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Abstract
ABSTRACT Inspired by the stories of middle-class P. R. Chinese students and graduates in Australia who were assigned female at birth but whose geographic journeys entwined with their exploration of alternative forms of gendering, this article aims to advance understanding of how the power relations of global (post)coloniality shape diverse discourses and practices of transgender mobility in the context of international education today. Our research participants’ narratives suggest that they understood movement from China to Australia as correlating with improved conditions for trans* becoming. Rather than naturalizing this understanding, however, we approach it as a problem to be solved. We do this by contextualizing framings of trans* existence in modern China as part of a wider set of global histories of (post)colonial power. Flowing from that history, we also consider China’s specific social and medico-legal administration of gender transition today, which is widely understood to make trans* lives less livable there than they would be in Australia. These explorations reveal how disjunctures among medical, familial, media, state, and civil society constructions of gender non-conformity tend to channel middle-class trans* mobilities East-to-West and South-to-North. However, we show that the understanding of Australia as a welcoming destination for China’s trans* educational migrants is challenged when they face obstacles to acceptance based on the intersection of their gendering with their racialized embodiment: another stubborn trace of sedimented (post)colonial histories.
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