8

Trans Networking in the

European Vortex: Between
Advocacy and Grassroots Politics
Carsten Balzer and Jan Simon Hutta

Introduction

Since the 2000s, a plethora of local, regional, and transnational trans

movements, networks, and organizations have emerged in, and across,
different parts of the world (Balzer and Hutta 2012). European trans
activism formed an integral part in these wider processes, which is exem-
plified by the founding of the Transgender Europe (TGEU) network in
2005. Currently counting 74 member organizations in 35 countries in
Europe and Central Asia, as well as more than 120 individual members
from Europe and beyond,1 TGEU is the largest regional network of its
kind and viewed as the principal voice of trans activism at the European
scale. Its expansion is the result of transnational grassroots networking,
facilitated by – and increasingly oriented toward – the European arena of
institutional politics and legislation ensuing from the so-called political
integration through the European Union (EU) and Council of Europe
(CoE).
Similarly to ILGA-Europe, TGEU has developed an organizational
structure targeted toward professional advocacy. Since 2008, TGEU has
oriented itself strongly toward advocacy at the levels of the EU, the CoE,
and (to a lesser extent) the Organization for Security and Cooperation in
Europe (OSCE) as well as certain UN bodies (World Health Organization,
WHO, Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human
Rights, OHCHR). However, from its inception TGEU has simultaneously
cultivated a pronounced grassroots politics of community engagement.
Conceived in the spirit of a network of independent groups and indi-
viduals joining forces and offering mutual support, its activities have

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© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2014
172 Carsten Balzer and Jan Simon Hutta

revolved not only around European-scale equality politics and its national
implementation, but also around community building, the creation of
alternative publics and actions around issues raised by TGEU’s members.
This has impacted TGEU’s campaigns, decision-making procedures, as
well as forms of collaboration.
“Europe” has played a significant role at both the institutional and
the grassroots levels, opening up political opportunities and providing
a set of guiding discourses. Simultaneously, politics reaching beyond
Europe has marked TGEU’s grassroots dimension of networking. This is
evident by its strong engagement in international campaigns, such as
the International Transgender Day of Remembrance and the Stop Trans
Pathologization campaign. Furthermore, the inclusion of members from
non-CoE countries and strong collaborations across other world regions,
especially with TGEU’s Transrespect versus Transphobia Worldwide
research project, exemplify the organization’s reach.
Both European-scale advocacy and European/Europe-and-beyond
networking have been integral to TGEU, coming together in mutually
nurturing as well as conflicting ways at different periods of its develop-
ment. Their coming together has enabled TGEU to become a hybrid of
advocacy and community-oriented politics, of centralized representa-
tion and grassroots networking, of unified articulation and multi-sited
debate. We argue that Europe has played different roles with respect to
institutional advocacy and grassroots networking, and that these differ-
ences have come together in both synergistic and conflicting ways,
depending on particular constellations in TGEU’s history.
In the first part of this chapter, we thus retrace TGEU’s development as
a hybrid grassroots-advocacy organization in order to discuss some ways
in which the scale of Europe has affected trans activism. We propose
TGEU’s development can best be understood in terms of a dynamic
re-composition that occurred under the suction of what we term the
“European vortex” and under the impact of an ongoing transnational
community networking. With the term “European vortex,” we refer to
the discursive and political arrangements that operate on institutional
levels such as EU, CoE, OSCE, or European Court of Human Rights. These
arrangements have opened windows of opportunity that both acceler-
ated and channeled, de- and re-territorialized trans activism. They can
be viewed as a vortex – or a set of vortices – that has given trans activism
new momentum and around which it has continued to revolve.
After providing an overview of TGEU’s development as hybrid grass-
roots-advocacy network, the second section investigates how embracing
advocacy, professionalization, and capacity building fostered by