Transgender theory and embodiment: the risk of racial marginalisation

Queer theories have received criticism for their ethnocentrism and their la ck of careful attention to the lived realities of transsexual and transgend ered people. A forum is being established through the publication of transg ender theorists' work, where transgender theorists may rework 'queer', but how well does this reworking address concerns about ethnocentrism? For some 'transpeople' it is important to maintain traditional cultural values by r esisting identification with (contemporary western) medical discourses on t ranssexuality. How might queer and transgender theorising inform and be inf ormed by the discursive pathways being carved out by people for whom medica lised understandings of gender may be deemed culturally inappropriate? I il lustrate the points made in this paper by drawing from interviews with gend er liminal people who live in New Zealand and who belong to cultures indige nous to the South Pacific. Whilst wholeheartedly supporting the efforts of transgenderists to challenge medical constructions of transsexuality, one o f the purposes of this paper is to critique the way perspectives of whitene ss echo, largely unacknowledged, through transgender theorising and to thus inspire more critical thinking about the racialised aspects of transsexual bodies and transgendered ways of being.