law by Viviane Namaste and Dalia Tourki. The keynote is included in this special issue, printed in English and accompanied by a French translation. On the third day of the symposium, invited scholars gathered for a closed academic workshop in preparation for submitting to this special issue. Participants exchanged feedback on their draft papers and received comments from academic mentors Brenda Cossman, Robert Leckey, and Viviane Namaste.

The symposium brought together scholars, advocates, and community members for a critical discussion about trans people and the law aimed at promoting change from the margins inward. This special issue continues that work.

Long before the law and legal movements gained interest in recognizing and protecting gender diversity, trans movements around the world were led by the voices of those most affected by the anti-trans distribution of resources and opportunities, those whose lives have been shaped by racialization, colonialism, poverty, ableism, and trans misogyny. Sylvia Rivera stormed the stage at the 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day Rally in New York City, demanding that the emerging gay and lesbian movement stand beside their siblings, both on the street and in prisons.²

In Canada, Jamie Lee Hamilton's work to fight violence against sex workers included creating a safe indoor space for sex work and demanding the investigation of missing and murdered women. Hamilton passed away on December 23, 2019. As the keynote discusses, her twenty-five years of ground-breaking activism for Indigenous rights, the decriminalization of sex work, access to housing, and services for trans people focused on improving the daily lives of people in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. We hope that the discussions at the Symposium and in this special issue honour her work.

The histories of trans movements are histories of advocating for tangible change in marginalized people's lives and of resisting the power of the law to exclude those who are marked as other. In the past decade, the global visibility of trans movements has grown immensely. Shifting from the periphery of critical and legal debates to centre stage, legal reforms addressing trans rights have swept across Canada and numerous other countries. In Canada, the rise of trans legal advocacy has led to a number of achievements in trans legal recognition and equality, including increased access to changing identity documents, and amendments adding explicit protections of gender identity and gender expression to Canadian human rights instruments. Yet, despite the surge in trans visibility, many trans...