Gender citizenship and sexual rights in Europe: transgender lives from a transnational perspective

TRANSRIGHTS is a project that aims to rethink and reflect upon gender and citizenship by focusing on trans-people (namely, transsexuals, transgenders, crossdressers and other forms of gender identifications, expressions and lives) as subjects whose voices and diversity must be understood as one of the most challenging boundaries for framing contemporary debates about rights vis-à-vis an institutional apparatus that, all in all, still reproduces a dualist gender order, opposing male and female, men and women as discrete beings. Against this backdrop, rather than proposing a monograph, the TRANSRIGHTS angle of analysis allows further understanding the workings of gender through the ‘voices’ of trans-people (within and beyond Europe), and their complex forms of self-identification vis-à-vis the institutional apparatus (whether legal, medical, political or even social-scientific). Our compromise involves respecting the voices of all individuals while disentangling the social meanings and political significations of ‘trans’ as a form of naming and representation.