Introduction

This special issue, From the Margins of Trans Legal Change, gathers nearly a dozen texts. Many of the contributors are scholars with longstanding engagements with trans communities. There are significant contributions from emerging scholars and prominent scholars in trans studies in Canada. A number of the articles were workshopped during the symposium by the same name that took place at McGill in 2019. Collectively, the papers are striking for the intellectual and activist energy they exude. By centring the lives and experiences of trans people, they invite us to think differently about law—its oppression and violence, but also its potential to improve the conditions of trans people and others. The diversity of the papers' subject matter reflects a challenge for trans legal activists: law's interaction with trans people—to use a neutral term—is diffuse and distributed. It runs across areas of federal and provincial jurisdiction. It ranges across areas that include criminal law, family, health, education, and immigration. Despite this diversity and variety, the papers share a number of themes or sensibilities.

The contributors manifest a shared consciousness that they are undertaking research and activism in a moment that follows fast, substantial legal reform. The legal landscape for trans people has changed drastically in the past decade, even just in the last five years. Some of the most basic needs of trans people are much better recognized in law than they were, particularly access to identity papers. As the articles show, some questions for trans legal studies thus bear on how legal subjects—official and unofficial—operate in the reconfigured space that follows formal legal reform. Other questions considered arise from legal notions such as accommodation, including whether new inclusions generate fresh exclusions. At the same time, there is a sense that, although much has changed in the statute book and case law, the difficult material conditions of trans people collectively have not been equivalently ameliorated. Access to employment, to education, and to adequate medical care remains uneven or illusory for many trans people. The articles' sensitivity to such material conditions aligns with the focus of activists such as Jamie-Lee Hamilton on poverty and addiction, among others, and with a broader tradition of trans activism that attends to poverty within marginalized communities more than the gay and lesbian movement often has.

We see a recurring commitment to the concrete, the quotidian, and what is experienced or felt, including affect. The authors know their Butler and other touchstones of queer theory, but several of them appear less interested than previous cohorts of, say, queer scholars in the high theory of poststructuralism and postmodernism. There is some attention to legal sources as literary and social texts, but even this ties back to law's concrete effects, which, for many trans people, are violent. There is attention to the nitty gritty of trans people's everyday life, for example, in prison, in the labour market, and in schools. Though not all authors in the special issue are legally trained, there is repeated engagement with legal texts that directly affect people's lives—be it the Civil Code of Québec, decisions around parenting, or the toolkit of litigation strategies. Several papers engage with storytelling. The symposium from which most of these papers issue similarly embodied the authors' commitment to law in the everyday lives of trans people, combining closed sessions to workshop the papers with public events, including a public lecture for lawyers, advocates, and community members to provide an update on recent trans legal changes in Canada.

The essays are located at numerous intersectionalities. Many explore the ways in which trans identity intersects with other identities and axes of power. In several cases, the work is informed explicitly by critical race theory and black feminism. The papers engage with issues of disability, aging, youth, and indigeneity, with the different bodies of scholarship developed around these issues, and with their particular intersections with trans identities.

The trans legal studies developed in this collection refuse both simple dichotomies and stable identities. There are moments of refusal...