Intimate equality and transparent selves: Legalising transgender marriage in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

In May 2013, the Court of Final Appeal in Hong Kong ruled in favour of granting transgender individuals the right to marry in their post-transition gender rather than their biological sex at birth. This landmark judgment, W v Registrar of Marriages, has been considered by many as an important milestone in the LGBT rights movement in Sinophone communities. In scrutinising both the majority and dissenting statements, a critical analysis of the parameters of queerness in this ruling shows that the liberal framing of transgender marriage rights engenders what I call ‘the polite residuals of heteronormativity’, which figures the advancement of queer interest by perpetuating certain implicit forms of gender and sexual oppression. Moreover, these residuals – concealed within a broader outlook of political progressiveness – were conditional upon a rhetoric of imperial citationality that renders giant global superpowers, especially Britain and China, as the normative frames of legal authorisation.

Acknowledgement

Earlier versions of this essay were aired variously at the ‘Masculinities, Modernity and Heteronormativity in the UK and South China’ symposium at the University of York, the ‘Homophobia Rewritten: New Literary and Cultural Perspectives on Violence and Sexuality’ symposium at Birkbeck, University of London, the 2015 Association for Asian Studies-in-Asia Conference in Taipei, the ‘Sinologissa’ workshop at National Chung Hsing University and the 2016 Modern Language Association Convention. Questions and comments from the audiences have enabled me to clarify specific points. I thank the journal’s two anonymous readers for their valuable feedback on an earlier version of this essay. I am immensely indebted to Alvin K. Wong for stimulating dialogues on queering regionalism and innovative conceptualisations of queer Asia.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Howard Chiang is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Waterloo. He is the editor of Transgender China (2012), Queer Sinophone Cultures (2013, with Ari Larissa Heinrich), Psychiatry and Chinese History (2014), Historical Epistemology and the Making of Modern Chinese Medicine (2015), and Perverse Taiwan (2016, with Yin Wang).

Notes

1 For an analysis of how wider transphobic social structures disenfranchise transgender persons through multiple forms of ‘imprisonment’, including gender and sexual essentialism, see Erni (2013).

2 For an excellent treatment of this intricate relation through the lens of queer cultural production in postcolonial Hong Kong, see Leung (2008). As cultural studies scholars such as Leung have already begun to give this realm of theoretical critique its due, this essay supplements their effort by utilising legal history and case studies to explore the overlapping social ramifications of queer activism and trans recognition, especially in transnational Sinophone contexts. For an overview of the transgender movement in Hong Kong, see Cheung (2012).

3 I borrow the descriptor ‘polite’ from Takashi Fujitani’s comparative work on the ‘polite racism’ of the Japanese and Americans in the context of the Asia–Pacific War (2011).

4 On the medical history of transsexuality, see Hausman 1995; Meyerowitz 2002; Najmabadi 2013.

5 For an analysis of the European Court of Human Rights’ jurisprudence in respect of sexual orientation, see Johnson (2012).

6 Petersen has observed that due to its ‘lack of democracy’, Hong Kong in the colonial period lagged behind England with respect to promoting human rights through legal reform (2013: 32).

7 For a historical overview of the tensions between gender pluralism and the umbrella coherence of the transgender rights movement in the US, see Currah (2006).

8 Although the concept of homonormativity has been invoked by queer theorists such as Duggan (2003) to denote the imitative constructs of heterosexual norms within mainstream neoliberal gay and lesbian politics, my usage in this essay sides with the transgender scholar-activist Stryker (2008), who adopts the term to describe the normative imposition of a gay and lesbian agenda over the concerns of transgender people on the margins of sexual politics and history.

9 On peripheral realism, see Esty and Lye (2012).

10 On the formations of Sinophone communities, see Chiang (2013); Shih (2007); Shih (2011); Shih, Tsai, and Bernards (2013).

11 This context exemplifies what Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih have called ‘minor transnationalism’ (2005).