OUTSIDER EXEMPTION: Transgender Migrants and Gender Accountability in South Korea

"Doing gender" has been explored in a variety of contexts. However, accountability to gender is understudied, leading scholars to call for work that analyzes the varying salience of gender accountability. I respond by studying transgender and gender-nonconforming (TGNC+) migrants originally from the West and Southeast Asia who now live in South Korea. How do TGNC+ migrants experience accountability to gender, race/ethnicity, class, and national origin boundaries in Korea and origin societies? I find that TGNC+ migrants feel safer in Korea than in their origin societies-including those that may be conventionally considered more progressive than Korea-to "do gender" in affirming ways. The reasons are that medical care is rarely gatekept, and public spaces facilitate gender affirmation for TGNC+ migrants because they are held less accountable to gender than their Korean peers. For this reason, I call them exempt outsiders. The exempt outsider is rarely held accountable to gender because their "outsider" status, inflected by national origin, class, and race/ethnicity, displaces gender as the primary frame through which boundaries are drawn in their interactions with Korean "insiders." By integrating the literature on gender accountability with boundary studies, I highlight the shifting salience of gender, national origin, class, and race/ethnicity when TGNC+ individuals migrate and interact in different social contexts. I identify what conditions enable gender identity affirmation by TGNC+ migrants in a destination that is not regarded as legally LGBTQ-friendly. I further distinguish the different ways in which their construction as exempt outsiders affects TGNC+ migrants in Korea in terms of their intersectional placement in local power hierarchies, such as national origin, class, and race/ethnicity.