Closets and Classrooms: Cis, Trans, and Nonbinary Queer Youth in Chinese Schools

• In Event: Trans and Nonbinary Lives

Abstract

Across national contexts, gender and sexual minority students experience disproportionate levels of school-based bullying, often framed as homophobic victimization, not gender policing. This paper examines how cisgender, transgender, and nonbinary youth experience and resist cisheteronormativity in Mainland Chinese schools. While existing research has documented queer students’ marginalization in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other Sinophone contexts, little qualitative work captures the everyday, lived experiences of queer youth in Mainland China—particularly those of transgender and gender-diverse students navigating classrooms, peer relations, and school authority. I address this gap using 46 semi-structured interviews with queer Chinese immigrants who moved to the United States during adolescence. Through retrospective accounts of schooling prior to migration, I compare how different gender and sexual identities are regulated and contested within Chinese educational institutions.
I argue that schools enact two distinct but interconnected regimes of control. Cisgender queer students are subject to a moral-silencing regime in which sexuality is dismissed as a distraction from exam-oriented success, rendering queer intimacies shameful, foreign, and unspeakable. In contrast, transgender and nonbinary students face a body-policing regime characterized by hypervisibility, public humiliation, and institutional enforcement of binary gender norms through uniforms, hair regulations, and peer surveillance. Yet queer youth are not passive recipients of regulation. I show how they develop “tactical borrowings”—selective appeals to biomedical discourse, culturally authoritative texts, and popular media recognizable within Chinese contexts—to reframe their gender and sexual identities as legitimate rather than deviant.
By foregrounding queer youth as both moral agents and subjects of regulation, this paper contributes to sociological debates on “doing heteronormativity”, schooling, and youth subjectivity, while extending transgender and queer scholarship beyond U.S.-centric frameworks to the Mainland Chinese educational context.

Author

• Frank Yueyang Meng, University of Pennsylvania