On 24th July, the Trans+ Virtual Centre of Excellence hosted the 2nd annual TVCE Symposium, in collaboration with the Birkbeck Gender and Sexuality Forum (BiGS), at Birkbeck, University of London. Themed Existing Otherwise, the symposium brought together trans+ artists, scholars, activists, and allies advocating through research across the arts, humanities, law, philosophy, medicine, and STEM, to think and create together in community.

170 people took part across parallel programmes, online and in person — a reach that speaks to just how much this work resonates. Presenters joined from across the globe, representing the UK, India, Europe, Pakistan, Africa, and the US.

About the theme

The symposium met at a time when trans+ lives are increasingly governed, scrutinised, and contested across legal, medical, and cultural domains. Rather than dwell there, Existing Otherwise turned toward generative possibilities: what does it mean to foreground ways of living, knowing, and relating that exceed, evolve, reframe, or refuse the normative structures through which legitimacy is policed and normativity enforced? How might queerness not only survive, but flourish, connect, and continually remake the world otherwise?

The day held space for the fact that trans+ experiences are not singular. Across its sessions, room was made for the uneven and intersectional conditions under which trans+ lives are lived — particularly for trans+ people from the Global Majority, and disabled trans+ communities, whose experiences of governance, exclusion, and resistance are shaped by overlapping structures of power.

Extending TVCE's 2026 thematic of Queer Acts of Hope as a future-facing gesture, Existing Otherwise centred the already-present: the lived, embodied, fugitive, and relational practices through which trans+ people continue to create and transform the conditions of the present. The programme also held space for intergenerational connection — how wisdom, learning, and celebration are fostered through engaging with trans+ elders, and how dialogue across time might sustain more expansive, connected futures.

Opening remarks

Opening the day, was Prof Sally Wheeler OBE, MRIA, FACSS, FAAL, joined by  Dr Tōmei June Bacon, Dr Sammy Holden and Prof Silvia Posocco. Bacon set the symposium in its wider context, addressing the current climate for trans+ lives in the UK and the conditions of precarity facing many trans+ academics:

"This is a climate that is actively trying to shrink the space in which some of us are allowed to exist, think, and work. But we are not going anywhere and we remain."

Bacon also used the opening to announce a new TVCE initiative: from the start of the next academic year, the TVCE website will offer members the opportunity to hold scholarly profiles on the platform, providing a point of institutional and intellectual affiliation for those without a permanent academic home.

"A scholarly profile hosted by TVCE is a small act of infrastructure, but it is also a political claim: that your intellectual existence does not depend on institutional permission, and that this community will hold space for you even when some institutions will not or perhaps cannot."

The remarks closed by framing the day itself as an enactment of its theme:

"This symposium, this room, this community — is one way of existing otherwise... No single one the same. No universal idea of transness but a complexity myriad and beautiful."

2026 Programme Archive

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As noted, the 2026 symposium took place against a backdrop in which the conditions of trans+ existence in the UK have shifted markedly. The EHRC's recent guidance continues to attempt to restrict how trans+ people navigate daily life in public, in institutions, and in workplaces — a change that, whatever its legal technicalities, has made trans+ existence more precarious, more surveilled, and more contested than it has been in years.

Disruption of this kind can feel entirely imposed: legislation shifts, and with it the safety, anxiety, and terms of everyday social interaction — contingent on place, circumstance, and community, and subject to change without consent. Existing Otherwise as a theme does not turn away from this. It holds the difficulty of the present moment alongside the recognition that trans+ and queer identities also carry radical potential through resistance to the norms currently being weaponised against them — not only disrupted, but disruptors; cultivating possibility, transformation, and world-making even under pressure.

It's in this spirit that Disruptions from Elsewhere: a transmission of hope (by Dane Eissler) was shared as part of the day's programme. Inspired by queer phenomenology, queer futurity, and science fiction, the piece takes disruption itself and turns it toward generative ends — imagining rupture not only as something done to trans+ people, but as a site from which new ways of relating, surviving, and world-making together can be imagined and practised.

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With heartfelt thanks, we want to acknowledge everyone who made this event possible.

With deepest thanks for their contributions, solidarity, support and leadership in making this possible: Dr Tōmei June Bacon, Sammy Holden, Silvia Posocco, Tanya Serisier, and Sally Wheeler.

With extra special thanks for their generosity of time and spirit: Yasmin Ali, Steven Ellis, Sophie Hope, Victoria Karlsson, and Chris Lehmann.

With sincere gratitude to Dane Eissler and Mika Gratzke for their generous support with online hosting, and to Shane Considine, Fareda El Shaeer, LJ Furner, Emily Orley, Dr Danny Scott, and Mat Thompson for so generously giving their time and skill to chairing and facilitation.

And with warm appreciation to everyone who supported this event in ways seen and unseen — including the full membership of TVCE and BiGS.