Abstract
The past three decades have seen the emergence of an increasingly vigorous and outspoken trans movement in the United Kingdom. Resulting political and social changes have been accompanied by an increasing number of individuals willing to disclose their trans status and be publicly trans. With the development of ‘new modes’ and ‘different codes’ of trans identity and political activism (Whittle, 1998: 393), and an increasingly visible trans population, the stand-alone trans has also come to operate as an organising category for cultural forms. Whereas previous terminologies such as ‘transsexual’, ‘transvestite’ (and perhaps even ‘transgender’) provided more distinct categorical accounts of gender-variant possibility, ‘trans’ is intentionally open and – like ‘queer’ – refuses any clear or coherent definition (Pearce, Steinberg and Moon, 2019). In this chapter, we reflect on what it might mean to ‘do’ trans in a contemporary cultural context, in the tradition of recent accounts of trans music, theatre and performance (see, for instance Halberstam, 2005; Kumpf, 2016; Gossett, Stanley and Burton, 2017; Jaime, 2017; Landry, 2018).