Understanding trans* asylum seekers' experiences of UK border practices

Trans* asylum seekers in the UK are acutely marginalized by the UK's asylum system. As asylum seekers they face the structural violence of UK border policies that extend border policing throughout UK society in ways that create racialised and class precarity in areas from employment, and housing to healthcare. For trans* asylum seekers this violence is further exacerbated not only by the notoriously low rate at which gender identity asylum claims are accepted by the Home Office but by a wider maze of bureaucratic hurdles and misgendering that further undermine their safety and access to support in domestic British society. Yet, despite the intersectional nature of the challenges trans* asylum seekers face, even sympathetic existing research does little to engage with their lived experiences, perspectives and agency in relation to the UK border system. This is not only a gap in the academic literature but also limits our understanding of how they navigate the
UK's existing migration policies and how these might be made less exclusionary.
In response to this, my research will foreground trans* asylum seekers lived experiences of UK border practices through use of multi-sited ethnography. Through this I will both draw further attention to the specific ways existing policies exacerbate trans* Asylum seekers' marginalization and the strategies they use to negotiate the UK border system.
In doing this I will show how structures of class, race, coloniality and gender interact with the UK border as a transnational site that produces particularly western understandings of transness and cis-normativity. Through this I hope to contribute to the task of decolonizing European trans studies by highlighting the ways domestic western conceptualizations of transness are not a neutral pregiven object of analysis but rather actively enforced and reproduced through border practices which permeate domestic UK society. In this I will also contribute to wider theoretical debates in International Relations on borders as socially produced phenomena by foregrounding the role of cis-normativity in constituting border practices in ways that transcend the conventional distinction between domestic and international politics. Methodologically I will perform a multi-sited ethnography comprised of initial critical discourse analysis of relevant policy documents, embedded participant observation with organizations that support trans* asylum seekers
and semi-structured interviews with trans* asylum seekers and key policy makers identified during the participant observation.
Through this I hope contribute to wider theoretical debates on the colonial production of transness sand cis-normativity and the domestic/international distinction in International politics. Beyond this I will also provide clear policy recommendations for local and national level policy actors on reducing their marginalization trans* asylum seekers and hope to contribute to shifting academic and policy discussions to being with rather than about trans asylum seekers.