This study aims to document the experiences of trans youths in Mainland China in dealing with a form of interlocking violence that arose from an alliance between their families of origin, private correctional institutions, and local authorities, alongside the creative and intimate strategies of resistance developed within trans communities. Through ongoing ethnographic fieldwork conducted in central China and online since 2024, we have collected a series of oral accounts and reports from local trans communities.
Whether before or after adulthood, trans youths are often forcibly taken away by parents from their everyday social environments—such as schools, universities, or shelters—into long-term confinement and enforced social isolation, or otherwise sent to private correctional institutions that promise to discipline “problematic” youths into conformity (constituting a carceral capitalism). In many cases, what has occurred to trans youths who were taken away would constitute false imprisonment and torture, yet the police and other local authorities often refuse to intervene, instead obstructing their escape or helping to capture them.
Mutual backing between patriarchy, carceral culture, and institutional power via tacit approval of each others’ activities together constituted a vast and coordinated violent nexus of interlocking oppressions against trans people in China. This tacit approval originates in part from the widespread acceptance of parents’ disciplinary authority over their children, and from the challenge and subversion posed by trans existence on hegemonic social and familial norms. When either themselves or people they know become targeted by this coordinated violence, Trans youths in China employ a variety of creative, intimate community practices to mobilise community members and navigate between various actors of power, in order to achieve the objective of “protecting” or “rescuing” the targeted person. In this process, violence shaped the ways in which trans communities are connected with each other.
This study adopts a trans perspective, yet the operational mechanisms and logic of resistance within this system of violence are not exclusively directed at trans individuals. Within the context of Mainland China, we aim to synthesise patriarchal violence, carceral culture, and institutional violence to bring novel empirical insights to broader investigations of violence and resistance.
