Paper short abstract:

Drawing on fieldwork conducted with transgender activists, researchers and clinicians caught up in the front lines of the so-called ‘TERF wars’, I reflect on the often exhausting, tedious and perplexing process of researching the anti-transgender backlash in the UK as a transgender researcher.

Paper long abstract:

Over the past years, anti-transgender sentiment has significantly intensified in Britain, reflected in an increasingly hostile policy environment and a steady manufacturing of ‘transgender moral panics’ (Hines 2020) by various actors with political, cultural and economic power. These debates have been affectively structured and shaped by organizations and individuals often described as ‘TERFs’, or trans-exclusionary radical feminists, who have unsettled liberal notions of facts and truth through alternative affective attachments to politics. In this presentation, I reflect on the often exhausting, tedious and perplexing process of researching the anti-transgender backlash in the UK as a transgender researcher. Drawing on fieldwork conducted with transgender activists, researchers and clinicians caught up in the front lines of the so-called ‘TERF wars’ (Pearce, Vincent and Erikainen 2020), I interrogate how affect circulates in these research encounters in ways that exceed the logic of analytic categorization, and its subsequent capacity to redirect the research process. I argue the very sense of ‘stuckness’ that often characterizes researchers’ attempts (including my own) to reconcile the tensions between political, intellectual and personal commitments and ethics on the field, can also open up a potentiality for moving differently.