Caterina Nirta

There is a significant absence of theoretical work directed at contextualising and understanding trans pregnancy and its implications for the body, the law, ethics, and politics. This aggravates the challenges we highlight in this chapter, contributing to what we refer to as the hyper/in-visibility of trans pregnancy. We analyse these degrees of visibility through the concepts of representation and recognition, focussing on the gendered language of the medical setting in the United Kingdom. Whilst we expect that much of our analysis will be relevant and applicable beyond this setting, it is the traditional Western role assumptions that are being challenged. We argue for the need to employ gender-modality terms for the sake of inclusivity, and advocate for a standpoint methodology, to be able to accommodate the complexities of the hyper/in-visibility of trans pregnancy.

While the presence of monsters in popular culture is ever-increasing, their use as an explicit or implicit category to frame, stigmatise, and demonise the other is seemingly on the rise. At the same time, academic interest for monsters is ever-growing. Usually, monstrosity is understood as a category that emerges to signal a transgression to a given order; this approach has led to the demystification of the insidious characterisations of the (racial, sexual, physical) other as monstrous. While this effort has been necessary, its collateral effects have reduced the monstrous to a mere (socio-cultural) construction of the other: a dialectical framing that de facto deprives monstrosity from any reality. 'Monstrous Ontologies: Politics, Ethics, Materiality' proffers the necessity of challenging these monstrous otherings and their perverse socio-political effects, whilst also asserting that the monstrous is not simply an epistemological construct, but that it has an ontological reality. There is a profound difference between monsters and monstrosity. While the former is an often sterile political and social simplification, the end-product of rhetorical and biopolitical apparatuses; the latter may be understood as a dimension that nurtures the un-definable, that is, that shows the limits of these apparatuses by embodying their material excess: not a 'cultural frame', but the limit to the very mechanism of 'framing'. The monstrous expresses the combining, hybridising, becoming, and creative potential of socio-natural life, albeit colouring this powerful vitalism with the dark hue of a fearful, disgusting, and ultimately indigestible reality that cannot simply be embraced with multicultural naivety. As such, it forces us towards radically changing not the categories, but the very mechanisms of categorisation through which reality is framed and acted upon. Here lies the profound ethical dimension that monstrosity forces us to acknowledge; here lies its profoundly political potential, one that cannot be unfolded by merely deconstructing monstrosity, and rather requires to engage with its uncomfortable, appalling, and revealing materiality. This book will appeal to postgraduate students, PostDocs, and academics alike in the fields of philosophy, critical theory, humanities, sociology and social theory, criminology, human geography, and critical legal theory.

It is often assumed that only cis women experience pregnancy. This fails to account for the trans and nonbinary people who are and have been pregnant, and therefore presents a partial picture of what pregnancy is, how pregnancy is experienced, and the conceptual and normative issues that surround having a pregnancy. In this article we argue for rethinking pregnancy and re-envisioning conceptual, social, medical, and legal approaches to pregnant persons by focussing on trans experiences, thereby trans/forming pregnancy. We highlight the ‘genderfication’ that permeates dominant formulations of pregnancy, which often implicitly or explicitly endorse a biological essentialism that takes birth-giving as necessary and sufficient for motherhood. We look in depth at the United Kingdom, but take our analysis to have far wider applicability and implications. Our aim is to trans/form philosophical approaches to gender and reproduction and contribute to practical guidance built from empirical and theoretical research, looking for positive outcomes for trans individuals who experience pregnancy. We take trans pregnancy seriously, on its own terms, arguing that doing so is both a theoretical and ethical imperative.

This article considers the model of recognition in the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (GRA) and, through a critique of the value of stability pursued through this legislation, argues that recognition as a model is incompatible with the variety of experiences of non-binary trans-identified individuals. The article then moves on to analyse self-declaration, part of the proposed reform recently dismissed by the Government. While self-declaration contains provisions that would minimise the length of the process of recognition as well as the level of intrusiveness and stigma associated with it, this analysis highlights some fundamental theoretical concerns with its over-reliance on the strict dialectical logics on recognition and its structural inability to account for and respond to the challenges posed by non-binary trans individuals.

The built environment and the organisation of public spaces reflect the normative notions of male and female. Public toilets, amongst other widely common public spaces, underline these two opposing concepts and challenge the presence of transgender. Within the boundaries of public toilets, transgender and gender non-conforming individuals become a crucial point of debate, scrutiny and controversy. Analysing the politics of such gender-segregated space, this article explores the notion of uniformity and challenges the idea of single-ness as the absolute expression of the self.