Expecting Transgender Futures: Uncertain Lives with Gender Transgressing in Guangzhou, China
This summer I completed a short-term, pre-dissertation fieldwork project with several transgender-centered nongovernmental organizations in Guangzhou, China. My research seeks to understand how transgender youths in Guangzhou, who are excluded from mainstream normalized life trajectories, make sense of their unexpected futures. I am using the term “unexpected” to capture the multiple ways that transgender folks are rendered culturally unintelligible in contemporary urban China. Like other young people, trans youths face overwhelming pressures from Chinese nationalism and familism to forge a cis-heteronormative life, which makes a nonnormative trans life hardly imaginable. At the same time, local medical technologies, grassroots nongovernmental advocacy, and global gender affirming discourses promote possible ways of achieving transness, which primarily set up transgender as a problem to solve rather than a life to live. These ways of achieving “healthy” transness through medical treatments and/or upward mobilities offer ways for trans youths to expect a feasible future, but this expectable future is unevenly accessible to different bodies. Thus my project examines how these vastly different expectations—previously worked-out life trajectories promoted by the non- queer, cis-queer, and trans-centered networks—shape mainland Chinese trans individuals’ sense of their own futures.
With the support of the fellowship, I was able to travel to Guangzhou, China and conducted fieldwork there. During the summer of 2023, I connected with and interviewed two trans- and queer-friendly therapists, one doctor specialized in gender dysphoria, and eight NGO workers to get to know about the current cultural, political, and medical milieu that transgender folks live in. I also started volunteering for two support networks for local transgender youths, the Trans Well-Being Team and Yuele Health. The Trans Well-Being Team is specifically founded to make accessible trans-friendly psychological care for trans individuals and to promote transgender visibility for a better collective trans future; Yuele Health is an NGO founded to promote accessible sexual health care for transgender folks. Working with these two groups offered me the opportunities to connect with and interview trans-friendly therapists, doctors, NGO volunteers, and transgender individuals to complete my preliminary research. While diverging in how they offer help, these two NGOs both aim to better transgender lives. These two connections are crucial to my future long-term dissertation research where I can further explore their difference in promoting better futures for local transgender youths.