In Malaysia, the everyday lives of trans women are shaped by dual civil–Syariah governance, moral regulation, and constrained gender recognition. At an older age, these conditions can intensify through declining health, reduced mobility, and heightened visibility in routine encounters that increase exposure to institutional scrutiny and barriers to care. This thesis examines what inequalities accumulate across the life course of older Malaysian trans women, how they navigate ageing under such conditions, and what resources make later life liveability possible. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork with 30 older trans women aged between 41 and 70 years in Kuala Lumpur, Kuching and Penang, data include River of Life (RoL) drawings, alongside semi-structured interviews, fieldnotes, and reflexive memos. The thesis developed and applied River of Life Polytextual Thematic Analysis (RoL-PTA) to all the data and treats drawings not only as elicitation devices but as analytic texts, interpreted through participant vignettes and cross-text triangulation. Alongside this, Braun and Clarke’s Reflexive Thematic Analysis (RTA) was used specifically to analyse interview transcripts, enabling thematic exploration of participants’ narrated experiences and meaning-making practices.

The findings show that ageing is navigated as ongoing work to sustain ‘low-friction’ living across institutional checkpoints. First, participants’ trajectories diverge by sociolegal timing: cohort-conditioned openings and closures in recognition shape documentary congruence, exposure to policing, and the risks and costs of accessing healthcare and services. Second, precarity accumulates through repeated forms of institutional interruption, such as refusal of their existence, bodily scrutiny, and documentary mismatch, all producing health vulnerabilities and reliance on self-managed or NGO-mediated care. Third, participants assemble survivability through fragile infrastructures of support, including selective natal-kin acceptance, peer networks and community ‘mothering’ and NGO accompaniment and

document work. Across these conditions, later life is polytemporally organised, in which past harms, present navigational labour, and anticipated futures co-exist and continuously shape replanning and modest, place-anchored futurities in what I conceptualise as Queer Temporal Continuum (QTC).

The thesis contributes to trans ageing and cultural gerontology by conceptualising sociolegal time as a queer ageing mechanism, extending recognition debates to end-of-life governance, and advancing RoL-PTA as a transferable methodological framework for analysing temporality and ageing under constraint in Global South contexts.