Outsider Exemption: Transgender Migrants and Gender Accountability in South Korea

Abstract

“Doing gender” has been explored in a variety of contexts. However, accountability to gender is understudied, leading scholars to call for work that analyzes the varying salience of gender accountability. I respond by studying transgender and gender-nonconforming (TGNC+) migrants originally from the West and Southeast Asia who now live in South Korea. How do TGNC+ migrants experience accountability to gender, race/ethnicity, class, and national origin boundaries in Korea and origin societies? I find that TGNC+ migrants feel safer in Korea than in their origin societies—including those that may be conventionally considered more progressive than Korea—to “do gender” in affirming ways. The reasons are that medical care is rarely gatekept, and public spaces facilitate gender affirmation for TGNC+ migrants because they are held less accountable to gender than their Korean peers. For this reason, I call them exempt outsiders. The exempt outsider is rarely held accountable to gender because their “outsider” status, inflected by national origin, class, and race/ethnicity, displaces gender as the primary frame through which boundaries are drawn in their interactions with Korean “insiders.” By integrating the literature on gender accountability with boundary studies, I highlight the shifting salience of gender, national origin, class, and race/ethnicity when TGNC+ individuals migrate and interact in different social contexts. I identify what conditions enable gender identity affirmation by TGNC+ migrants in a destination that is not regarded as legally LGBTQ-friendly. I further distinguish the different ways in which their construction as exempt outsiders affects TGNC+ migrants in Korea in terms of their intersectional placement in local power hierarchies, such as national origin, class, and race/ethnicity.