Trans Lives

Trans people have been thrust into the spotlight in recent years across the world as never before. Trans groups have become targets of intense online abuse and hostile political and religious campaigns. The media abounds with reports on a few glamorous trans women, or anti-trans attacks, but say little about the everyday realities of trans lives or their global diversity.

In this book, Raewyn Connell, a world-leading sociologist and gender researcher, gathers the evidence and writes about the lives of trans women and men, hijra, travesti, and other groups around the world. She looks at the forces shaping trans lives, including medicine and its limitations, precarity and poverty, unequal gender relations, the role of sex work, and encounters with the state and the corporate economy. She discusses what is behind anti-trans campaigns, criticizing the simplistic idea that ’transphobia’ explains these, and suggesting more potent causes. Finally, by exploring the creative ways trans groups have organized, she argues for the contribution they can and should make to solving our shared contemporary crises.

Written in clear and vivid language, this book offers illuminating new perspectives on gender transitions, and on gender itself.

Raewyn Connell is among the world’s leading theorists of gender, masculinity and power, and is herself a trans woman. She is Professor Emerita at the University of Sydney.