ABSTRACT
The question of whether transgender or its hyper-inclusive heir trans can be readily applicable to the historical material conditions of mainland China warrants an attentive probe. The purpose of this essay is to consider how the legacy of transgender shows up in the term kuaxingbie which arguably serves as “a tool for the imperialist expansion of bourgeois Western epistemologies and forms of governance” (Amin, 2023, p. 57) in the age of digital platforms. During my doctoral research on the trans social reproduction and political economy in China, I have found that many works 3 about transness in China are formulaically framed within an imperialist moralist narrative that situates China as a nation riddled with social conservatism and puritanism, awaiting liberation by Western forces. On one hand, the term transgender has been deployed as an expansive, assimilationist project tied to the globalisation of sexuality and sexual politics (Altman, 2004; Gill-Peterson, 2024); on the other hand, the affordances of online platforms have facilitated the rapid dissemination of information, expediting the adoption of the term ‘transgender’ across disparate subgroups. Digital communication has historically served as a pivotal mechanism for information-seeking, self-fashioning, and community-building, stabilising the terminologies used by queer and trans people (Dame-Griff, 2023). Nevertheless, the contemporary iteration of platform-driven transness, predicated on algorithmic mediation and modular classificatory frameworks, has become easily untethered from the collective material realities of specific geopolitical locations.
