Respect for transgender rights broadly and recognition of nonbinary gender specifically have given rise to global legislative and policy-level reforms that purport to rectify discrimination faced by transgender and gender-diverse populations when traveling or migrating. In several countries, for example, the binary options “male” and “female” have been extended to include other possibilities in legal and travel documents, such as X, third gender, indeterminate, and unspecified. Drawing on qualitative data gathered from an online survey conducted over a period of one year, this article homes in on this phenomenon, asking how existing and expanding options for gender in passports could impact transgender and gender-diverse people’s ability to cross international borders. The article’s findings highlight how current border-security structures frequently pose a challenge for those not conforming to gender norms. Our analysis reveals an intricate set of negotiations and tensions, and elucidates the complex dynamics between macro-level practices of power and micro-level articulations of resistance that might interrupt the normative functions of law. This article also shows how existing and alternative options can be taken up in transformative ways that can be used to subvert otherwise restrictive policies. This article is part of the special issue “Media, Migration, and Nationalism” of the journal Global Perspectives, Media and Communication, guest-edited by Koen Leurs and Tomohisa Hirata.

Picking up on Janice Raymond's infamous work The Transsexual Empire (1979), Sheila Jeffreys' monograph Gender Hurts aims to provide a critical analysis of 'transgenderism' as a contemporary medical/political phenomenon. Her book is a reaction to what she envisions to be 'an avalanche' of celebratory works on the subject within feminist academia. She suggests that there is a gap in critical feminist academic literature that does not fit with the wealth of contemporary critiques generated by radical feminists on the web (pp. 11-12). Jeffreys' book fits into a broader tradition of radical lesbian feminist works that seek to abolish 'the idea of gender as the foundation of the political system of male domination', rather than to celebrate it as an affirmative component of feminist identity politics, or to take it as a starting point for affirmative transgender discourse(s) (p. 1). After outlining this position in the introduction, Jeffreys makes a comparison between the social construction of transgenderism and the construction of 'the homosexual', arguing both constructions function to normalize 'unacceptable gender behaviour which might threaten systems of male dominance and female subordination' (p. 17). Extending this argument in the second chapter ('Transgenderism and feminism'), she argues that transgenderism is fundamentally opposed to the feminist project, which ought to have female-born subjects and their lived experiences of subordination as females at the heart of its politics (p. 36). In addition, she articulates a stark opposition between radical lesbian feminism on the one hand, and queer theory and politics on the other: the first tries to abolish gender, and then latter tries to mobilize it as a site of personal and political empowerment (p. 43). The general argument established here is that transgenderism as a medical and political phenomenon is based upon a notion of essential, innate gender identity, thereby appropriating and affirming the very mechanism that continues to subordinate those female-born subjects that should be the subjects proper to feminist discourse, according to Jeffreys (pp. 1, 14). In the third chapter ('Doing transgender: Really hurting') Jeffreys touches upon various medical facets of transgender healthcare, arguing that 'physically changing the bodies of men and women who seek to transgender is ineffective in improving physical and mental health and social functioning' (p. 79), and is, in fact, mentally and physically damaging. Moving away from the question of how transgenderism as a discourse might hurt transgender people themselves, Chapter 4 ('A gravy stain on the table: Women in the lives of men who transgender') is concerned with the ways in which male-to-female (MTF) transitions might be hurtful to non-transgender women occupying the direct environment of such 'male-bodied transgenders', as Jeffreys describes them. In the subsequent chapter ('Women who transgender: An antidote to feminism?') she elaborates on this theme, this time focusing on the way female-to-male