Exploring Young Trans and Non-binary People’s Strategies and Spaces for Navigating Marginality in the United Kingdom: A Novel Resilience, Resistance, and Restoration Framework

Amid recent, unprecedented sociopolitical scrutiny and hypervisibility of young trans people in the United Kingdom, this article considers how trans youth develop individual and collective mechanisms, spaces, and embodied practices of resilience, resistance, and restoration (RRR) in response to social, spatial, and structural marginalization. I ask: What are the some of the key RRR strategies created and drawn on by UK trans youth in their everyday lives? How do these respond to everyday “out-of-placeness” (Todd 2024) and exhaustion (Todd 2023a)? And what significance do they hold in young trans people’s everyday lives, encounters, and imagined futures? Drawing from participatory research, I demonstrate young trans people’s agency in forging spaces and strategies through which to thrive, resist cisnormativity, and foster trans liberation. I discuss three modes of RRR: crafting affective and emotional connections to materialities for protection and shielding; escaping into more inclusive spaces (real or imagined) and embodied potentials; and immersing in trans and queer “safe spaces” as landscapes of RRR. These “safe spaces” nurture empowering affective atmospheres and bodily conditions, materially transforming young trans people’s immediate and long-term realities. Significantly, RRR emerges as a transferable intersectional framework for analyzing how individuals and communities continually develop co-constitutive strategies and spaces responsive to marginalizing conditions.