In How We Make Each Other (Zurn 2025), the author Perry Zurn offers strategies for resisting anti-trans landscapes. Such landscapes, whilst not new, are being emboldened through far-right extremism (Martino and Kuhl 2024, p. 601) and authoritarianism (Nteta et al. 2025). The text provides approaches for addressing trans exclusion and erasure through moving beyond policy-based approaches for trans inclusion in institutional settings, to focus on what gets overlooked in trans policy work (p. 15). The stuff of trans life that DEI policy work disregards includes objects (like dust and thread) and experiences (like fatigue), which can challenge institutional environments where trans people are pushed to the periphery. In this article, I provide an overview of Zurn's text, the methodology underpinning it and its unique contribution to the literature. I also explore how the text might be improved, including through a deeper examination of the aspiration of ‘belonging’ in trans inclusion work, and attunement to labour politics in trans advocacy. Overall, Zurn's book makes an exciting contribution to diversity studies, trans studies, and policy studies. This occurs through its focus on the textured reality and nuances of trans advocacy that are occluded from official policy narratives. The book is split into three sections, commencing with a critique of trans inclusion policy work, and zeroing in on the role trans histories, resistance and hope play in challenging cisnormativity. Zurn studies trans histories, resistance and hope through qualitative and archival research at five colleges in the United States, which are known for their progressive trans inclusion work. The author focuses each chapter on a seemingly mundane, everyday object, or experience of significance to trans activism. This precipitates chapter titles like ‘dust’, ‘threads,’ and ‘fatigue.’ As opposed to focusing on DEI policy work, Zurn instead focuses on the trans and resistant nature of objects like ‘thread’ and ‘dust’ in the colleges. For instance, the author examines the trans nature of thread as it appears in the university archives (e.g., in the contexts of clothes swaps and drag balls). Thread can be read as trans given the proliferation of threads in the fraying of normative gender expectations, and in its capacity to bind together and fashion new selves (p. 141). In the chapter ‘dust’, Zurn explores the resistant and trans nature of dust, recognising its boundary-crossing embodiment of matter from multiple sources, including plants, animals, and minerals (p. 85). Here, Zurn also conceptualises trans identities as the dusty underside of the gender binary, which society attempts to erase, but cannot (pp. 85–86). Notably, through examining the role of dust and thread in trans lives and advocacy, Zurn redirects attention to that which is left out of trans inclusion policy scripts. The focus on mundane objects like dust and thread as actors that defy cisnormative expectations also challenges the human-centrism that can orient DEI policy work. The focus on the trans nature of such objects additionally embodies Zurn's expansive understanding of ‘trans’, which moves beyond the human world and identity, to inter alia, examine how objects, human animals and more are inseparable from, and make, one another in cisnormative institutional environments (e.g., see pp. 84–85). Methodologically, Zurn refocuses attention away from the primacy of DEI policy work through his engagement with trans poetics. Trans poetics describes the way in which trans people, and people who disrupt normative gender expectations, construct themselves by and with each other (p. 12). It also encompasses how these parties make sense of their reality and the communities they are a part of, how they create stories, how they survive in a cisnormative world, and their visions for more just trans futures (p. 12). The value of engaging trans poetics is it provides attunements to things that trans inclusive policy work can leave out—for instance, relationships, art making, trans creativity, failure, wisdom and the quotidian in trans lives (pp. 13, 49). Policy work can also construct trans exclusion and people as problems that must be fixed (Zurn 2025, p. 22). Yet, the book shows how the richness and nuance of trans lives cannot be reduced to the binary of a problem and solution (p. 23). Zurn's work contributes to the body of literature that moves beyond DEI policy-based approaches to examining minoritised experiences and addressing oppression. Within this body of work, Sara Ahmed, for instance, highlights that anti-racism policies can become ‘non-performatives’ in academic environments, given the way they fail to do the work they claim to- that is, create more racially equitable environments (Ahmed 2012, pp. 114, 116, 117). Thus, her hope for more racially just futures does not lie in DEI policy scripts. In Trans in College: Transgender Students’ Strategies for Navigating Campus Life (Nicolazzo 2017, p. 16), the author, in a similar fashion to Zurn, refuses to simply understand trans experiences as ‘problems’ to be solved (see Zurn 2025, p. 22). Instead, the author, Z Nicolazzo (2017, p. 16), highlights the role of trans resilience in navigating exclusionary colleges. The works differ in that, unlike Zurn's larger-scale study, Nicolazzo's text does not feature the same sustained examination of mundane objects and their significance to trans activism. Another text that is similar to Zurn's, which engages trans poetics over policy framings, is the book Troubling the Line: trans and genderqueer poetry and poetics (Tolbert and Peterson 2013). This text uses trans poetics to examine trans activism, embodiment and identity. However, Zurn's text differs in its sustained qualitative examination of college campuses, and explicit examination of the undercurrents beneath trans inclusion policy work. While drawing on the aforementioned texts in his exploration of trans advocacy beyond policy initiatives, Zurn's approaches and subject matter make his text a unique contribution to the literature. While Zurn's book highlights the importance of moving beyond trans inclusion policy to address oppressive contexts, there were moments where the author could have deepened his analysis. This included in his study of activist efforts to make college bathrooms more trans inclusive. Whilst bathroom advocacy work by trans communities often focuses on equity for the end users (like trans people), the labour politics and conditions faced by people tasked with cleaning the bathrooms are often forgotten (e.g., Bhakta et al. 2022, p. 2). This issue surfaced in Zurn's text. Recognising equity issues facing all who move through bathroom environments- including workers who clean these spaces- could have deepened the analysis of labour, race and class politics imbricated with the trans activist work that Zurn examines. Additionally, it would have been productive for Zurn to more thoroughly interrogate the aspiration of ‘belonging’ in the trans advocacy work that exists beyond policy scripts. Throughout, Zurn often frames trans belonging as a way to navigate trans experiences of being pushed to the edges of institutions (e.g., pp. 17, 40, 43, 59, 141). Notably, belonging has become a buzzword in the diversity and inclusion space, including in job ads for diversity practitioners, where belonging is considered by some diversity practitioners to provide a higher standard of acceptance to ‘inclusion’ (Gillard 2024, pp. 68–70). This is through its focus on ensuring people feel more embedded and at home in the institution. Given the settler colonial context of the United States, examining what it means for settlers to aspire to belonging on stolen land (see also Moreton-Robinson 2003), would have facilitated a deeper interrogation of the way settler trans identities and experiences are implicated in settler colonial projects. The productive potentiality of ‘(non)belonging’ to space, explored by scholar Carolyn D'Cruz, might also have been employed to explore how (non)belonging can productively foster an estrangement from nation-building projects that one may be situated within (D'Cruz 2021), which in Zurn's case, is the United States. Rather than (non)belonging simply being a negative thing for minoritised communities, D'Cruz explains it can hold positive potential for challenging the violence of nation-building projects, and the implication of these projects in communities’ identity construction. Overall, Zurn's mobilisation of trans poetics contributes to understanding trans resistance and hopes in institutions that cannot be captured by DEI policy scripts. While the analysis could have been deepened with respect to labour politics and interrogating the notion of belonging in trans advocacy, Zurn's text powerfully highlights the nuances and texture of trans activism in a context of an anti-trans backlash (Martino and Kuhl 2024, p. 599), where trans experiences and labour are daily being devalued and erased. Rory Gillard: formal analysis, conceptualisation, writing – original draft. The author declares no conflicts of interest.
Rory Gillard (Thu,) studied this question.