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Is China becoming transphobic?
(theconversation.com)
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this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2024
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This was more about queerness in a broader sense (the survey in the article also covered sexual minorities as well as gender minorities). The article lumps sexual and gender minorities together throughout (LGBTQ) and so I was addressing sexual and gender discrimination as a whole as well. I know the title was specifically about transphobia, but there was nothing specifically about gender identity separate from sexual orientation in the article itself, aside from saying trans people were the most discriminated against.
I will also add: there actually are cultural contexts in which "gender identity" is an act, meaning the gender role is, quite literally, the role that is currently being engendered, and not an intrinsic/total way of being, but that wasn't specifically what I was addressing, I just kept it as broad as the source material I was replying to.
Ah, okay, that makes sense.
Actually, now that you point it out, lumping gender and sexual minorities together is itself a recent Western development! It's a manifestation of our resistance to cisheteronormative patriarchy within the West specifically, it made sense for us to do it so we could combine our struggles together, but applying it globally is probably going to produce lots of errors.
Funnily enough, that vibes with how I experience gender. My gender is a performance I do for others so that I fit within the social role I desire. I just don't see enough of a difference to say that being a woman is something I do, rather than someone I am. It's both?
Exactly! Coalitional terminology can be very powerful in building cohesive movements and cross-boundary solidarity, but can serve as a bit of a double-edged sword and lead to a glossing over (or even erasure) of the rich cultural differentiation within (Julia Serrano talks a bit about this in Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive, and Viviane K. Namaste's Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People has some really great insights about this, and addresses--in a Canadian context--the way that the dominant trans discourse in Canada is english and thus Canadian legislative and organizational initiatives often reinforce an english framework of transgender that seeks to supplant french transsexualité)
Editing to add: if I'm remembering correctly, Leslie Feinberg's Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue talks very specifically about the difficulties in forming those coalitional ties in American organizing between trans people and gay people, and the struggle to get gender minorities and sexual minorities to see their oppression and liberation as intrinsically linked.
If you're interested in learning more about the performance and performstivity of gender identities, Judith Butler is a great starting point.