Immigration Article of the Day: Transitional Citizenship by Jayesh Rathod
Transitional Citizenship by Jayesh Rathod
Abstract
In recent years, transgender U.S. citizens have been the target of state and federal policies that restrict access to gender-affirming care, limit legal recognition, and outlaw ordinary expressions of gender identity. These measures coincide with rising social hostility and harm, including workplace discrimination, public intimidation, and disproportionate rates of violent victimization. Together, these conditions have eroded trust in both state and society, prompting many trans people to question their long-term safety in the United States and, for some, to consider relocation abroad.
Drawing on forty qualitative interviews with trans individuals who are contemplating or have undertaken emigration, this Article examines how these citizens understand and negotiate their relationship to U.S. citizenship. The data reveal five recurring conceptions of citizenship found in the existing literature-communitarian, liberal, cosmopolitan or postcolonial, instrumental, and accident-of-birth. While each reflects a distinct logic of membership, interviewees often moved among multiple frames, engaged selectively with citizenship, or expressed contradictory feelings and evolving views about their status. These patterns expose the limits of existing citizenship frameworks, which fail to fully capture how belonging is adjusted and redefined amid exclusion.
To address this gap, the Article introduces the concept of transitional citizenship to describe how individuals reconfigure their ties to the state when hostility and marginalization compel withdrawal. Through this lens, citizenship emerges not as a fixed legal status but as a dynamic practice of recalibration. Drawing on queer theoretical perspectives, the Article further illuminates this concept by tracing how individuals inhabit and renegotiate their connections to structures and institutions that no longer offer protection. The Article also identifies implications for constitutional and administrative law, showing how transitional citizenship complicates legal assumptions about allegiance, belonging, and formal membership.
