The concept of self-determination has a lengthy scholarly history. The concept has motivated a range of bioethical concerns; as such, the interpretations and thus the effects that result from utilizing the concept vary. This book considers key personal, political and pedagogical approaches to trans, sex/gender expansive and intersex people in various policy fields such as sex/gender recognition legislation, medical diagnoses, medical interventions and educational policies. This book also contemplates how self-determination relates to sex/gender productions, transitions and expressions, and how they correspond to current debates around binary sex/gender embodiment. I will consider throughout how diverse cultural practices and systems may still be (de)limiting trans, sex/gender expansive and intersex trajectories to self-determination. These are not dead ends though but produce new virtualities. This is because trans people are always becoming-trans, sex/gender expansive people are always becoming-sex/gender expansive and intersex people are always becoming intersex-people. This is the same for cis people too, who are always becoming-cis people. The relevant qualities that everybody has are not inherent, archetypal or phylogenetic but are desired in specific assemblages of becominghuman and/or becoming-social (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004).

We will ask if (self-)determining sex/gender is an effect of desire connected to coercive effects, and what this looks like. We will explore how legal, medical and pedagogical policies have more in common with each other than we may think and ask does each of these policy areas coproduce and affect human and non-human bodies? The basic response from a new materialist perspective, which I draw on throughout, must be ‘of course’. Affect, according to Siegworth and Gregg (2010: 1), ‘is found in those intensities that pass body to body (human and nonhuman), in those resonances that circulate about, between and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds’. Affect is the ability to affect and be affected and corresponds to the passage from one experiential state to another (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004). Medico-legal, bioethical and pedagogical bodies (human and non-human) stick together in particular ways, or, in new materialist terms, assemble through them in multiple, interconnecting and affecting ways.