Trans-asylum: sanctioning vulnerability and gender identity across the frontier

Abstract

ABSTRACT While legal and humanitarian discourses underscore Central American trans refugees’ vulnerabilities, individuals are often unable to access rights and protection. In this article, I address this seeming paradox by analyzing how trans asylum seekers navigate and at times contest vulnerability discourses framing deservingness of asylum. Based on interview data and longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork, I discuss continuities of trans asylum seekers’ experiences in humanitarian spaces and punitive spaces as they encounter policies, institutions and actors that purport to protect them. I argue that, however ineffective, humanitarian discourses and legal provisions impact the formation and transformation of trans asylum seekers’ bodies. Indeed, they succeed in sanctioning transness, in the sense of both permitting it authoritatively and punishing it. I analyze these effects through the lens of “legal violence” – i.e. the direct, structural and symbolic violence that the law authorizes and legitimates, concluding that trans experiences illuminate the broader violence of asylum.