a b s t r a c tTrans rights advocacy is a social justice movement that is transforming language practices relating to gender. Research has highlighted the fact that language which constructs gender as binary harms trans people, and some trans studies researchers have developed guidelines for honouring trans people's names and pronouns. The language of academic writing is an area of discussion where questions of trans rights and trans experiences have not yet been addressed. This paper draws on two data sources to explore the citation experiences and practices of trans scholars and activists: a web-based archive of writers' perspectives built between 2015 and 2016; and a corpus-based study of 14 research articles published in TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Our analysis highlights the sensitivity that is required of colleagues who work with transgender authors' writing, furthering our understanding of citation as a collaborative and potentially intimate and caring practice. Practices of referring to work by trans scholars pose ethical questions about the social relations expressed in citation in general, enabling applied language scholars to develop a new and different awareness of the sociality of citation.Transsexual monstrosity, however, along with its affect, transgender rage, can never claim quite so secure a means of resistance because of the inability of language to represent the transgendered subject's movement over time between stably gendered positions in a linguistic structure.dSusan Stryker, "My Words to Victor Frankenstein" I feel I am constantly being asked to pick a team, stick to it, tick a box, choose F or M, make up your mind because you can't have it both ways … But in my experience, there are more options than male or female, masculine or feminine. The meanings of these words change depending on the context, anyway, so my mutability is echoed in language. Is it possible to understand both language and myself as incoherent? As always spilling over the edges of intelligibility?dJoe Macdonald, "An Authoethnography"