跨 性 別
(oh my god it's time for asian gender thoughts…)
a few years ago, someone asked me if i would like to participate in their research project about the intersections of asian and transgender identities. i agreed, and ended up spending a number of hours just sitting around and thinking about how to best articulate my thoughts and feelings, and in doing so, also somehow learned the cn word for transgender: 跨性別.
the main reason i hadn't archived this to my site earlier is less because it's quite personal (like i have literal diary entries archived here; "it's kind of personal" is not really a consideration i have when i feel it has something i want to say lol), but really just bc it goes into how i've named myself in fandom. which is not something i wanted to figure out how to cut n censor during my anonymous era lol.
(…also bc i wrote this so long ago that i lowkey take psychic dmg from reading it lol)
originally written 24 may 2021.
I was assigned female at birth, so obviously that has a pretty big influence on me and my gender thoughts. My mom was raised in the militarization era of Taiwan, and growing up, I remember she would sort of subtly impress traditional gendered expectations upon my sister and me to be like, proper young ladies and stuff, because her adherence to strict traditional culture was her way of showing pride in being Taiwanese in the face of Communist China. My Chinese name is 白曉婷 — the 婷 here meaning "graceful and ladylike."
They say that the language you speak affects your personality in subtle ways, and I find this to be true. When speaking in Chinese, I find myself more soft-spoken, more deferential. When I set my brain to Chinese-Language Mode, I enjoy presenting and being perceived as feminine, while when being set to English-Language Mode, I still struggle to understand how I want to be perceived—I want people to see me and feel the same way they would seeing a pretty boy in a skirt, but I don't want to cut my long hair short, and I refuse to pitch my voice down, to aid in that.
A few years into being involved with online fan communities, I wanted to change my username, symbolically my identity in that space, to something else. LunaBloom, my alias at the time, had come to me at three in the morning when I was thirteen, but at the age of sixteen, it felt young and immature in a way I couldn't place. I was thinking of joining a fandom event at the time, where either I'd have to sign up for a forum with a username I wouldn't be able to change later, or the name LunaBloom had already been taken, so I was left at a loss, since autonomy in its literal definition of "self-naming" was never my strong suit, at least not in English. I was also studying and memorizing some Tang Chinese poetry at the time, most notably The Bloom is not a Bloom, or Hua Fei Hua , by Bai Juyi, and one night a few days before signups closed, I dreamt that I signed up under the name hua-fei-hua. I remembered the dream so vividly that when I woke up in the morning, the first thing I did was open up my laptop and sign up for the event under that name, and a few months later, HuaFeiHua became my default online username.
But it's not just that the name came to me in a dream and reflected my cultural heritage that I loved it so much. My English name is [Redacted] of a flower associated with beauty and grace, but as i grew up and understood what the 婷 in my Chinese name meant, a few things happened. I was proud at first, since growing up, I was a tomboy who was "one of the boys", but I still valued that connection to femininity.
However, in Chinese, our names come from the hopes and expectations the nameers have for us, and as I've come into my own and started embracing a more masculine gender performance, I started to feel a disconnect. I no longer wanted to present myself as a lady in American society.
So to name myself what literally meant, "the flower is not a flower" (or, less poetically, 'the flower is unfloral'), it felt like both a rejection and an embrace of the person society thought a "[Redacted]", a flower, should be. A [Redacted] is a flower, and I will proudly wear that association on my sleeve, but I am in no regards the delicate, graceful, or ladylike woman it represents.
Another conundrum that comes around with being trans in Chinese is the pronoun problem. In Mandarin, tā is our only third-person pronoun, said the same regardless of gender, but in modern writing, you have the masculine (他) and feminine (她). While in English, you can correct someone immediately when they verbally misgender you, and thus help retrain the other person's perception of your gender, in Chinese, you can never tell which tā they intend when referring to you out loud. All you have is their writing, which can't be caught or retrained as easily. Just as I've struggled with which English honorific I want used on me, I've struggled with whether I want the masculine or feminine version of _ta_ used on me in writing. Technically, the masculine is also the neutral, but I still want to be a proper young lady in Chinese, so I shy away from the masculine connotations.
And perhaps it's odd that I should still want to be a proper young lady in Chinese, especially since choosing HuaFeiHua as an online name, as a symbol of my identity, is one of my ways of rejecting womanhood. But in East Asian culture, filial piety is one of the most valued virtues, and despite a strained relationship with my mother, who does not understand or accept my nonbinary identity, the part of me that was seen as half white by my mostly East Asian community yearns to be wholeheartedly seen as as culturally Asian as my fully Asian peers, and part of that means being the proper graceful young lady my mother expected out of me growing up.
And I like the idea of ladyship. I like the idea of performing some aspects of femininity it embodies, from altruism and forgiveness to kindness and deference. But I don't think being a lady means I have to be a woman.
The legendary Mulan was a fierce general, but you must also understand that once you put on a general's armor, your life is no longer your own. To put on the trappings of a role and play your part is not the same as innately being what you portray to the audience known as society. At the end of her ballad, Mulan takes off her armor and returns home to be a model daughter again, for that is who she knew herself to be inside. Being a soldier never took away from her womanhood. I too can be a lady and nonbinary; one does not have to take away from the other.