Passing and Crossing: A Study of Transgender Embodiment in Hong Kong

Issues of transgender and transsexuality provide a new impetus and a practical need to problematize assumptions about bodies and identities and to rethink the categories of women and men. While transgender studies have exposed the artificiality and mutability of sex/gender/sexuality categories, a tension exists between the transgender/transsexual discourses which are oriented toward a search for a gendered home and the queer emphasis on creating trouble for the gender order through non-normative, unintelligible embodiments. This paper seeks to address the debates through an examination of the embodied practices of passing and crossing in the transgender community in Hong Kong.

For many gays and lesbians, passing or acting straight is a strategy for coping with stigmatization in a hetero-normative society. For many transgender people, passing, that is, to blend into society both socially and visually in accordance with their preferred gender, is a goal rather than a means. They want the society to see them in their desired gender. The emphasis on passing is reinforced by the ‘Real Life Test’, which requires trans to dress and live in their gender identity successfully for a period of time in order to be eligible for hormonal treatment or surgery.

Questions will be raised as to whether a hierarchy based on the ability to pass has been created in Hong Kong’s transgender community; to what extent the practices of passing entail compliance with dominant standards of dress and behavior which are grounded in the class privilege and compulsory heterosexuality. Similarly, questions will also be raised with regard to incoherent embodiment. Who can afford incoherent or unintelligible embodiment? Whose incoherence is strategic, and whose incoherence is necessary or unlivable? This paper argues for the importance to subvert dominant codes, yet without losing sight of the materiality, complexity and ambiguity of the lived experiences of transgender people.