Disrupting the Colonial Transgender/Law Nexus

Abstract

Not long ago, clutched in colonial laws deployed to regulate dissident genders, the Hong Kong courts had never recognized the transgender person as a legitimate legal personality. Alongside powerful cultural transphobia that casts doubts on the corporeal authenticity of gender in post-operative transgender subjects, the laws held desperately onto the anachronistic and heterosexualized matrimonial framework that denies transgender subjects of their marriage rights—via the vastly productive hegemonic Judeo–Christian dogma of “one man and one woman” in marriage laws. All this was about to change because the disruptive pulse of cosmopolitan marriage laws began to vibrate in various national jurisdictions, causing ripples that spread through the legal disputes of rights first in non-procreative marriage and divorce rights, and subsequently in gay and transgender marriage legal challenges. Using the groundbreaking case of W v. Registrar of Marriages heard in Hong Kong’s various courts (2010-2013), this article attempts to work through the conceptual possibilities offered by a postcolonial legal approach to understand the contingent but real legal possibilities to advance an immanent politics of transgender justice in the 20th century.