Despite Belgium’s relatively progressive legal framework for transgender rights, the country has not been immune to the growing wave of attacks on trans people’s lives and rights (Verlooy, 2025). These attacks occur against the backdrop of climate crises, housing crises, and the rise of the far right across Europe, drawing on legacies of colonialism, sexism, and cisness (Roggeband et al, 2025; Heaney, 2024). Yet, there is limited research on how trans people navigate these crises and legacies, particularly in relation to activism aimed at creating liveable spaces for themselves, their trans and queer communities and other marginalized groups. Existing scholarship on trans people’s engagement with activism often focuses on digital activism (e.g. Erlick, 2018; Tortajada et al, 2021) or subsumes it under the banner of LGBTQ+ and/or queer activism. This article wants to sculpt a space for examining trans people’s engagement with diverse forms of activism. We ask what is specifically ‘trans’ about trans people’s activism, suggesting that ‘trans’ – as a movement across and beyond boundaries – can carve a pathway to liberation (Stryker et al., 2008). Marquis Bey (2021: 199) understands transness “as a way of doing things with (our) subjectivity that engenders different ways of making and breaking sociality” as different, but not dissimilar, from queerness and transgender identities. This article wants to retrace the role of transness in activism done by trans people. Drawing on 19 interviews with trans people in Belgium involved in varied activist practices, including protests, care work, and education, we identify the different forms of activism they practice and we analyze how they are ‘transing’ activism toward liberation.
