Trashing or Rather Thrashing out the Gender Binary? Trans Employees’ Gender Performance at Work

Abstract

This article analyzes 32 individual interviews and 5 focus group interviews with trans-persons and trans-experts, and focuses on how openly trans individuals, who are successful in their careers and who do not work in in especially ‘trans-friendly’ business sectors, perform their gender at work in Thailand. As non-passing trans-persons they do not meet the idealized cis-gendered standard of Butler’s heterosexual matrix. We show, however, that in order to make themselves ‘intelligible’, and with this, employable and promotable, another matrix applies: this we call the trans-matrix. This demonstrates that successful trans-women tend to adjust their way of ‘doing transgender’ to an ultra-feminine standard, whilst the gender performance of successful trans-men tends towards more of an ultra-masculine standard. While trans-femininity is primarily performed on the level of appearance for trans-women, trans-masculinity is, for trans-men, rather performed on the level of behavior. Although the rigid gender binary is the main obstacle to their struggle for equal recognition, compensating for any deficiency with regard to non-conformance with the cis-gender ideal of the heterosexual matrix by performing in accordance with the ideals of the trans-matrix (that is, performing extreme positions of the gender binary) contributes more to stabilizing the binary, rather than undermining or challenging it.