This essay examines how a liminal state of uncertainty and disorientation shapes the trajectory of a trans-advocacy organisation in contemporary China. By situating the group’s current struggles within the tension between global humanitarianism and China’s ambivalent institutional support for trans people, it argues that this situation produces a unique structure of feeling that can be called ‘fragile optimism’. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the author shows how the members of this organisation cultivate fragile optimism as an affective orientation to navigate political and cultural constraints.