Everyday precarity, oblique hostility and gendered liveability among Malaysian transgender men

ABSTRACT

Although a gamut of sensational issues affecting transgender communities in Malaysia proliferates in academic scholarship and activism reports, and transgender experiences of tragedy and violence are often amplified in the news media, less attention is given to the everyday forms of aggression and vulnerability that transgender people encounter in seemingly innocuous spaces. Guided by a Constructivist Grounded Theory Methodology, I analyse selected narratives of three local transgender men to theorize their experiences of ‘oblique hostility’ in Malaysia, or subtle and implicit manifestations of discrimination and harassment that threaten to annul their gendered liveability. I argue that these spaces which initially and ostensibly do not target gender normativity for valid accessibility – such as airport x-ray scanners, road blocks and local Roman Catholic ecclesial communities – are actually implicitly grounded in normative gender expectations and thus perpetuate a condition of precarity for transgender men who struggle for recognizability, dignity and security in their everyday lives. My analysis is framed by Judith Butler’s ideas on precarity as the consequence of exaggerated and protracted state-sanctioned exposure to vulnerability, and Judith/Jack Halberstam’s concept of the bathroom problem writ large, an insightful reference to spatial apparatuses of gendered invigilation that pronounce the (in)validity of gendered lives.

KEYWORDS:

• Bathroom problem
• everyday precarity
• Malaysia
• oblique hostility
• transgender

Introduction

My main argument in this article is that Malaysian transgender men experience everyday precarity through diverse and intersectional forms of ‘oblique hostility’, or subtle manifestations of discrimination and harassment in everyday life that threaten to annul their gendered liveability. These moments materialise when their ability to pass in accordance with their heartfelt gender identities is called to question at spaces where gender does not immediately appear as the pre-eminent condition for legitimizing and thus permitting the projection of human bodies into the public sphere, such as airport x-ray scanners, road blocks and local Roman Catholic (hereafter ‘Catholic’) ecclesial communities. The use of the term ‘gendered liveability’ in this article refers to the ability of transgender people to live ‘authentically’ and flourish when, as Jason Cromwell (1999) posits, ‘they are being seen as their true selves in living, dressing, and behaving as men’ (p. 39).

Extant academic literature on transgender issues in Malaysia addresses the ‘unusual vulnerability’ (Goh, 2012a, p. 217) they face in everyday realities due to secular and religious laws, and societal pressures (Goh, 2019, 2020; Slamah, 2005; Teh, 2008a). Scholars also write on the perspectives of transgender sexual health (Barmania & Aljunid, 2016; Gibson et al., 2016; Teh, 2008b), institutional religious disapproval (Goh, 2012b; Teh, 2008a), and salient connections between transgender and spiritual identities (Goh, 2014). Some works adopt a more deprecatory approach that re-pathologises transgender people and exacerbates their vulnerabilities (Hassan & Ghazali, 2013; Zainuddin & Abdullah Mahdy, 2017). This article, which speaks to my ongoing research on the quotidian experiences of transgender Malaysians, including transgender men (see Goh, 2020), contributes to this corpus of scholarly thought through its focus on implicit and often ‘hidden’ forms of vulnerability and aggression involving transgender people in seemingly innocuous spaces.

In what follows, I first provide an overview of how the state and religious departments – in seeming collusion with the media – create and preserve the aforementioned climate of unusual vulnerability in their efforts to uphold an imaginary of obligatory heteronormativity and cisnormativity. Then, I segue to a brief discussion on my method, methodology and theoretical framework. Thereafter, in my combined Results and Discussion section, I analyse selected narratives of three transgender men in relation to everyday precarity and oblique hostility.

Overview: precarious transgender lives

Located in Southeast Asia, ‘Malaysia is a representative democracy with a constitutional monarchy’ (Luhur et al., 2020, p. 1). This mostly Malay-Muslim country comprises 32.6 million people (Department of Statistics, Malaysia, 2019). Nevertheless, ‘while the general law in Malaysia remains secular, a separate Shariah [or Islamic] jurisdiction is carved out to address personal status matters for persons professing the religion of Islam’ (Shah, 2017, p. 24). On official and unofficial levels, religious categories continue to serve as important identity markers for Malaysians who consist largely of Muslims, Christians, Buddhists and Hindus (Department of Statistics, Malaysia, 2019), and who mostly hold conservative views on gender and sexuality.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) ‘culture’ – popularly perceived as ‘abnormal’ crossdressing, erotic activities on social media, same-sex marriages and protest marches – is censured in Malaysia and perceived as the encroachment of ‘Western’ influence (see Kaos, 2018; Mohd Noor, 2021). In general, LGBTQ Malaysians prefer to adopt ‘Western-groomed’ identity categories instead of the more deprecatory local terms used generically on people of diverse genders and sexualities, such as ‘pondan’ (see Goh, 2020, pp. 10-11). Similarly, Malaysian religious and political leaders frequently conflate gender and sexual identities in their use of ‘LGBT’ communities on LGBTQ Malaysians (for instance, Iskandar, 2018), which departs from ‘the cultural elaboration of distinctions found in English and many other languages among transvestism, transsexualism, hermaphroditism (intersexuality), homosexuality, and effeminate behavior’ (Peletz, 2002, p. 244). Hence, the vitriol which impacts LGBTQ communities at large unquestionably bears consequences on transgender communities as well.

Both secular and Islamic laws lack any specific stipulations that safeguard the wellbeing of LGBTQ people and are instead often deployed to criminalize them. For instance, the Federal Constitution’s guarantee of non-discrimination for all citizens on the basis of gender (Federal Constitution, 1957, art. 8(2)) deliberately excludes LGBTQ people (see Anis, 2012). The Minor Offences Act 1955 also allows for the arrest of mak nyah or transgender women on the basis of ‘“indecent behaviour”, a term whose inherent subjectivity leaves it open to widespread interpretation and abuse’ (consult Slamah, 2005, p. 102). Syariah (or ‘Shariah’) laws and fatwas (religious opinions which can take on the force of law) which are implemented by various Islamic departments in Malaysia continue to criminalize Muslim transgender people in the name of religious morality (for example, Jabatan Mufti Kerajaan Negeri Sembilan, 2008; Legislature of the State of Pahang, 2013). Prime Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob announced in 2021 that as of the middle of that year, a total of 1,733 LGBTQ Malaysians had ‘been sent to a rehabilitation camp run by Malaysia’s Islamic Development Department (JAKIM)’ (as cited in Ang, 2021). In that same year, the fatwa committee of the Malaysian state of Perak decreed that transgender Muslims were forbidden from entering mosques unless they dressed according to the genders assigned to them at birth (as cited in Dzulkifly, 2021).

Malaysian activists continue to highlight the discrimination and persecution affecting transgender communities, including the near-impossibility of changing either their names or genders on Malaysian Identity Cards, limited access to trans-specific healthcare services, obstacles in securing employment and housing, expulsions from familial homes, forced participation in reparative therapy camps and exposure to arbitrary physical violence (Human Rights Watch, 2014; Justice for Sisters, n.d.; KRYSS, 2014; See, 2019; SUHAKAM, 2021). Nevertheless, transgender-led social movements labour indefatigably towards exposing injustices against transgender people, advocating for their rights and responding proactively to their diverse needs (Justice for Sisters, n.d.; Transmen of Malaysia, 2018).

Precarious transgender lives are also reflected in the Malaysian news media which appear to demonstrate a fascination with mishaps that involve transgender people, particularly transgender women. In 2016, Buletin TV3 covered the discovery of ‘the body of a man dressed as a woman on the sidewalk of a luxurious condominium’ (Buletin TV3, 2016), thus reflecting the common and unchallenged trend of misgendering transgender people in Malaysia. The gruesome tragedy which befell Sameera Krishnan in 2017 was prominently highlighted by the New Straits Times as ‘the attack and brutal murder of a transgender woman’ (Reduan, 2017). The Star published a segment on a transgender woman who was beaten to death by ‘several men wielding blunt weapons’ (Muthiah, 2018). Even if reports of crimes against transgender men feature less in the news media, it is worthwhile to note the assertion of local human rights activist Dorian Wilde – who is himself a transgender man and founder of the online support group Transmen of Malaysia – that all transgender Malaysians ‘have to bear the brunt of the hatred due to their visibility’ (as cited in The Straits Times, 2018). In this sense, both transgender women and men are impacted by such sensational coverage of their lives.

In the news media, transgender people are subtly portrayed as Malaysians whose adversities are somehow justified owing to the fact that their heartfelt gender identities and expressions are perceived as a defiance of secular and religious laws, as well as ‘a scandal, an outrage, from the point of view of essentialism’ (Connell, 2005, p. 72) in conventional understandings and expectations of gender. Transgender people are discursively constructed as the anomalous and sinful Other whose nonconformity who must somehow be responsible for their grave misfortune or tragic fate. Within this environment of unusual vulnerability that cisgender Malaysians often never encounter, not all transgender Malaysians have the capacity and/or privilege to flourish.

Method and methodology

My article draws on selected narratives from ‘Adam’, ‘Warp’ and ‘Michael’ – pseudonyms chosen by the research participants themselves – who are three educated, urban-dwelling and mainly English-speaking transgender men. They were part of a larger cohort of fifteen Malaysian transgender men whom I personally interviewed with the use of open-ended questions on matters of gender identity, social interaction and religious practice in a qualitative research project funded by the School of Arts and Social Sciences, Monash University Malaysia, which was approved by the Monash University Human Research Ethics Committee (Project Number: CF16/1275 – 2016000673). My fieldwork was greatly aided by the Transmen of Malaysia online support group which connected me to potential research participants. Research participants signed and submitted a Consent Form before in-depth, face-to-face, in-person interviews, which lasted between 1.0 and 2.0 hours each, were recorded and transcribed. Then, I emailed the transcriptions to them for approval and edits, as well as some minor follow-up questions and clarifications. This was the extent of our post-interview interactions as their personal and work commitments prevented us from further engagement.

The approved transcriptions were then analysed and thematized with the help of ATLAS.ti, a computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software. These narratives, which supply vignettes of transgender lives rather than sweeping generalizations, encapsulate the experiences of these research participants and offer nuanced insights into everyday forms of precarity that bear negatively upon their gendered liveability. As a cisgender gay man, I do not speak for them, but respectfully with them as an ally and a fellow Malaysian who believes in the pursuit of gender and sexuality justice and rights in Malaysia.

My analysis is conducted through a Constructivist Grounded Theory Methodology (CGTM) which serves as:

both … a method of inquiry and … product of inquiry [which] encourages researchers to remain close to their studied worlds and to develop an integrated set of theoretical concepts from their empirical materials that not only synthesize and interpret them but also show processual relationships. (Charmaz, 2005, p. 204)

This Methodology is particularly pertinent for social justice inquiry, as it ‘fosters showing how inequities and discriminatory practices are enacted[, and] produce[s] interpretive analyses of how structural inequality is played out in individuals’ meanings and actions and how individual agency and actions affect larger social structures’ (Charmaz et al., 2017, p. 411). CGTM builds knowledge ‘from the ground up’ as it theorizes on lived experiences. It underscores how knowledge is shared and produced in interactions between the researcher and the research participant, rather than being ‘discovered’ in the research participant and existing as ‘pure’ representation. Therefore, the sense-making of lived experiences in CGTM is a collaboratively interpretive project (Breckenridge et al., 2012; Charmaz, 2005; Charmaz et al., 2017). This epistemological co-production – which echoes what I mentioned earlier in terms of speaking with rather than speaking for my research participants – is particularly evident in my analysis and theorizing of my research participants’ narratives in the combined Results and Discussion section.

Theoretical framework: the starting points of an interpretive lens

My discussion is first framed by the notion of precarity, which, as Judith Butler (2009) explains, ‘designates that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death’ (p. ii). Butler interprets precarity as deliberately produced by the state in denying protection to certain populations that are labelled as deviants, as precarity ‘characterizes that politically induced condition of maximized vulnerability and exposure for populations exposed to arbitrary state violence and to other forms of aggression that are not enacted by states and against which states do not offer adequate protection’ (p. ii).

From the perspective of gender and sexuality, Butler highlights how precarity arises from an insidious state-sanctioned reaction to the presence of those who are unable or unwilling to abide by hegemonic dictates of gender identities and expressions. Butler’s insight that ‘to be a subject at all requires first complying with certain norms that govern recognition – that make a person recognizable’ (2009, p. 4) sheds light on how the Malaysian transgender person who transgresses normative configurations of gendered embodiment becomes ‘unintelligible’ or a ‘non-entity’, and faces attrition or even disqualification in terms of liveability. Precarity is the condition of profound vulnerability whereby transgender lives reside in perpetual possibilities of extinguishment as ‘those who do not live their genders in intelligible ways are at heightened risk for harassment and violence’ (Butler, 2009, p. ii). Butler offers an excellent working framework on the production of systemic vulnerability as perpetrated by state mechanisms with which I am able to examine everyday precarity, oblique hostility and gendered liveability among Malaysian transgender men.

I further frame my discussion through Judith/Jack Halberstam’s poignant observation of how the airport bathroom acts as an implement of gender invigilation that pronounces the (in)validity of gendered lives. The bathroom is a space where the alignment of anatomy and gender – and more tacitly, presumed sexual desire – is both anticipated and insisted upon. Any perception of deviance from this alignment is swiftly met with horror, panic, ridicule and contempt. The bathroom undoubtedly provides mental respite and physical relief for many on an everyday basis, but this is a privilege that is not indiscriminately accorded to all. For Malaysian transgender people (and others) who are unable ‘to “prove” their right to use’ (Halberstam, 1998, p. 21) the bathroom due to their inability to successfully justify an unequivocal physical projection, the bathroom exposes the vast divide ‘between binary gender schema and lived multiple gendered experiences’ (Halberstam, 1998, p. 23), and grossly transforms into a site of terror and hostility. Nevertheless, Halberstam (1998) aptly points out that ‘gender policing within airport bathrooms is merely an intensified version of a larger “bathroom problem”’ (p. 21). In this article, I use the bathroom as a trope for seemingly innocuous spaces which belie their actual roles as apparatuses of gender (il)legitimization that can effectively penalize gendered failures, namely spaces that ostensibly and initially do not insist on cisnormative adherence in order to be occupied.

As gender identities and expressions are integral to human lives for social recognizability and meaningful living, the appearance of and eventual expulsion of ‘misaligned’ individuals from the aforementioned spaces signals the displacement of these individuals’ very existence. Such individuals, as Cai Wilkinson suggests, are caught in ‘a multitude of everyday insecurities [which] creates a state of everyday war that requires constant vigilance and preparedness’ (2021, p. 93; original emphasis). In the ensuing section, my theorizing from a Malaysian context expands and contextualizes Butler’s and Halberstam’s concepts by paying attention to unlikely spaces in the country that become hubs of precarity when gendered embodiments which do not meet hegemonic demands are required to exercise great caution in navigating slippery bathroom floors of recognizability and liveability. My theorizing also conscripts other scholarly interlocutors as an acknowledgement of the intersectional nature of my analysis. This article heeds and follows through with Audrey Yue’s call for and notion of queer Asia as method which ‘reorients the flows, boundaries, and hierarchy of global queer knowledge production’ (2017, p. 21) as it analyses and theorizes the lived experiences of Malaysian transgender men.

As I will demonstrate in the next section, these individuals often find themselves in spaces where gender ‘legitimacy’ may not be immediately adjudicated. Yet, in these spaces, a Malaysian transgender man who is ‘criminalized on the basis of public appearance’ (Butler, 2009, p. ii) can experience a profound displacement of meaningful liveability at the hands of those who insist on an alignment between presumed anatomy and gender.

Results and discussion: ground-level views of everyday precarity and oblique hostility

Adam: airport x-ray scanners and a prosthetic device

Adam, a 45-year-old Peranakan Muslim transgender man who works in the media, frequently travels outside Malaysia for work. Peranakan Malaysians practise a ‘“hybrid culture” mixing elements from their Chinese and Malay ancestries’ (Lim, 2015, p. 154), and embrace various religious beliefs. Adam is one of very few transgender men in the country who successfully changed his gender to ‘male’ in his Identity Card in recent years, but has requested that I do not publicly divulge the strategy that led to this successful amendment. He also intimated to me that he had undergone metoidioplasty. Although this surgical procedure subsequently allowed him to have a penis, he continues to experience complications with urination and erection, both of which are physiological processes that enable him ‘to be socio-culturally recognised, perceived and treated as male and man’ (Goh, 2020, p. 47).

Adam finds that x-ray scanners at the airport are precarious spaces in which his gender identity can be called to question:

I just pass so easily … I have a prosthetic that will allow me to pee standing up, but that is also a cause of concern when I cross border at the airport. I always check if they have x-ray scanner that can see your body shape and what you wear underneath. I made sure my prosthetic was in my check-in baggage to go through their scanners.

For transgender people who go through immigration checkpoints and various x-ray scanners at airports in Malaysia and elsewhere, it is very possible that ‘a perceived mismatch between the gender marker on their ID and the gender they present [will be] flagged as an anomaly … an event that automatically triggers higher levels of scrutiny’ (Currah & Mulqueen, 2011, p. 562). It is highly unlikely that this mismatch will pose a problem for Adam at these checkpoints in terms of documentation, appearance, presentation and anatomy. Yet he is aware of a risk of being labelled as ‘not-man and not-woman [and thus] gender deviant’ (Halberstam, 1998, p. 21) should the prosthetic which helps him to ‘pee standing up’ in a desired manly fashion be detected if he is wearing it while going through x-ray body scanners at the airport.

Although there is no absolute guarantee that this device will not be detected and investigated by x-ray luggage scanners when packed as ‘check-in baggage’, I suggest that what is important for him is that this prosthetic is not detected and investigated on his person when he passes through x-ray body scanners. Despite the fact that he successfully passes as a man on numerous levels, the discovery of this device on his person rather than in his luggage may more easily elicit an interrogation that can disrupt the stable identity which he has carefully assembled. Adam can easily be subjected to pathologisation as an aberrant being, as ‘identity is not simply a matter of who one is but also what one is’ (Currah & Mulqueen, 2011, p. 569, original emphasis).

The construction and function of airport x-ray body and luggage scanners are not specifically based on the proviso that anatomies and biological functions must cohere with gender identities and gender expressions for legitimate passage. Instead, they exist ‘to identify potential threats to the airplane and its passengers’ (Currah & Mulqueen, 2011, p. 563). Nonetheless, these scanners still act as potential spaces of oblique hostility that could thrust labels such as ‘“freakish”, “sensational, “silly, “crazy”, “tragic”, and “monstrous”’ (Cavalcante, 2018, p. 68) – and their attendant challenges – onto individuals like Adam.

In situations where a transgender man needs to ‘cross border’ to officially and thus legitimately leave one space in order to enter and be received into another, he faces the precarity of derision and invalidation, namely ‘the othering of those who do not conform to society’s norms [as] a deliberate part of the theatre of security that is performed at airports’ (Wilkinson, 2021, p. 97). Adam is forced to entertain the possibility that he may not be able to cross the border of hegemonic gender legitimacy and enter the realm of gender invisibility where ‘manliness is invisible, not only because it is normative, but also because it is considered a permanent and stable fixture of “man in … society” [b]y becoming “just another bloke”’ (Goh, 2020, p. 62).

Warp: road blocks and racism

Warp is a 29-year-old Tamil Indian freelancer who adheres to a blend of multiple spiritualities, including Hinduism. For him, oblique hostility straddles law enforcement, gender verification and racism at ‘road blocks’:

I’ve been harassed by the police, at road blocks, because I present as an Indian man, so I get stopped at road blocks all the time, thanks to our country’s wonderful racism (laughs) … so they’ll always stop me. Especially when it’s a Friday. Because Indian men definitely go out drinking, so, (laughs) I get stopped. And I have to present my IC. And if I’m lucky they’ll just see my name and let me pass, but more often than not I found that I’m unlucky because they look at the ‘perempuan’ (female) and then they’ll ask me all sorts of questions, are you sure this is you, and very personal questions.

Similar to x-ray luggage scanners, ‘road blocks’ are unexceptional spaces that do not immediately signal as venues of gendered (in)validation. They do not pose any gender-related problems to Malaysian road users insofar as they are able to furnish law enforcement officers with unproblematic documentation. Nonetheless, Warp is aware that his gender identity can be severely interrogated at road blocks as it is during such moments of amplified security that he will be obliged to ‘present [his] IC’ or Identity Card on which details of the gender assigned to him at birth have not been rectified.

Confronted by this possible threat to an otherwise unremarkable ‘present[ation] as an Indian man’, he hopes that what ‘the police’ will casually scan is his official name, which as Warp had explained to me prior to our interview sounds gender neutral, ‘and let [him] pass’ without any complications. However, ‘more often than not’, the police notice how the identification of ‘perempuan’ – meaning ‘female’ or ‘woman’ in the Malay language – on his Identity Card differs from his physical appearance, and subjects him to ‘very personal questions’ that will only will serve to humiliate him and threaten to annul his embodied liveability. Warp’s experience is not unlike that of many other transgender Malaysians who experience various complications in everyday interactions on account of their Identity Cards (KRYSS, 2014).

For Warp however, the vulnerable position in which he finds himself in terms of his gender identity is preceded by the issue of ‘racism’. His reference to the ‘country’s wonderful racism’ is not a glib remark. Malaysians of Indian descent, who comprise mostly Southern Indian or Tamil people, are regarded as a minority ethnic group as they comprise only 6.9% of the Malaysian population (Department of Statistics, Malaysia, 2019). Scholars who write about the racism that is levelled against this ethnic community also admit that as an upshot of long-term racial, cultural, political, religious and economic discrimination against Indian Malaysians (Kananatu, 2020; Nagarajan, 2009; Ramasamy, 2004), many of them are unable to untether themselves from economic and political disadvantages, and social disdain. Consequently, as P. Ramasamy (2004) posits, social problems have emerged and ‘the frequency of Indian involvement in violent activities have increased quite dramatically’ (p. 162). Since the 1990s, Ramasamy continues, ‘one often reads about Indian involvement in gang fights, murders, and rapes’ by ‘members of urban working-class Indians’ (p. 162). This situation has given rise to, and solidified the many stereotypes and preconceived notions that continue to enshroud Indian communities.

Nevertheless, it is the precarious matter of drinking and driving ‘as an Indian man’ that Warp highlights. The Consumers Association of Penang (CAP), a Malaysian civil society organization, declares that Indians ‘are by far the heaviest liquor consumers’ (quoted in Revathi, 2020) in the country. While facts concerning escalating criminal activity and inordinate alcohol consumption may be rooted in reliable studies which are conducted on specific sampling groups, they undeniably play a role in undergirding and fostering popular perceptions of all Indians, chiefly Indian men. Logically therefore, Warp’s experience of being ‘stopped at road blocks all the time’ is in no small degree due to prevalent and ongoing stereotypes of Indians as prone to criminal activity, as well as being intemperate drinkers who are involved in automobile mishaps.

Therefore, rather than prioritizing the discrepancy between the gender on his Identity Card and his actual gender presentation as the cause of receiving unsolicited attention from the police, he foregrounds his ethnic background as the primary gateway to the destabilization of his gendered liveability. Warp faces the risk of being reduced to a gendered aberration only after he is racially profiled at roadblocks based on the stereotype that ‘Indian men definitely go out drinking … when it’s a Friday’. The policing which is performed by law enforcement officers for the purpose of ensuring the safety for all road users becomes a matter of ethnic, class and gender surveillance. Warp’s experience of oblique hostility is intersectional, in that it assumes a racist and classist form even as it transmutes into gendered cross-examination. Hence, as he experiences first-hand, ‘both masculinity and the category “man” are amorphous and constantly shifting in meaning [as t]hey depend on age, class, occupation, and political affiliation as well as racial, ethnic, and cultural background’ (Cromwell, 1999, p. 12).

Michael: local Catholic ecclesial community and gossip

Michael is a 22-year-old Tamil Indian transgender man who works in the food and beverage industry and continues to live with his parents. Although he professes to be an avowed atheist yet spiritually inclined, he admits to being culturally Catholic as well. For him the local church is far from being an innocuous space as it can potentially nullify his gender identity:

I’ve been going to church for like, almost twenty years, but that’s not because I wanna go. It’s because like, my uncle’s a Catholic priest and, my whole family goes to church, just to please them and, for other parishioners not to talk, like ‘Eh, how come I don’t see your niece at church’, but right now since I transitioned, I actually stopped going to church, because I don’t want people see how I am. And none of like, the parishioners there, know that I’m actually transitioning, and I’d like to keep it that way, because to be honest my uncle doesn’t know that I’m transitioning. I do plan on telling him but just not now.

For Michael, the local Catholic ecclesial community as a religious and social space has acted and continues to act as a powerful site that generates a Malaysian Indian Catholic identity even if this identity is not one to which he voluntarily subscribes in its entirety. For ‘almost twenty years’, Michael has had to conform to the performativity of a specific religio-cultural identity that constructs and sustains an image of respectability as a member of ‘a whole family [that] goes to church’, and the niece of ‘a Catholic priest’ although he lacks interest in church services. He thus experiences customary church participation as a requisite performative act that validates, seals and naturalizes an identity of intersectional gender, sexual, familial, ethnic, moral and religious cohesion – a performative act not uncommonly experienced by various LGBTQ young adults who are born into religious families (Cornelio & Dagle, 2022; Del Castillo et al., 2021).

Nevertheless, Michael appears to be cognizant that this image harbours a heavy reliance on, and alliance with cisnormative standards. It thrives on the uninterrupted preservation as well as uncontested power of these standards to (in)validate gendered subjects based on (non) adherence to social norms. In order to remain within the parameters of socio-culturally sanctioned respectability and ecclesial acceptance, Michael needs to persistently present as a Malaysian Indian Catholic person who was assigned female at birth and consistently lives as a woman. He is keenly aware that his preferred gender identity can be censured and nullified when this unspoken cisnormative gender obligation is challenged or unmet at church.

‘The Church of Christ’, as George Zachariah (2017) states, ‘is a Church without walls extending its fellowship to all those who are beloved by God in Christ Jesus’ (p. 13), including LGBTQ people. The broad aim, vision and mission of Christianity, including Catholicism, is for all its clerical and non-clerical members to embody the loving and inclusive stance of Christ by embracing people from all walks of life in an indiscriminate manner – particularly marginalized communities – and guiding them to right living. However, this supportive pastoral stance has always been conditioned and attenuated by teachings in the history of Christianity that revile gender and sexual diversity (Jordan, 1997). Such teachings remain largely undisputed and condition the ways in which most present-day Catholic ecclesial communities think about and behave towards LGBTQ communities.

Contemporary official Catholic decrees invariably impact transgender people in a negative way. The Vatican, which seems to comprehend transgender people only in terms of surgical modification, denies the opportunity for presbyteral ordination to transgender people who have undergone Gender Affirmation Surgery. It has declared that a ‘surgical operation is so superficial and external that it does not change the personality’ (as quoted in Norton 2011) of the transgender person. Pope Francis (2015) has referred to modern understandings of gender in terms of ‘the so-called gender theory [and] an expression of frustration and resignation, which seeks to cancel out sexual difference because it no longer knows how to confront it’. The pontiff’s somewhat reductionistic statement underscores the reality that ‘traditional, heteropatriarchal Christian teachings about God, sex, Jesus, gender, and creation often are used to justify the oppression of transgender persons’ (Lowe, 2017, p. 28).

Such sentiments inevitably trickle down to Malaysian Catholic leaders and congregants who then erect, in the words of Justin Tanis (2003), ‘barriers to participation’ (p. 116) for transgender people in ecclesial life due to ‘fear and unfamiliarity on the part of the congregation’ (p. 116) in relation to transgender issues. Michael’s adamant stand that church members do not ‘see how [he is]’ as a transgender man speaks to the prowess of Catholic teachings and popular perceptions as systems of ‘soft’ surveillance in relation to gender identities and expressions. That he ‘plan[s] on telling’ his uncle of his gender transitioning at an undetermined time suggests a tacit belief and acceptance that clergypersons act as legitimate defenders and curators of cisnormative gender logic (Hunt, 2009; Ichwan, 2014), and that he is delaying what would inevitably be a disapproving backlash.

As such, both clergy and laity engage in uncritical rehearsals of ‘pathologizing or designating trans issues as sinful’ (Tanis, 2003, p. 116). Rather than supplying affirmation, support and acceptance, Catholicism becomes instead a canonical court to declare and justify the sole validity of cisnormative gender identities and expressions. Thus, while local ecclesial communities and attendance at services are not in themselves explicit mechanisms to persecute gender diversity as their raison d’être, they can transmute into occasions of oblique hostility for transgender men who are embedded in such religio-cultural systems, thus revealing the intersectionality of religion, ethnicity, class and conservative familial systems in the formation of oblique hostility. As Michael discovers, a deliberate defiance of formal teachings on the subject of gender proves to be the only response if a transgender man is to live his truth. As such, ‘since [he] transitioned’, he has ceased church attendance as he is cognizant that it is a space of everyday precarity where his gender identity can be annulled.

Michael’s original compliance with ‘going to church … just to please’ his parents was a strategy to eschew the onslaught and ill-effects of gossip that would ensue from his non-attendance at church. I propose that he now finds himself caught in a double bind, as either continual church attendance or its unexplained cessation will spark gossip. The dread of gossip does not merely point to anxieties that arise when one becomes the subject of conversation. Neither does gossip simply contain an insidious power to invalidate subjective integrity and credibility. ‘Wielding gossip means wielding power over who belongs and who does not’ (Subramanian, 2013, p. 312), and therefore reimagines and pronounces the insiders and outsiders of a community. Whether he chooses to attend services or avoid them, Michael becomes vulnerable to the accusations of being a corruptor and an apostate of divinely dictated doings of traditional gender, sexual, familial, ethnic, moral and religious ‘values’.

Conclusion

This article has focused on various forms of everyday precarity that emerge and affect transgender men in seemingly innocuous spaces such as airport x-ray scanners, road blocks and local Catholic ecclesial communities where their gender identities are initially deemed as inconsequential to their movements. These spaces reflect the intersectionality of oblique hostility which traverses elements of ethnicity, class, religion and social capital, as evident in the lived experiences of Adam, Warp and Michael. In such spaces – by no means an exhaustive list – transgender men experience a diverse range of oblique hostility that interrupt and even threaten to annul their liveability. Their experiences uncover the reality that macro views on the ways in which laws impact the lives of transgender Malaysians offer limited insights if they are devoid of more careful micro examinations of quotidian challenges.

My main premise is that certain spaces which are perceived as gender-neutral at first instance are in reality implicitly grounded in normative gender expectations and thus perpetuate the condition of precarity for transgender men who struggle for recognizability, dignity and security in their everyday lives. In Malaysia, everyday precarity for transgender men is fundamentally generated, conditioned and maintained by secular and religious laws which preserve an imaginary of obligatory cisnormativity and heteronormativity in the country. Media depictions of transgender people bring to life and sustain the seemingly justifiable abjection and marginalization that besiege transgender bodies due to the regulatory effects of the aforementioned laws. These combined dynamics produce actual far-reaching implications on the quality of life for transgender men in Malaysia on a daily basis.

For transgender men who have become accustomed to discrimination, harassment and aggression in their everyday social interactions, oblique hostility may not be an entirely unanticipated phenomenon. They realize that safe and welcoming avenues which often exist in specific locations that intentionally cater to transgender people may not always be accessible in everyday spaces. The anxiety of having to constantly look over their shoulders, and the perturbations of expecting the worst but hoping for the best are arguably routine for them. As I see it, the most crucial consequences are that the capacity for self-realization and self-empowerment, as well as the opportunity to flourish on their own terms become severely curtailed for transgender men, and very likely by extension, for all LGBTQ Malaysians.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

School of Arts and Social Sciences, Monash University Malaysia, Internal Research Grant, Project No. 211.

Notes on contributors

Joseph N. Goh

Joseph N. Goh is a Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies at the School of Arts and Social Sciences, Monash University Malaysia. He holds a PhD in gender, sexuality and theology, and his research interests include queer and LGBTI studies, human rights and sexual health issues, diverse theological and religious studies, and qualitative research. Goh is the author of numerous publications, including Doing Church at the Amplify Open and Affirming Conferences: Queer Ecclesiologies in Asia (2021), Becoming a Malaysian Trans Man: Gender, Society, Body and Faith (2020) and Living Out Sexuality and Faith: Body Admissions of Malaysian Gay and Bisexual Men (2018).