Exploring the everyday lives of young trans people

Abstract

This thesis explores how young trans people aged 14-25 in the UK experience everyday spaces and times and examines why it is imperative, and how it might be possible, to make visible their lived and embodied everyday realities. To do so, the thesis builds a novel narrative arc – developed out of young trans people’s stories and creative works shared throughout the collaborative research – that pays attention to three spatially and temporally interconnected modes of being in and experiencing the world articulated by its participants – ‘out-of-placeness’, exhaustion, and resilience, resistance, and restoration (termed in the thesis as RRR). Exploring these modalities through the thesis’ unique ‘more-than-representational’ and intersectional conceptual approaches, emphasises how trans youth – both as individuals and collectives – variously experience, embody, endure, accumulate, rub up against, slide into, resist, enjoy, and continually emerge through forces (whether social, material, and/or political), affects, societal conditions, spaces, and times of their everyday lives. Significantly, the thesis expands on temporalities that young trans people encounter, accrue, embody and orient toward, and recognises the agency held and enacted by particular spaces, atmospheres, and socio-materialities, producing an account of the specific ways that such phenomena exert force upon trans youth.

Through its innovative participatory research approach and collaboration with Gendered Intelligence (G.I.; a British national charity working to support trans youth) and their young trans service users, the thesis also counters existing problematic research approaches often taken by cisgender social scientists and develops a methodological blueprint for conducting social science research with trans folk and trans communities and queer/feminist geographical research exploring marginality and embodied experiences in certain spatiotemporal contexts. The thesis also affords space and voice to the often life-saving potential of trans and queer ‘safe spaces’ and young trans communities such as G.I., and conducts a novel compilation and examination of existing research and evidence around trans lives and societal hostility toward trans people in Britain.