Understanding trans* asylum seekers' experiences of UK border practices

在英国，跨性别寻求庇护者被英国的庇护制度严重边缘化。作为寻求庇护者，他们面临着英国边境政策的结构性暴力，这些政策将边境监管扩展到整个英国社会，在从就业、住房到医疗等领域造成了种族化和阶级不稳定。对于跨性别寻求庇护者来说，这种暴力行为进一步加剧，不仅因为内政部（Home Office）对性别认同的庇护申请的接受率低得臭名昭著，还因为官僚主义障碍和性别错误的更大迷宫，进一步破坏了他们的安全和在英国国内社会获得支持的机会。然而，尽管跨性别寻求庇护者面临的挑战具有交叉性，但即使是同情的现有研究也很少涉及他们与英国边境系统相关的生活经历、观点和代理。这不仅是学术文献中的一个空白，而且还限制了我们对他们如何驾驭英国现有移民政策以及如何减少这些政策的排他性的理解。为了回应这一点，我的研究将通过使用多站点人种学来展望跨性别寻求庇护者在英国边境实践中的生活经历。通过这篇文章，我将进一步关注现有政策加剧跨性别寻求庇护者边缘化的具体方式，以及他们用来与英国边境系统谈判的策略。在此过程中，我将展示阶级、种族、殖民地和性别的结构是如何与英国边境作为一个跨国网站相互作用的，它产生了西方对跨性别和顺性规范的理解。通过这篇文章，我希望通过强调国内西方的跨性别概念不是一个中立的预先设定的分析对象，而是通过渗透到英国国内社会的边境实践来积极地执行和复制，从而为欧洲跨性别研究的非殖民化做出贡献。在这篇文章中，我还将为国际关系中关于边界作为社会产生的现象的更广泛的理论辩论做出贡献，通过以超越国内政治与国际政治之间传统区别的方式，强调顺性规范在构成边界实践中的作用。在方法上，我将进行多地点人种志研究，包括对相关政策文件的初步批判性话语分析，对支持跨性别寻求庇护者的组织进行深入的参与者观察，以及对跨性别寻求庇护者和参与者观察期间确定的关键政策制定者进行半结构化访谈。通过这一点，我希望有助于更广泛的关于跨性和顺规范性的殖民生产以及国际政治中的国内/国际区别的理论辩论。除此之外，我还将为地方和国家层面的政策参与者提供明确的政策建议，以减少跨性别寻求庇护者的边缘化，并希望将学术和政策讨论转向与跨性别寻求庇护者进行讨论，而不是讨论跨性别寻求庇护者。

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 theUK'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 seekersand 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.