‘She’s a woman!’ The liminality of a trans gender identity

Abstract

In this paper I use the recent UK Supreme Court ruling to surface and to examine the liminality of trans lives. I develop liminality as a way to make sense of trans experiences ‘betwixt and between’ understood gender and sexed body, how bodies are read and how they are wished to be read. In this context of liminality, I theorise gender identity as the dynamic interplay between identity work, body work and gender boundary work, and gendered self-identity as constituting the ongoing embodied experience and response to differently gendered spaces and regulatory regimes. I adopt this liminal reading and theorisation of gender identity to study my own trans body moment by moment across multiple situated contexts. My aim is to widen the possibilities of organising by offering an account of trans experience which broadly aligns with the Supreme Court judgement, and its implications for the liveable lives of trans people.

Introduction

During the writing of this paper the UK Supreme Court handed down a judgement regarding the interpretation of the Equality Act (EA) 2010 and its definition of sex, with significant implications for trans people (For Women Scotland vs The Scottish Ministers, 2025). Coincidentally the judgement also crystalises a number of themes already in the paper. This paper now speaks to that judgement and what it means for trans people and their ‘liveable lives’ (Moulin de Souza and Parker, 2022; O’Shea, 2018) through my own trans experience.

In summary the judgement found that ‘sex’, ‘man’ and ‘woman’ within the EA 2010 were intended to refer to ‘biological’ sex. It concluded that the EA 2010 could only be read and applied coherently and consistently if each of the protected characteristics within it were defined coherently and consistently. It thus found that ‘sex’ could not be interpreted as including ‘certified sex’ (where a person has a Gender Recognition Certificate (GCR) which recognises their wish to live as the opposite sex to their birth sex) or more generally people with a gender not in accordance with their birth sex, because this would undermine the protections afforded to groups on the basis of their biological sex. It also noted that trans people retained rights against both direct and indirect discrimination and harassment under the act under the protected characteristic of gender reassignment (with or without a GRC) and would retain rights under biological sex such as pregnancy and maternity rights for trans men.

The judgement concludes that ‘the interpretation of the EA 2010 (i.e. the biological sex reading), which we conclude is the only correct one, does not cause disadvantage to trans people, with or without a GRC’ (For Women Scotland Ltd vs The Scottish Ministers, 2025: 22: xvii). Yet, for many trans people the judgement is indeed disadvantageous. Its interpretation limits the extent to which trans people can assert the right to live as their understood gender rather than their biological sex: while trans people retain rights not to suffer discrimination on the basis of living in their understood gender, there remain occasions when they can be legally be treated as their biological sex. Trans people are thus placed into a liminal space in which they may mostly, but never fully achieve social recognition of their gender.

The judgement does not constitute a change in the law but a clarification of how existing law should be interpreted. I am not qualified to discuss the merits of the ruling, nor to make any case for whether and how the law should be amended in future. Instead, I argue that despite the pain and uncertainty which the ruling has caused for many trans people, it also presents an important opportunity to reexamine the liminal status of trans people, as caught ‘betwixt and between’ (Turner, 1974) their sexed bodies and understood gender, how social structures read and treat them and how they wish to be read and treated. This liminal state is especially important to understand because of recent trends within trans scholarship and activism towards the primacy of gender identity over sexed bodies and towards discursive approaches over the materiality of the body (Gonsalves, 2020; Neuhann, 2023; Zimman, 2019). It is also important because gender identity itself remains under-theorised and is still commonly and uncritically assumed to be something innate and essential (Byrne, 2023; Davy, 2019; Dembroff, 2020; Fisher et al., 2025; Gheaus, 2023; Kozee et al., 2012).

In this paper I develop liminality as a way to make sense of trans experience: as between understood gender and sexed body, between how bodies are read and how they are desired to be read, and between different social contexts where sex and gender are variously salient. Building on this liminal state between understood self, body and social context I develop a theorisation of gender identity based on the dynamic interplay between identity work, body work and gender boundary work, and gendered self-identity as constituting an ongoing embodied experience and response to differently gendered spaces and regulatory regimes. I further examine this liminal reading and theorisation of gender identity by studying one trans body moment by moment across multiple situated contexts through an autoethnographical analysis of myself as a trans person on a single, mundane occasion of going clothes shopping.

The paper’s contribution twofold. I use the recent Supreme Court ruling to surface and examine the liminality of trans lives as essential for understanding and supporting trans people in organisations. Attending to such liminality also reveals the nature of gender identity as fragile, variable and requiring continual maintenance and reconstruction, as one body is differently experienced, perceived, managed and policed moment by moment across multiple gendered spaces and contexts. I also contribute to the small number of studies of trans lives by trans people themselves, and to the call by Moulin de Souza and Parker (2022) for scholars and organisations to ‘think with trans’ people rather than about them. By accounting for my own trans life, I surface some lesser discussed elements of trans experience. Unlike many trans people I continue to acknowledge my sexed body even as it conflicts with my gender identity, and the Supreme Court judgement more or less reflects my own experience of liminality in which I am unable to align my female sexed body and male gender identity. I thus seek to ‘complicate’ responses to the judgement and suggest that it invites us to listen more closely to one another, so that we can accommodate all kinds of identities and bodies in organisations.

(Re)problematising gender identity

Gender identity is a central concept for understanding trans people who experience incongruence between their own sense of gender and their biological body. Gender, which Butler (1990, 1993) characterises as a heterosexual matrix, organises society by conflating biological sex, gendered expression and sexuality so that, for example, male bodies perform male social roles and masculinity (Ashraf et al., 2023; Bradford and Syed, 2019). Gender thus makes us socially intelligible (Butler, 1990, 1993) through producing and reproducing culturally appropriate performances (West and Zimmerman, 1987) or else be deviant (Muhr et al., 2016) or unintelligible (Moon, 2019; Moulin de Souza and Parker, 2022; Murawsky, 2023; O’Shea, 2018).

Gender identity is defined by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) as ‘a person’s deeply felt, internal, intrinsic sense of their own gender’ (Coleman et al., 2022). Gender identity is not exclusively problematic for trans people, because all individuals are required choose how to conform with, challenge or transgress gender norms (Coffey, 2013; Fisher et al., 2025). However, the strength and degree of misalignment between trans people’s gender identity and anatomical body makes gender identity especially salient including as the basis for legal rights to live and be treated in accordance with gender identity rather than biological sex, such as the UK Gender Recognition Act 2004.

Nevertheless, gender identity is problematic as a concept. Given its increased prominence and its role as the basis for legal rights for trans people, gender identity is under-theorised. The WPATH definition itself has been criticised because of its circularity and inability to delineate the nature of gender identity beyond self-assertion (Byrne, 2023; Dembroff, 2020; Gheaus, 2023). Furthermore, the definition characterises gender identity as something both innate and settled, which is at odds with contemporary sociological understandings of identity as something actively, continually and reflexively worked on through social interaction, interpersonal negotiation and internal soliloquy (Brown, 2022; Felix et al., 2024; Merlini and Aboim, 2025; Moon, 2019). More generally, gender identity lacks both consistent measures and clear theorisations as to how it relates to, for example, gender, identity, sex, body and socialisation (Davy, 2019; Dembroff, 2020; Fisher et al., 2025; Gheaus, 2023; Kozee et al., 2012).

The second issue is the relationship between gender identity and biological sex and especially the rise of discursive approaches to the body, and self-identification (Gonsalves, 2020; Neuhann, 2023; Zimman, 2019). Such activism not only challenges assumptions that sex must determine gender, but starts to assert that one’s felt gender determines sex (Gonsalves, 2020). For example, surgery may bring the physical body in line with gender identity (Gonsalves, 2020), self-narratives and semiotics are given greater weight over observable bodies (Aboim, 2023b) and individuals may signal how others should read them through presentation and sharing their pronouns (Zimman, 2019). But this primacy of gender identity over biological sex has several consequences both for trans people and more widely. Gender identity as a discursive project is not equally available to all people: body shape and size may prescribe the ways and degree to which it may be read, and some gender identities, such as non-binary, may be difficult to signal or to read (Fiani and Han, 2019; Murawsky, 2023). The body is also the site of desire and affect, both of which are crucial for a full understanding of the lived experience of the body (Dale, 2001; Fotaki et al., 2014): our affective responses to our own and other bodies, and those of others to our body are not always controllable or trainable, and cannot be discursively undone.

Self-identification goes some way to explaining the shock and resistance amongst many trans people and their allies to the Supreme Court ruling, because the ruling determined that where rights based on gender identity and biological bodies conflict, the biological body must take precedence. But beyond this, I suggest that a major difficulty with much trans activism and many studies is that its starting point is the attempt to resolve the tension between the trans person’s gender identity and body rather than to better understand the nature and experience of that tension itself. It is here that a liminal perspective can be helpful.

Liminality is an anthropological concept which has attracted increasing interest within organisational studies (Popova et al., 2025). van Gennap (1960) first documented liminality as an essential middle stage within rites of passage, after which an individual has separated from their former role or status, but before they have incorporated a new, higher status. Liminality is thus a space outside of social structures, or a ‘limbo of statuslessness’ (Turner, 1995: 97). Occupying such a space affords opportunities for creative freedom when ‘anything might, even should, happen’ (Turner, 1979: 465) and new ways of being can be imagined and enacted; but lacking any social status or recognition also brings challenges of uncertainty and ambiguity, and significant social risk of being incoherent and unrecognisable to society (Douglas, 1966, 1970).

Liminality has emerged as a metaphor for examining a variety of trans experiences. It has been used both as a way of understanding gender transitions (Dentice and Dietert, 2019; Kłonkowska and Bonvissuto, 2019; Pereira-García et al., 2024; Wilson, 2018), and as a more permanent residing in a liminal space (Merlini and Aboim, 2025; Pereira-García et al., 2024; Williams et al., 2017; Wilson, 2002). It has been used to frame trans people both as agentic, deliberately eschewing social structures and creating new communities from the periphery (Dentice and Dietert, 2019; Wilson, 2018) and as victims precariously caught between social structures (Guptha and Sandhya, 2023; Narendran et al., 2021; Seitz, 2017). Liminality can express a space or community within which one can escape the tyranny of social structures (Davis and Paramanathan, 2024; Wilson, 2002) or the trans body itself as it reconfigures flesh and expression and co-ordinates available language to describe itself (Aboim, 2023a; Carlson and Sweet, 2020).

Liminality has been used variously, creatively and sensitively to generate important insights into trans lives. I propose that experience of being trans itself – of experiencing incongruity between one’s sense of gender and one’s biological sex – is essentially liminal (Dentice and Dietert, 2019) because trans people do not fit into the binary organisation of sex and gender. Beyond becoming potentially unintelligible because of a failure to conform to gendered expectations, and potentially unreadable because gender identity cannot be adequately expressed or interpreted, the Supreme Court ruling also reminds us that many social structures remain based on biological sex and that the trans person may still be read as their sex, in law and otherwise. In this sense, being trans represents a permanent state of liminality or ‘betwixt and between’ (Turner, 1974) gender and sex, identity and body, never settled but continually worked on, never completed but a becoming (Carlson and Sweet, 2020) .

Adopting a liminal perspective of trans lives has implications for the nature and role of gender identity. Rather than viewing it as innate and as the defining feature of trans people, and thus as having primacy over the body, gender identity exists in ongoing work with the body. Furthermore, such work is dynamic because it is the product of how we perceive ourselves, how we are perceived and the different ways in which sex and gender are organised and prioritised in different social contexts. In the next section I explicate this theorisation of gender identity as the dynamic interplay of identity work, body work and gender boundary work.

A theoretical framework for gender identity

Identity work

Despite the centrality of gender identity for trans people, there has been limited attention paid to trans people within the identity studies field, and little application of identity theory within trans studies (see Felix et al., 2024; Narendran et al., 2021 for notable exceptions). Within Management and Organisation Studies identity work has emerged as an integrative approach to identity theorising (Brown, 2022). Identity work conceptualises identity as the ongoing and mutually constitutive work of ‘forming, repairing, maintaining, strengthening or revising’ (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002,: 262) one’s personal self-identity in the context of ongoing challenges or confirmations posed by various social milieu (Watson, 2008). From an identity work perspective gender identity is not something innate or fixed, but a continual and reflexive process of attaching meanings to oneself (Brown, 2015) in relation to gender and the ongoing struggle to sustain a (gendered) self-concept within gendered milieu through social interaction, interpersonal negotiation and internal soliloquy (Brown, 2022).

Body work

The assumed alignment between sexed body and gender expression (Butler, 1990, 1993; West and Zimmerman, 1987) makes gender an embodied practice (Bell, 2019; Schrock et al., 2005). Bodies are socially read (as biologically male or female) and then subjected to gendered expectations, and also a means by which we may signal our gender and how we desire to be read (Ashraf et al., 2023; Coffey, 2013; Davy, 2019; Jones and Lim, 2022; Schrock et al., 2005). Body work therefore forms an important dimension of gender identity. Body work may seek to construct, enhance or maintain a body that conforms to one’s gender identity, often with reference to gender stereotypes to produce unambiguous claims to being male or female, with both non-trans men and women (Coffey, 2013), or trans men and trans women (Dozier, 2005; Jones and Lim, 2022; Schrock et al., 2005) closely modelling themselves on female and male bodies, presentations and behaviours. Alternatively, body work may be a deliberate signalling of one’s other-ness through a display of non-conforming bodies. For example, non-binary people may deliberately mix gendered presentations (Felix et al., 2024; Fiani and Han, 2019; Murawsky, 2023). Body work may discursively construct new meanings of the body to align it with a gender identity, such as re-naming body parts (Zimman, 2019), or asserting gender such as a ‘feminine soul’ over bodily appearance (Ashraf et al., 2023). Finally, bodywork may focus on disciplining or constraining a body so that it fits, or appears to fit, or does not draw attention to itself, for example undertaking body work to hide gender identity (Felix et al., 2024) or alternatively undertaking body work to better fit normative ideas of trans bodies (Garrison, 2018).

Yet, body work is never an entirely cognitive or agential process. Bodily dys-appearance (Leder, 1990) conceptualises moments when the individual is suddenly made aware of their body and can no longer take its working for granted. Relatedly, affect constitutes autonomous bodily reactions which pre-date conscious emotions (Massumi, 1995). The body’s affective response to both itself and the world, how it both affects and is affected is central to understanding any lived experience (Fotaki et al., 2014). Gender is one way in which the body’s affective capacities are both produced and organised (Coffey, 2013). The gender identity of individuals is embedded in multiple and diverse affective responses towards their own bodies, the bodies of others, and affective responses of others towards their bodies (Davy, 2019; Moon, 2019).

Gender boundary work

Any doing, or undoing of gender is also located within a particular space and time (Moulin de Souza et al., 2016) and the effects of different regulatory regimes (Ashraf et al., 2023; Hussain, 2024): what is expected of bodies, the degree and kind of attention paid to gender, to bodies and to performances, how bodies are read, and the degree and affordances for individual agency (Ashraf et al., 2023; Moulin de Souza et al., 2016; Felix et al., 2024; Hines, 2010). Drawing on the work of Lefebvre (1991) and Hernes (2004), Johansson and Lundgren (2015) develop the concept of gendered boundary work as a way of understanding how spaces are both gendered and gendering. Physical boundary work refers to tangible structures such as segregated changing rooms or toilets, signage, images and artefacts, through which individuals are organised along gendered lines. Social boundary work includes the practices and behaviours which define membership and regulate social norms, whereby individuals perform gender appropriately within such spaces. Finally, through mental boundary work, individuals learn to incorporate meanings of gendered spaces into their own mental schema, and to treat them as natural. As a ‘performative accomplishment’ (Butler, 1990: 179) gender is thus subject to multiple forms of physical, social and mental boundary work which determine, space by space and moment by moment, our intelligibility both to others and to ourselves.

In summary, gender identity is a continual and reflexive process of attaching meanings to oneself (Brown, 2015) in relation to gender, constituted through ongoing identity work and body work in, with and across physical, social and mental gender boundaries. This theorisation of gender identity, as the embodied response to differently gendered spaces and regulatory regimes, allows us to fully appreciate the liminal nature of being trans, in which gender identity is continually worked on and never settled as the trans body variously works and is read, and gives us tools with which to analyse such work. To further illustrate and examine the liminality of trans people I now presents an autoethnographical analysis of myself as a trans person on a mundane event of clothes shopping. In the following sections I set out my method and justification for an autoethnographical approach, but first I introduce myself as a trans person.

The case of me

I am a middle-aged female and have experienced gender dysphoria all my life. As a child I was convinced, I was really a boy, and this feeling became more intense during puberty. I came out as gay and in my early thirties I seriously considered whether to physically transition. I have never done so because I have been able to manage my dysphoria through dressing and presenting as a man, and because despite my dysphoria I remain deeply cognisant of my female body and fear that no hormone treatment or surgery would ever be enough. Nevertheless, my gender dysphoria persists: despite my belief that I am female, I desire to be male.

My own trans experience is not commonly talked about. I cannot label myself as any particular ‘kind’ of trans person, only name the consistent feelings that I have about myself. Yet coincidentally, my trans experience more or less reflects the liminality articulated by the Supreme Court judgement. I attempt to sustain my gender identity as a man, whilst at the same time believing that desired self to be a fantasy, and that my body can never fully reflect my desired self. I seek recognition of my gender performance and am happy when strangers mistake me for male, but I do not feel able to ask friends, family and colleagues to call me male. I am constantly aware of being called out, or of having to out myself as female. My gender identity remains liminal, always desired and always worked on but whose achievement is precluded by my female body.

I therefore contribute to the tiny body of scholars who write from personal experience of living as trans and to calls for more diverse accounts and the undoing of a normative ‘trans community’ (Garrison, 2018; Hines, 2010; Moulin de Souza and Parker, 2022; Murawsky, 2023; O’Shea, 2018).

Methodology – Autoethnographical vignettes

Autoethnography seeks to illuminate and critique cultural practices through selected experiences of being part of such a culture (Ellis et al., 2011; Jones et al., 2013), both evocatively conveying experience and critically analysing and reflecting on the experience, to illuminate connections between the personal and the cultural and generate theoretical insight (Learmonth and Humphreys, 2012). One strategy is the use of vignettes, which break down an experience into specific occasions or ‘epochs’ (Husserl, 1970) allowing closer reflection and analysis, but which also form a connecting narrative (Humphreys, 2005; Pitard, 2016).

In this paper I present five vignettes about an occasion of going shopping for clothes which remains a memorable but representative example of my liminal trans life. In writing each vignette I endeavour to convey some of the concrete actions, dialogues and affect that remembering it evokes (Herrmann et al., 2013; Pitard, 2016). Following each vignette I then interweave my reflections and analyse these actions, dialogues and affect in terms of my identity work, body work and boundary work.

Autoethnography has been accused of a lack of rigour, standardised methods and language (Ford and Harding, 2008); reliance on personal memory and recall (Chang, 2008; Winkler, 2014); narcissism, self-indulgence and vanity projects (O’Shea, 2019; Sparkes, 2002); and a lack of critical distance between the researcher and the researched (Winkler, 2013). However, it is through a deliberately subjective and personal account of a mundane occasion that I seek to surface what may be little spoken about or hidden (Learmonth and Humphreys, 2012). I intentionally draw on a lived experience of gender with which I am deeply familiar (Winkler, 2014): rather than attempting to establish sufficient distance from the phenomenon being studied, as an autoethnographer I aim to get as close as possible to the phenomenon of trans experience of gender.

Going shopping – Five vignettes

Getting dressed

I stare at myself in the full-length mirror. Ever since my partner suggested going shopping for some new work outfits I have been planning what I should wear. I am playing it safe with a plain shirt, jeans and boots; now I scrutinise my reflection, looking for any betrayal of a female shape. I experiment with my shirt out and then tucked in. I get a belt. I try out different stances, checking which best conceals my hips and thighs. I will remember these stances while I am out. My clothes are thin and the shapes they make are fragile.

I manage my gender dysphoria through living and presenting as a man, so the body work of dressing consumes much attention. When dressing I am acutely aware of my body and my aim is not only to signal masculinity through my choice of clothes, but to conceal my female contours. I do not feel comfortable until I am satisfied that I have hidden my body, and this body work also includes forms of comportment which work with my clothes. I regularly check myself during the day to reassure myself that my outline is male.

My identity work includes recognising my reflection as male and interpreting what others will recognise as male. When dressing to go out I consider where I will be going, anticipating how I will be read. Knowing we would be going to a ‘mainstream’ clothes store I chose unambiguously male and conservative clothes. My performance of masculinity cannot afford to be ambiguous or transgressive but carefully undertakes social gender boundary work by learning and complying with situated norms of being read as a man. Being able to read myself in the mirror as male and doing masculinity ‘properly’ produces positive affect. Yet, I also recognise the gap between what I desire to be and my body. I am conscious of the work I undertake to present and to perform as male, because I am not. I utilise social gender boundary work in order to support my gender identity, but am simultaneously undone by mental gender boundary work. I cannot take my gender identity, my masculinity or my belongingness as a man for granted, even by myself: my gender identity is only sustained by a continual conscious performance. My positive affect towards my body and gender remains provisional and fragile.

Entering the store

The store shares a large atrium with a supermarket. As we enter the atrium several clothed manikins, elegantly posing in groups of twos and threes, signal the store’s entrance on the left. I run my eye along them as we enter, all the women in summer dresses, culottes and bikinis, and stare for a fraction too long at the single male manikin. Nice cargos, would they work on me? I catch myself and walk into the store.

Entering the clothes store prompts identity work. The store is a highly gendered space: the manikins at the entrance are unambiguously male and female in their idealised body shapes and poses as well as dress, and there are many more female manikins. Inside, the majority of floorspace is given over to women’s clothes and the men’s section is at the back. I am aware of the physical gender boundary as I enter the store. The manikins, and then the women’s clothes I first pass all ask me: which are you? Are these for you or not? What is your role here? My attention to the male manikin is therefore complex. It is partly a deliberate affirmation to myself that this (female) space is not for me, and my self-concept of being male is supported: my body work of dress and performance, and my gender identity are congruent with both the physical and social organisation of gender. Yet my self-concept is also threatened by my attention to the male manikin, because it reifies my constant attention to my own masculine performance. Becoming aware of having paid such attention I feel as though I have momentarily betrayed my commitment to masculinity and do not permit myself to linger: my identity work to restore my gender identity is to (temporarily) reject my interest in male dress.

In the store

We walk around the store. I follow my partner who is wandering in one direction, then veering in another, and my attention is on keeping up with her. She holds a top up against herself and I agree it looks nice. I carry it got her while she continues looking. I glance around but don’t see anything I can suggest, so I continue to follow and accept more tops and two skirts carry for her. She is enjoying herself and I am happy for her: hopefully this will be successful trip. We head for the changing rooms and converge with two other couples handing over clothes and separating.

In the store I play a normative male role to a female partner shopping. I observe other couples around the store, men following women, playing no active part in the selection of clothes. I enjoy this aspect of shopping. I want to be helpful to my partner and I am confident that I am naturally mirroring what men are doing. In these moments my body work feels easy and natural, comfortably reflecting other male performances which reinforces my self-recognition as male. I experience congruence between my self-concept and social context, and I experience congruence between my body’s affective desires and what is expected of it. I comply with normative social expectations of being a man in this space, and my sense of belonging is now also supported by mental gender boundary work: my performance as a man is effortless and natural.

The men’s section

I wait outside the changing rooms with the other two men. I look at my phone but the signal is weak. My partner will be a while, so I wander over to the men’s section. On the way I snatch a glance at myself in the mirror, remember the right pose, satisfy myself that I still look ok. I walk round the men’s quickly, not stopping, not touching anything. I see the cargos the manikin was wearing; they’re still nice close up, but I don’t want to try them on, I don’t need them and we’re not here for me today. I head back to the changing rooms. My phone pings and I find a message from my partner: Come and look.

Going into the men’s section I cross another physical boundary marked by signage and two male manikins. Women are in this section, with male partners and alone, shopping (I assume) for men. However, I want to look for clothes for myself, and I worry that my desire to buy clothes, and the pleasure I take from new clothes that make me look and feel good is insufficiently masculine. My wander round the men’s section is therefore quick and half-hearted.

While performing maleness in a female space supported my gender identity, entering a male space prompted more intense identity work. My gender self-concept relied on being recognised as a man rather than a woman shopping for a man (or a woman shopping for herself). Whereas with my partner we could be read heteronormatively as a couple performing complementary masculinity and femininity, on my own I felt under greater scrutiny. Being in a space that I constructed as a male one reified my desire to be male and, paradoxically, the sense of transgression of my female body and therefore my need to hide it.

My self-concept was further threatened by my failure of normative masculinity. My affective desire to choose new clothes, and the pleasure I gained from it made me question the authenticity of my performance: my body produced the ‘wrong’ kind of affect. I questioned not only the veracity of my performance but my desire to be male. My gender identity work involved continually measuring myself against an imagined standard of maleness not only in terms of outward appearance and social recognition, but my own feelings and desires and whether these also sufficiently supported my claims to be a man. My gender identity work depended not only on recognition from others but self-recognition.

The changing rooms

I walk into the changing rooms. Men’s to the left, Women’s to the right. I pause and look around for an assistant but can’t see anyone. As I walk down the corridor of cubicles I hear a voice behind me: Excuse me, this is the ladies, you can’t go in there! I hesitate, then turn to the assistant who has now appeared, but I don’t catch her eye or speak. I walk past her and stand outside again. From inside comes my partner’s voice, angry: She’s a woman! Another assistant is now also nudging the one who confronted me: it’s not a man! The assistant comes over to me, apologising. I walk back into the changing rooms and turn right again.

I do not use men’s changing rooms or public toilets, because my body remains female. I would feel uncomfortable entering private or intimate male spaces, and anxious for my own safety as a female (especially a female trying to pass as male). At the same time, I feel intense discomfort having to ‘out’ myself as female by choosing women’s changing rooms or toilets. Often this involves having to explain my right to be there and to deal with both my embarrassment and that of the other person when they realise their mistake. When I was challenged on this occasion I complied with the appellation of male. I felt pleasure that I had been recognised as male, awkwardness that, as a presumed male, I had been trespassing in a female space, and anxiety that this male appellation would need correcting. When I was recognised as female, I felt embarrassed to have fooled the assistant, and cross that she had not initially seen through my disguise of male performance.

The changing rooms are a space where physical gender boundaries are literally policed by staff, and I anticipated such policing when I looked for the assistant before entering the women’s changing rooms. The episode captures my liminality between my female body and male gender identity. There is no ‘right’ way to read me in this moment, only two different kinds of ‘wrong’: I am either a transgressing male, or my male performance and gender identity is undone. The assistant can only ‘wrongly’ read either my gender identity or my sex because the two cannot align.

Moreover, the episode highlights the other bodies with which I interact and am in relationships with. In calling out ‘She’s a woman’ my partner also called me into our relationship as two females, albeit one which fully acknowledges my dysphoria. In calling me out as a trespassing man, the assistant expressed the instinct of a female guarding a female space, and her affective reading of me (tall, slim, short hair, men’s clothes) as male. Her subsequent discomfort at realising her mistake was embarrassing, but her initial discomfort at a boundary transgression was more discomforting to me. The misalignment between my body and my gender identity leads to another ‘two kinds of ‘wrong’ whereby either I or another must be discomforted.

Discussion

In this paper I confront the recent Supreme Court judgement on the meanings of sex and gender and its liminal positioning of trans people, whereby they are protected in their right to express their gender identity but not the right – in all circumstances – to be treated as other than their biological sex. Drawing on my own liminal trans experience of being trans I have theorised gender identity as a liminal state comprising ongoing identity work, body work and boundary work, and used these this theoretical lens to analyse my trans body and gender identity on a mundane occasion of going shopping. My account suggests three important insights for understanding and supporting trans people in organisations.

First, my account of my trans body reveals me embodying the judgement’s positioning of trans people, variously but continually caught ‘betwixt and between’ (Turner, 1974) gender identity and sexed body, working on becoming (Carlson and Sweet, 2020) but never able to never able to settle or take either for granted. My body is central in this. My body was variously salient over time and space, and prompted different forms of identity, body and boundary work to hide it, curate it and to sustain a temporary alignment with my male gender identity. In getting dressed I undertook body work to hide my body by dressing in conformance with masculine norms and expectations, informed by social boundary work, and practised maintaining a masculine profile. My gender identity was supported by recognising myself as male in the mirror, but simultaneously threatened by the close attention I paid to my performance of masculinity and my subsequent interest in shopping for myself: I undid myself through mental boundary work. Walking round the store with my partner I undertook more social boundary work and body work, drawing on a typical social role for a man which was further reinforced in relation to a woman. However, in the changing rooms a physical gender boundary made my female body highly salient again. By acknowledging this division of male and female bodies I was required to disclose my female body in order to enter the female changing rooms. My male identity was, however, undone.

Furthermore, my body exists in relation to other bodies. My body is variously material that can be crafted into a male image through appearance and comportment (Dozier, 2005; Jones and Lim, 2022); a body in relation to my female partner performing heteronormativity; a female body that is loved by my partner (c.f. Davy, 2019; Dozier, 2005 who also find some trans people not physically changing their bodies because of a partner). These relations are also affective, autonomous bodily reactions (Massumi, 1995). In the changing rooms the assistant instinctively read me as male and challenged me; before that my body had already hesitated, anticipating the transgression I was about to undertake, and my body complied with the assistant’s interpolation of me as a transgressing male.

My account of my body therefore provides a counterweight to discursive approaches to gender (Aboim, 2023b; Gonsalves, 2020; Neuhann, 2023; Zimman, 2019). My female body is in constant tension with my male gender identity, and I remain aware of my body: even when I am satisfied that I have successfully crafted my body and am performing masculinity, this performance requires continual attention. I remain continually alert as to how I am being, or might be read and confronted with moments of ‘dys-appearance’ (Leder, 1990) when my body fails to fit. Rather than undoing or transcending the body, my gender identity paradoxically reifies my body. Moreover, when I am required to make an ontological claim about myself, I choose my female body rather than gender despite the discomfort this causes me. It is a decision made each time from pain and grief, but I am unable to make any other. The Supreme Court judgement says nothing new about my trans body, but simply expresses my lived experience: that I may seek to live in accordance with my gender but that others may not, will not or cannot see me as I desire to be seen.

Second, my liminality is more complex than simply being caught between gender identity and sexed body. My gender identity itself – the meanings that I attach to myself in relation to gender (Brown, 2015) – also changes moment by moment. Walking round the store with my partner I experienced congruence with my gender as I comfortably performed maleness and reflected other men. At other times – getting dressed and entering the changing rooms – my female body became salient and threatened my gender to different degrees by drawing attention to my work to be read as male. At still other times my gender identity was threatened simply by my own assessment of my performance of masculinity.

My account therefore highlights not just the situated nature of gender identity (Ashraf et al., 2023; Moulin de Souza et al., 2016; Felix et al., 2024; Hines, 2010; Muhr et al., 2016), but the ongoing cognitive, affective and embodied demands of gendered spaces for trans people. Trans people may not only feel unintelligible or illegitimate (Butler, 1990; Moulin de Souza and Parker, 2022; O’Shea, 2018) by the organising of gender; they may also experience frequent existential threats to their gender which require ongoing and intensive identity, body and boundary work. Such work may be underestimated or overlooked by assumptions that gender identity is ‘deeply felt, internal [and] intrinsic’ (Coleman et al., 2022). My study reflects others that report how trans people do and undo gender in response to situational context (e.g. Dozier, 2005; Felix et al., 2024; Fiani and Han, 2019; Murawsky, 2023; Schrock et al., 2005), but further reveals the cognitive and affective load of continuously ‘forming, repairing, maintaining, strengthening or revising’ (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002: 262) gender identity itself in a permanent liminal state.

For organisations, responsibility for trans people’s welfare thus goes further than trans-positive policies. The liminal existence of trans people and the daily effects of ordinary social structures which demarcate gender binaries invite organisations to consider the necessity and relevance of all such structures (c.f. Moulin de Souza and Parker, 2022). But conversely, the struggle of trans people is precisely because we exist – and many of us choose to live – outside such social structures. We do not fit within forms of organising that most people accept without question. Trans people do not and cannot afford to depend on organisations to make our lives liveable: we find our own ways to survive – our ‘practices of care’ (Moulin de Souza and Parker, 2022) – to live within the limen.

Thirdly, my account also offers an alternative ‘thinking with trans’ (Moulin de Souza and Parker, 2022). For me, gender identity is a project of self-recognition. The primary audience of my performance of masculinity is myself. I can only know to what extent I am able to ‘pass’ as a man through the affective responses of strangers, and these only tell me that sometimes I do, and sometimes I don’t. Instead, my identity work relies on being able to recognise myself as male. Self-recognition still requires constant maintenance: my gender identity was not only threatened by my female body which had to be hidden, but whether my interest in choosing and buying clothes was appropriately masculine. More fundamentally my gender identity was threatened by my failure of mental gender boundary work: by having to pay continual attention to my masculine performance I undid my own claim to be male. For me, being intelligible to myself is more problematic than my intelligibility to others, and the key to surviving is to remain within the limen and avoid being confronted with situations which force me to choose between my gender and sex. I use gender neutral toilets and other spaces where possible not because I am neither male nor female but to avoid having to choose between ‘two kinds of wrong’. I avoid declaring my pronouns, a policy intended to support trans people, but which forces me out of the limen.

Furthermore, my gender identity depends on the existence of the heterosexual matrix. My account relies on normative – sometimes deeply stereotypical – versions of men and women. As one reviewer commented, many contemporary clothes stores are much more gender neutral, and plenty of men do shop for themselves, while I relied on the ‘reluctant man’ trope in a clothes store designed for women. Trans people may seek to avoid ambiguity or mis-reading by modelling themselves on male or female stereotypes (Dozier, 2005; Jones and Lim, 2022; Schrock et al., 2005) but I am surprised – as a critical management scholar – that I replicate such norms so readily. A Butlerian view of my gender performance would be that I start to undo the heterosexual matrix by undoing the coherence between sex and gender and assumptions of where ‘reality’ lies (Butler, 1990). Doing masculinity as a female might be progressive; undoing gendered expectations of my sex might be queering. Yet my affective desire is not to undo gender or heteronormativity, but to rely on it, and to reproduce masculine stereotypes to support my claims to be a man.

My trans life thus suggests different conclusions to O’Shea (2018) and Moulin de Souza and Parker (2022) who argue for ‘thinking with trans’ as an alternative way of organising outside binaries. Characterising my trans life as liminal I do not transcend either a gender or a sex binary, but fall in between sex and gender, failing to fully align them. My claim to be a man is grounded in socially recognised characteristics of maleness and masculinity, femaleness and femininity. Although I seek out spaces where I am not required to choose between gender and sex, I also question how I would feel in a gender-neutral world where there is no set of gendered expectations for either sex. What meanings would I attach to myself instead? What would I replace meanings of masculinity with? With what would I replace the pleasure of passing as a man? To exist in the limen is to continue to be defined by the social structures that one is not a part of, whether they are desired or rejected. Sex and gender form the dimensions of the limen in which I exist and seek to construct a liveable life. I do not wish to undo either: my identity is grounded in them.

Conclusions

The UK Supreme Court judgement (2025) has enflamed debate regarding the rights of trans people in the UK and beyond. Much debate is characterised by hard-line positions, arguing that either the judgement is wrong (morally and/or legally) because trans people must be treated as their understood gender in every way; or that trans people can and should always be treated as their birth sex. Neither of these positions accurately reflects the judgement. More importantly, it is now critical to listen to one another, and work out how we can accommodate all kinds of identities and bodies in organisations. I therefore offer some reflections on the judgement from my own experience as a trans person. I do not claim to speak for other trans people, but simply to offer a way to think with me as one trans person (Moulin de Souza and Parker, 2022).

The paper’s first contribution is to highlight the liminal position that the judgement places trans people in, as protected in their right to live as their desired gender but who may still be legally treated as their biological sex. I have suggested that being trans is essentially liminal (Dentice and Dietert, 2019) because trans people do not fit into the binary organisation of sex and gender, but live ‘betwixt and between’ (Turner, 1974). Adopting a liminal perspective of being trans, I have proposed a theorisation of gender identity which does not assume it to be innate and central to being trans, and thus as having primacy over the body. Instead, gender identity is understood as the meanings I attach to myself (Brown, 2015) in relation to gender, constituting an ongoing embodied experience and response to differently gendered spaces and regulatory regimes.

Through an autoethnographical account of going shopping, I have demonstrated how I embody the judgement’s positioning of trans people and especially the ongoing salience of my body throughout multiple forms of identity, body and boundary work. My male gender identity reifies my female body, requiring me to continually discipline, craft and monitor my body and face moments of ‘dys-appearance’ (Leder, 1990) when my body’s misalignment becomes apparent. Moreover, my body, as well as my identity, is in relation with other bodies. My body produces affective responses in others and affectively responds to other bodies (Massumi, 1995). My body will be read by others in ways that I may be unable to control. Gender, and trans gender is an embodied experience, and it is trans bodies, as well as gender identities, that need to be accounted for and accommodated in organisations.

My account also highlights a number of other features of my liminality. My liminality is more than being caught between gender identity and sexed body: my gender identity itself changes moment by moment, as various degrees of salience, conflict and resistance that I experience sustain or threaten my self-concept of being male. Furthermore my gender identity is primarily a project of self-recognition, dependent on recognising myself as male, but continually threatened by the attention needed to sustain this self-image. My liminality is also defined by the social structures that I am unable to fit into: I have learned and reproduce my desired maleness from stereotypes underpinning the gender binary. My existence in the limen is paradoxical: I am there precisely because I also acknowledge and reify sex and gender binaries.

This leads to my second contribution, which is to speak to Moulin de Souza and Parker’s (2022) call to think with trans. To create ways of organising which can better accommodate trans people, we must not only listen to trans people but recognise our range and variety. De Souza and Parker address questions posed by O’Shea’s (2018) autobiography as a non-binary trans person and how this challenges them to rethink organising outside a gender binary. My account adds to the tiny corpus of trans people authoring their own experience. But it is differently challenging to O’Shea’s because, unlike many trans people and trans allies, I continue to acknowledge my sexed body even as it conflicts with my gender identity, and find that the Supreme Court judgement more or less reflects my own experience of liminality where I am unable to align my female sexed body and male gender identity.

Thinking with my trans life would suggest different ways of organising to thinking with that of O’Shea’s, and to thinking with many other trans lives. For example, O’Shea, as a non-binary trans person seeks to undo binary categories of both sex and gender, whereas I cannot help but acknowledge my female sexed body and rely on gender binaries to sustain my male gender identity. Many trans people ask for their bodies to be read and treated in accordance with their gender identity and for the signalling of gender identity through the use of pronouns to become common practice, whereas I seek to avoid situations where I am required to disclose either my sex or my gender identity. It is therefore not for me, as a single author and trans person to propose solutions for all of us. Rather, I simply propose that ‘liveable lives’ represent what we can live with, alongside the liveable lives of others.