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Being a trans legal being in the world
There is the law and there is the law. Trans people exist in societies of all shapes and framings ranging from trans libationary to complete trans exclusionary. Each approach frames trans people differently within a legal framing, with the law understood by citizens in each jurisdiction. The law is a social construction based on the needs and desires of the majority within any country, shaped and reshaped over time as case law and judicial decisions are passed down. Thus, being a trans person in any particular legal jurisdiction means living in an operative legal environment that could be inclusive, ambivalent or outright hostile.
This makes discussing legal trans personhood a complex issue, especially that each trans person within a given jurisdiction has a positional understanding based on their own experiences. This means that all trans legal issues arise due to trans people moving through the world and engaging with those legal systems. Conversely, anti-trans legislation and case law is based on gender critical experiences and gender critical citizens bringing cases to enforce their beliefs at law. This creates an innate, and I would argue intractable, tension between trans rights and gender critical rights at law, leaving trans legal personhood at the mercy of whether jurisdictions see where the balance is.
