For decades now, trans activists have been struggling to make human rights law more inclusive of trans persons – from early efforts at the national level in various countries, over first successes in litigation regarding a right to legal gender recognition at the regional and global levels, to broader campaigns concerning depathologisation, access to health care, housing, education, employment, and so much more. While general tendencies can of course be made out, struggles such as these are complex and non-linear. Not only are there events commonly classified as victories or defeats (applications to human rights bodies being vindicated or rejected, say), but each will involve elements of the other to the point of making them sometimes indistinguishable: for example, even successful applications might include trade-offs in the kind of reasoning deployed to convince legal institutions of the applicants’ cause, and even judgments in favour of trans applicants will build on and reinforce societal notions of gender, and indeed humanity, which condition how reality becomes intelligible to us.