Navigating transprejudice: Chinese transgender students’ experiences of sexuality education in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

Prior publications on sexuality education experiences have often focused on cisgender students. Few have studied transgender students’ experiences, particularly in East Asia, and none have addressed these issues in the Hong Kong Chinese context, where transgender human rights are a hotly debated issue, and injustice towards trans youth persists. Using the concepts of transprejudice and rights-based sexuality education, this paper identifies the non-inclusive and inclusive sexuality education experiences of Chinese transgender students as reported in data from qualitative interviews with eight trans students aged 16–20 years from secondary schools and a community college. We identified the following themes: 1) Left Out – being omitted and silenced; 2) Terrified and Distressed – being misgendered and misinformed; 3) Outraged – being pathologised and bullied; 4) Empowered: connecting trans-Inclusive and rights-based education; 5) Affirmed and Supported – engaging in trans-inclusive dialogue. The paper argues that rights-based gender diversity content needs to be included in the sexuality education curriculum to reduce transgender students’ feelings of marginalisation. It also speaks to the need for advocacy for non-prejudiced and inclusive sexuality education in Hong Kong.

KEYWORDS:

• Chinese transgender students
• transprejudice
• rights-based sexuality education
• gender minority stress
• school sexuality education

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to informants for their trust, honesty and openness during the study. Special thanks go to Damon Ho who provided translation and logistic support for the study. Thanks also go to Liam and Ming for providing peer debriefing guidance and community outreach support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Trans and transgender are here used as umbrella terms to define individuals whose ‘gender identity, gender expression, and/or behavior are different from that typically associated with the sex they were assigned at birth’ (Tebbe and Moradi 2016, 520). The word ‘trans’ is used in this article to include both those who self-identify with nonbinary or fluid gender identities, such as genderqueer and gender-fluid, and/or binary gender identities, such as trans boy/man, and trans woman/girl (Tebbe and Moradi 2016).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Grant Council Hong Kong [18613418]; The Education University of Hong Kong IRG [3832].