Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

Anti-trans and anti-gender narratives have become increasingly prevalent in social, political and legal landscapes worldwide. From high-profile court rulings to disputes over gender-segregated activities and spaces emerge urgent questions of how gender is recognised, policed and regulated in everyday life beyond formal law.

This book introduces the novel concept of sensory surveillance to examine how gender is made and monitored in the everyday. Intervening into the current anti-trans moment, it analyses how seeing, hearing, smelling, and touching feature in the production and maintenance of gender, and thus argues that surveillance is not only technological but also deeply social.

Refusing rights-based frameworks, the book proposes a collective sensory trans politics as a means of resistance – and as a way of making life more liveable.