"Transgender" as a Fluid Category: The Racialization of Gender Identity and the Production of Cultural Boundaries from a Queer Theory Perspective

Abstract

The term "transgender" has achieved significant political visibility in recent decades, yet its consolidation into a seemingly fixed and universal category risks obscuring the diverse ways gender variance is experienced, named, and regulated across cultural and geopolitical contexts. This study critically examines "transgender" as a fluid, contested, and historically situated category, arguing that its boundaries are actively produced and policed through intersecting processes of racialization. Drawing on queer theory, critical race theory, and postcolonial feminism, the paper employs a qualitative case study approach to analyze three key sites: Western media representations, the encounter between global transgender rights discourses and Hijra communities in India, and the racialized rhetoric surrounding bathroom bill debates in the United States. The findings, synthesized in four analytical tables, reveal that race functions as a primary mechanism for constructing a hierarchy of "legitimate" versus "excluded" transgender subjects. Whiteness is consistently centered in mainstream transgender narratives, while racialized gender expressions are erased, exoticized, or pathologized. Four mechanisms of boundary production are identified: differential visibility, implicitly white normative standards, the translation of racial anxiety into regulatory policing, and differential material consequences in law, policy, and everyday life. The study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of identity politics by demonstrating that gender fluidity is not absolute but significantly constrained by racial and cultural power dynamics, challenging universalizing conceptions of "transgender" and foregrounding the complex production of cultural boundaries that determine whose gender variance is recognized and whose is not.