This girl’s life: An autoethnography

Abstract

This essay seeks to add to a growing awareness of transgender lives and narratives in management and organisational studies. It presents an often visceral and emotive autoethnographical account of the experience of being a non-binary transsexual in the United Kingdom to question whether it is possible to think gender without invoking the heterosexual matrix and being held to account by it. It also asks what may need to be done so that the abject and marginalised in society may have liveable lives rather than an otherwise unliveable life resulting from that matrix. It argues that transgender is often conflated in management research theoretically as queer or queer’s evil twin where the latter concept reduces trans lives to rigid, polarised positions in the matrix and stereotypes. The essay concludes by asking an open question, how we may organise so as to make lives liveable?