作者 / Dominic Wong，在場 · 非虛構翻譯獎學金得獎者
As I am writing this, I am bleeding from below. Yes, you've read that right. What a cruel and humorously fated coincidence that while translating this piece, I, a trans man, have found myself wrestling my own body not only with health issues that most trans men find hard to mention, but—worst still—navigating the gynecological wing of the very medical system that the piece speaks of.
I've always avoided going to the doctor's office whenever I'm back in mainland. And most of the time, I have the privilege to. Having been sent abroad at a young age, bodily issues as such are, in my mind, things that I could defer to until I “return” to places where my gender is less likely to be subjected to certain forms of bureaucratic violence. Yet this sudden bleeding—a condition that my natal body has not known for quite a while—erupted in a way that propelled me into the fluorescent-lit waiting rooms filled with stares of confused female patients, into the bureaucratic landscape of the mainland medical system. And by doing so, it propelled me into another, less tangible sphere: one in which I had to articulate and have my trans body inspected in a language that is native to me, but to my body foreign.
Much of my transness has been articulated and taken shape in English—from my first diagnosis of gender dysphoria to the everyday slang terms I use to communicate with my queer friends. Its appearance in Chinese seemed to always be in modes of translation, with an Anglophone queer hermeneutics serving as its basis—medically, legally, and socially. Evidently, more than once while working on the article, I told Caini (the author), “It feels as though I am retranslating something back into English, rather than translating it out of Chinese.” On the one hand, there were moments when concepts like passing seemed to circle back into English unchanged, as there hadn't been an equivalent expression that existed in queer Chinese lingo. It is an absence that reflects a deeper asymmetry: how translation in the non-West has historically operated more as an importation of ideas rather than as a reciprocal exchange of cultural frameworks—a confirmation that the lexical embodiment of trans imagination in my native language remains borrowed, re-deferred.
Yet on the other hand, there are sentiments, silences, and nuances within the article that only existed and made sense within the material conditions of Chinese trans life—terms and ways of thinking that cannot be detached from the medical, political, and embodied realities that produced them. This tension, between what feels like a retelling and what resists intelligibility in the foreign, is precisely what makes the act of translating Chinese trans nonfiction narratives significant. It is through this tension that translation, like physical transition, ceases to operate as terminable. It does not proceed with the fixed certainty of moving from an “origin” into a “target,” but unfolds as an ongoing negotiation between languages and bodies. Through rendering Chinese trans voices intelligible, translation—what I once conceived as a practice that delimited transness by making it legible through the markings of a dominant language—now becomes a mode of redressing the epistemic gaps produced by the uneven relationality of global LGBT experiences.
Another symmetry that has been upended during this period of bleeding is my relationship with Caini. Besides asking her for clarification on syntax in the process of translating her text, I also found myself asking her for things outside the usual author-translator relationship: where to look, who to speak to locally—anything to find the only gynecologist in the country that specializes in treating trans men. In a sense, through the very act of acquainting myself with Caini by being the translator of her article, she, in turn, became mine, not of the national language, but of codes beneath the medical and social terrain I was suddenly forced to navigate.
To translate transness is, in this moment, a task inseparable from inhabiting it in the flesh. When one reads through the article, it becomes abundantly clear that it was not translated in a neutral tone so often ascribed to nonfiction writing, to present itself as a mere retelling of objective reality. Beyond a fidelity to Caini's own refusal of neutrality in her journalistic writing about marginalized communities, this is also a personal rejection of the false neutrality of the translator as a mere intermediary. I am writing this while sitting in the waiting room of gynecology, surrounded by clinical language that excludes and renders me legible only through universal categories never meant to accommodate me. To be trans is to constantly confront the false neutrality of the language used in modern medicine, hiding behind the façade of scientific objectivity. To be a trans translator, then, is to be implicated in language's reproduction of power and uneven social hierarchies both lexically and somatically. After all, the text has a body, too.
Acknowledgement: I'd like to thank my mentor, Lilith, for all their support and inspiration throughout the translation process. I owe my deepest gratitude to the Frontline Translation Committee for granting me this wonderful opportunity, and to Tung, who's been an incredible help with logistics—and an even better new friend. I'd also like to thank my partner, Max, for grounding me with their love and insights during this process.
And to the piece's author, Caini: thank you for everything—your trust, your words, your cooking, and this already blossoming friendship forged through transness.