Transgender migration in Canada: "trans migration" as a generative approach


YAN XUE, University of Alberta

Queer migration studies have gained momentum since the 1990s (Luibhid, 2008). The flourishing of scholarships that focus on how queer gender and sexuality shape transnational movements from the Global South to the Global North can be attributed to the development of queer theory and the queering of immigration policies of the Global North (Manalansan, 2006). Transgender migrants are relatively underrepresented compared to gay and lesbian migrants in queer migration studies (Fobear, 2016). There is a critique that 'queer' in queer migration studies become increasingly equated with homosexuality at the cost of marginalizing other gender and sexual variant subjects (Luibhid, 2008). In this paper, I will first review the scant but growing literature on transgender migrants in Canada. Then, I will discuss the concept of transmigration as an important lens for expanding queer migration studies. The majority of Canadian transgender migration studies focus on refugee claimants compared to trans migrants of other immigration statuses, such as visitors, international students, and workers (E. O. J. Lee et al., 2021). Studies on transgender migrants from Asian countries are limited (Tamagawa, 2019). Findings show that while transgender migrants feel more secure with their transgender expressions in Canada (Fobear, 2016), they also have encountered issues of unmet health needs (Fobear, 2016), underemployment (Le et al., 2020), homelessness (McDowell and Collins, 2023), and isolation (W. J. E. Lee, 2015). The structural racism, xenophobia, sexism, and classism and the geopolitics between Canada and transgender migrants' countries of origin make them differentially vulnerable to the issues mentioned above (Jacob and Oswin, 2023). Meanwhile, findings indicate that transgender migrants must navigate complicated forms of ex/inclusion across multiple communities: Canadian mainstream society, queer communities, and co-ethnic/national communities (Lee et al., 2021). Transgender migrants from similar national and cultural backgrounds form close connections and share material and emotional forms of support, supplemented with those from back home (Butler Burke, 2016). Vartabedian (2018) argues that the particularity of the transmigration concept lies in that it connotes not only a spatial journey that traverses the national border through bodily movements but also an embodied journey that transits the gender border through bodily modification. The prefix trans is assigned with meanings of both transitioning and traversing and implies an analogy between transgender transition and immigration (Cotten, 2012). The metaphorical tradition of this analogy can be traced back to transsexual narratives (Bhanji, 2012). Jay Prosser (1999, 88) notes that "an appropriate analogical frame for the transsexual's writing of transition as a journey may be that of immigration." I argue that by foregrounding the embodied experiences of transgender transition during the forced transnational movement, transmigration as a generative conceptual framework contributes to queer migration studies that have been predominantly focusing on identity development and behavioural changes of homosexual migrants. Furthermore, I contend that findings of Canadian transgender migration studies dispute a more liberal conceptualization of transmigration as linear, teleological movements from disembodiment and oppression in the home country to embodiment and freedom in the host country. Instead, the findings add a critical edge to the concept that juxtaposed gender integrity and social mobility are attainable only for a few transgender migrants because of the interlocking structural discriminations in the post-migration contexts.

This paper will be presented at the following session: