The transfeminist judgments project is a new project that builds on the achievements of past rewritten judgments projects that have shone a light on the blind spots and erasures of traditional justice systems. A foundational instance was the UK Feminist Judgments Project – a collaborative initiative in which feminist legal scholars revisited significant UK cases and produced rewritten judgments informed by feminist perspectives. The project aimed not only to critique judicial decisions from the external perspective of legal scholarship but, also, to explore how feminist reasoning could be applied within the constraints of legal decision-making. That project culminated in a collection of 23 feminist judgments (in some instances accompanied by commentaries) published in 2010, and sparked an ongoing movement of similar projects around the world and across a variety of specific practice areas, resulting in a number of subsequent similar publications, including a queer judgments project. We aim to apply a comparable method in a transfeminist mode, and we invite expressions of interest in contributing.

For us, ‘transfeminism’ means the formation of political commitments that is constituted at the intersection of two sets of concerns. As feminists we are concerned to highlight the role of gender in the structuring of social hierarchy/oppression, and as transfeminists we are equally concerned to foreground the role of gender modality i.e. the different relationships that people have with their assigned/legal sex. We seek in addition to incorporate into our transfeminism a recognition that all axes of structural oppression and marginalisation, including in particular race and disability, are co-constitutive in the role that they play in structuring relations of power in society. And at the same time we are conscious that transmisogyny is a specific oppressive formation with its own structure and history. In deploying the concept of transfeminism we aim to draw upon, and develop as a mode of engagement with case law, the work of authors and organisers such as Sandy Stone, Emi Koyama, Julia Serano, Miss Major, Dean Spade, Susan Stryker, Talia Bhatt, Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift.

Despite the ‘rewritten judgments’ methodology, we reject any suggestion that trans liberation can be achieved by the insertion of transfeminist thinking into judicial reasoning. As we embark on this project, reactionary bioessentialist and transeliminationist lawfare under a liberal feminist banner is making sweeping inroads into existing trans rights with the complicity and support of a transphobic judiciary – a judiciary willing to compromise the purported integrity of the courts and make a mockery of liberal-legal ideals by excluding trans voices from proceedings that concern trans rights, by permitting injustice and transmisogynist violence to arise from procedural stitch-ups, and by shoehorning what had previously been understood to be social media pseudolaw into their decisions even at the very highest appellate level. That being the context, rather than looking forward to law being administered in accordance with increasingly enlightened thinking, we wait for the next blow to be delivered; for the next success in the faux-feminist project of mandating us out of existence.

We therefore invite contributions that occupy but also simultaneously resist the traditions, presuppositions and temporalities of the rewritten judgments method, in whatever creative ways appear to potential contributors to be appropriate to these times of anti-rights revanchism. Contributors are invited to consider whether the revolutionary fact of ongoing trans existence, a fact that cissexist judges find to be ontologically intolerable, can be introduced into a counterfactual or re-imagined version of a case otherwise than by (or in addition to) the adoption of transfeminist principles by a member of an appellate tribunal. (For example what if there had been trans evidence or transfeminist submissions in one of the decisions about us taken without us? What if one of the judges who have done such harm to us were held accountable?)

We intend the scope of the collection to be global rather than restricted to any particular jurisdiction, although we anticipate outputs to be weighted towards the epicentre of the anti-trans lawfare of recent years i.e. the UK. We would welcome contributions from people working within a transfeminist framework outside formal legal scholarship or practice. We expect the collection to take on the ‘greatest hits’ of anti-trans judicial lawmaking e.g. Corbett and FWS, but would also very much welcome re-imagined versions of less well-known cases. As at the date of this call there has been no process of drawing up a list of cases or provisionally allocating cases to existing participants in the project, so all potential cases are up for grabs.

If you would like to participate, please email transfeministjudgments@gmail.com by 31 January 2027 with:

• Your details and a brief biographical note including, if you like, a statement of your positionality vis-à-vis an explicitly transfeminist project
• A choice of preferred case and an abstract of how you propose to treat it
• A selection of other relevant cases you would be willing to have allocated to you in the event that your first choice of case is allocated to another contributor
• Any other comments (e.g. suggestions of other cases we should cover or approaches that you would like to see adopted among the contributions)

Carolynn Gray (University of the West of Scotland)

Clair Quentin (Loughborough University)

Danielle Watson (University of Leicester)

Kay Crosby (Newcastle University)

River Baars (SOAS)

14 November 2026