Queer Temporalities and Transgender Rights: A Hong Kong Case Study

Abstract

This article investigates how theoretical explorations of queer time can shed light on our understanding of law. Taking transgender rights in Hong Kong as a case study, it argues that legal judgments can entrench normative temporal structures and impose tropes such as linearity, futurity, and finality onto the life scripts of trans subjects. Through close readings of the Court of Final Appeal decision in W v. Registrar of Marriages and the recent judicial review challenges that have emerged in its aftermath, it demonstrates how the cases exclude transqueer individuals who do not fit into those temporal trajectories from the realm of rights protection. It also suggests ways of thinking about the temporalities of transgender issues differently. The analysis here stages an encounter between law and literary/cultural theory, and provides a new perspective on the current state of transgender rights in Hong Kong.