As a theme, questions of representation unite much of the work in transgender studies. However, much of this scholarship has focused on visual or political representation, with less attention paid to representation in and through language. This collection of eleven essays offers an important and accessible entry to the field, analyzing not only the theoretical aspects of language use but also the more pragmatic aspects, such as identity recognition when dealing with healthcare providers.
The different essays are loosely organized in four sections: ‘Representation’, ‘Legal representations’, ‘Self-representations’, and ‘Linguistic representations’. In the first section, the authors contextualize the political and social implications of representation. Karen Parker, in particular, presents an accessible unpacking of gender's categorical uses within academic and queer discourses, as well as possible noncategorical alternatives. The second section focuses on the disconnect between law and self-identity. As Christopher Hutton notes, legal definitions of concepts like ‘sex’ rely on ordinary-language arguments that fail to account for lived realities. This theme frames the next two essays, as Kimberly Tao analyses how trans individuals in Hong Kong resist legal categories of sex, while Elisabeth McDonald, Jack Byrne, & Sandra Dickson illustrate how using genital terminology as opposed to sex labels in law, though intended to increase gender neutrality, instead elide the embodied reality of transfeminine and transgender women.
The third section pays particular attention to self-representation within sometimes indifferent or hostile systems. Fiona Clark discusses her experience as a photographer capturing New Zealand's queer club scene during the 1960s and 1970s, accompanied by high-quality color reproductions of some of her work from the period. Ahi Wi-Hongi, Adeline Greig, and Evan Hazenberg's essay documents the challenges of fitting one's self-description and identity to match medical authorities’ expectations, and they offer an alternative model based in a cultural safety framework. The final section moves from the systemic to the individual, examining how individuals select and use identity terminology within everyday contexts. Poiva Junior Ashleigh Feu’u studies how faʻfafine and whakawahine individuals narrate their identities within a colonialist history that often wrote them out of existence. In the final two essays, Hazenberg and Lal Zimman consider the power and limitations of self-naming. Hazenberg argues that agency to deviate from established identity terminology is spread unevenly across trans individuals. His argument dovetails nicely with Zimman's essay, where he questions how neoliberal individualism obscures the collective nature of identity-building.
Representing trans is an important addition to trans scholarship not only for its focus on the linguistic aspects of self-identification, but also its decentering of North American perspectives. In contrast to the Americentrist nature of much trans scholarship, half of its essays deal specifically with issues in Aotearoa New Zealand, a sociocultural context uniquely shaped by both its rapid recent cultural change on LGBTQ issues and ‘uneasy neo-colonial relationship’, as Niko Besnier puts it in the epilogue, with its Pasifika citizens and neighbors (256). Their voices and narratives, so often subsumed within the broader category of ‘transgender’, are highlighted throughout. All of these make this collection a valuable addition to collections in sociolinguistics or LGBTQ studies.
