Gay, lesbian, and trans rights movements had similar social, cultural, and political goals, the latter of which included changing laws and policies in order to gain new rights, benefits, and protections from harm, goals which are sought both in the civil and political spheres. The AIDS epidemic in the 1980s marked a new era for gay political activism and the emergence of lesbian direct action groups, such as Lesbian Avengers (1992). In the UK, Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1986, which banned mention of homosexuality in schools, sharpened the need for political organising and resistance. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the Gender Recognition Act (2004) in the UK restored some of the rights lost to trans people in the previous century. This chapter explores the relationship between late twentieth-century literature and sexual rights. It asks what a book can do to advance the political case for sexual rights, as well as showing how a book might provide a much-needed textual space for self-imagining and self-determination, for the sexual or gender minority subject literally written out of the socio-cultural and political mainstream.

Chapter 4 analyses recent writing by and about trans people with a twofold aim: to examine how they challenge binary thinking, and to explore their understanding of how gender identity interacts with and is circumscribed by heteropatriarchal capitalist institutions and norms. I examine how Juliet Jacques’ Trans: A Memoir (2015) and ‘Weekend in Brighton’ (2015), Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015), and Paul Preciado’s Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (2013) abandon the tradition within earlier trans life-writing of focusing upon transition as the dramatic apex of the narrative. In different manners, all of these writers are arguing for an expansion of the term ‘trans’. In the case of Nelson and Preciado this extends, controversially, to name other states of flux, such as the pregnant female body or the flow of information and data. This chapter examines these audacious attempts to both naturalise and expand ‘trans’, as well as Jacques’s dedramatizing prose, arguing that these writers testify to a new twenty-first-century understanding of gender identity from which feminism, social behaviour, and societal organisation can be reappraised.