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AbstractThe early modern fairy is a long ignored transgender figure. This article presents a transhistoricist analysis of how a range of "transgender" concepts manifest in the early modern literary imagination—instabilities, transformations, ambiguities, or indeterminacies in sex and gender—through the representation of fairies and the supernatural. It focuses on Ariel in Shakespeare's Tempest, Duessa in Spenser's Faerie Queene, and Jocastus in Randolph's Amyntas. Breaking from the threatening fairies of the medieval tradition, early modern writers reshaped how fairies were conceptualized in popular imagination, which inform our ideas of the supernatural and gender instability to this day. While transgender approaches to the medieval period have recently come to prominence, transgender approaches to the early modern remain marginal. This article seeks to establish what early modern fairies offer transgender theory and what transgender theory can offer early modern historicism. Through transgender readings of fairies and supernatural figures, this article demonstrates how such figures provided a space in which early modern culture could fantastically conceptualize transgender concepts and identities.

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This article analyzes discourses and performance practices in India's hijra and transgender communities through a comparison of badhais (ritualistic acoustic music and dance performed by hijras) and dances from the professional transgender-led troupe known as the Dancing Queens. Differences between the two evince the transformation of regimes and representations of hijra identity from devalorized codes of social difference to respectable, middle-class ones within a transgender narrative of self-understanding and personal empowerment.

AbstractThe globalization of transgender and its relationship to human rights has been accompanied by increased media interest in those so identified around the world. In Indonesia, this mostly involves the representation of male-to-female transgender-identified waria. While most mass media representations do portray them in narrow terms as the victims of violence, this does not undermine the value of transgender for waria. Seeing interaction with mass media in economic terms, many waria charge money for interviews and other media appearances. This article describes how waria understand affective labor for transnational mass media markets. They do so in terms of the historically understood association between work and visible claims for national belonging and recognition in Indonesia. Although such possibilities are situated in a context characterized by inequality, waria do consider the global scope of transgender to be of value as a way to expand their claims. A perspective that analyzes the circulation of transgender as it relates to global political economy helps clarify how the category produces uneven forms of value as it encounters diverse national and local contexts.

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This article seeks to start a discussion that may help us understand why the category "transgender," created to include all trans* experiences, has excluded some. If "transgender" cannot fully include all trans* people, can it still be a useful category to adequately capture and analyze the lived experience of historical actors? It is in tracing back the genealogy of transgender, in the search for a name that could encompass the multiple and sometimes contradictory relationships between one's body and its social recognition, that we may attempt to discover why transgender has eclipsed terms such as transsexual and transvestite. The article first examines the parallels between recent debates in the historiographies of gender and transgender as terms that can express the complex social representation of bodies negotiated by language. Second, it studies how much a genealogy of transgender in the past reveals in fact a multiplicity of terms to express a realignment between body and a self that can be read by society. Ultimately, the author proposes the study of first-person narratives as the best way to comprehend the multiple terms used to express the diverse and sometimes contradictory identities an individual can embody.

AbstractThe article examines the criteria for determining which individuals become legible as transgender in Poland and how expert medical and legal discourses normalize the gender identity, sexuality, and gender performativity of this group. Only those transgender people who fit the outdated model of the "true transsexual" are allowed to (in fact expected to) undergo a physical transition. Once transitioned, they are expected to blend into society and present heteronormative, socially conforming gender roles. In Poland, only those people who have been diagnosed as so-called true transsexuals are counted in the estimated number of transgender people. After describing the convoluted legal and medical processes that individuals are required to follow, the article presents qualitative research describing how transgender people in Poland have responded to these normalizing systems. The article concludes with proposals that would make trans populations more legible to policy makers and the mass media without imposing outdated medical norms on the trans community.

Abstract
In 2000, the US Census Bureau acknowledged multiracial Americans on the decennial census in an attempt to better capture racial heterogeneity and to more closely align what is publicly collected on forms with people's personal understandings of their racial identity. In this article, we start a discussion of how the census—a major source of political identity recognition and legitimation—could be more inclusive of gender variance. We ask: (1) Is there support for a transgender category on the US census? (2) Who might select a transgender option if it were provided? To answer these questions, we conducted questionnaire research at three transgender and genderqueer conferences and found strong support for the inclusion of a transgender category. Conversely, we found that many people did not currently check "transgender" on forms when given the opportunity. As we show, the decision to check "transgender" varies by what we term gender identity validation. In other words, people who identified as male or female and who felt others viewed them as unequivocally male or female, respectively, were less likely to check "transgender" than people who identified as transgender or who experienced a discrepancy between their self-perceived and other-perceived gender identity. These differences suggest that—similar to the push for adding a multiracial category to the census—the expansion of sex/gender categories is most likely to come from individuals who experience themselves as constrained by the existing possibilities and/or who are stigmatized by others' conceptions of the appropriate alignment of bodies and genders.

As with public opinion on other policy issues, attitudes toward transgender rights are partly driven by "group-centric" reasoning. Those with more positive feelings toward transgender people are more likely to support policies that protect their rights. But linking group affect with policies impacting members of that group requires some knowledge and understanding of politics, which not all citizens possess to the same extent. In this research note, we demonstrate that political awareness moderates the relationship between affect toward transgender people and support for their civil rights. ANES data from 2016 and 2020 show that more politically sophisticated respondents were more likely to connect their views of transgender people with policies that protect their rights. These results suggest that group-centric thinking is most prevalent among the most, not least, politically aware.

This article develops notions of transgender citizenship in relation to existing approaches to citizenship, including liberalism, neoliberalism and communitarianism. Changes relating to New Labour's Third Way provide some support for transgender citizenship. However, these are limited because New Labour has yet to fully support gender diversity, to embrace different forms of morality, to tackle underlying structural inequalities and to develop sufficiently strong mechanisms for participation. The article argues that a robust participatory democracy is necessary for ensuring transgender political participation and social inclusion. Full transgender citizenship would lead to fundamental changes in the social organization of gender and social policy positions concerning gender.

Kirsten Anderson, research and policy manager at Coram Children's Legal Centre, examines how a Council of Europe resolution relates to the rights of transgender young people to change their legal gender