That didn’t come out right

Translating queerness poses challenges for multicultural youth.

Story by Joyce Li

Design by Gracie Kwon

Photos by Lianna Amaruso & Kim Jao

“Jinan jeon, [jeoneun] yeoja iss-eoss-eoyo. Geuligo oneul, jeoneun namjaaeyo.”

That’s something SESP first-year Shepherd Lee Williams learned to say after two quarters of Korean classes: Last year, I was a girl. And today, I am a boy.

Williams came out as transgender to his parents in 2021 and began hormone replacement therapy soon thereafter. Though his appearance and voice have changed, he has yet to come out to his maternal grandparents, who primarily speak Korean.

“I’ve been telling my grandparents that I got COVID, and now I sound like this,” he says.

Like many queer Asian Americans, Williams faces a language barrier when talking to his family about his identity. For some, this hurdle is also compounded by the outdated, derogatory or entirely absent vocabulary surrounding same-sex attraction and gender identity in several Asian languages.

Williams, who is biracial, says his mother didn’t speak much Korean with him growing up. He says one of the first Korean phrases he taught himself is “jeoneun teulaenseujendeo imnida” — “I am transgender.” However, he says he isn’t sure his grandparents will know what it means. Like ge-i (gay), reseubian (lesbian) and kwi-eo (queer), teulaenseujendeo is a loanword from English.

“The national conversation [in Korea] around gender and gender identity is still very much less about trans people and more about the feminist movement as a whole,” Williams says. “I do know conversations about transness are starting to happen more often. It’s just kind of complex, so I don’t even know how well they’ll understand.”

The unfamiliarity around queerness in East Asian countries is also why John Lee* (Medill ’23), who says he has been considering coming out to his parents, plans to do so in English. It’s the language he’s more comfortable with — he says he speaks a mixture of Mandarin and English at home but leans heavily on the latter.

“I feel like I would end up having to come out almost entirely in English just to explain what all my positions or beliefs are — concepts that are basic or inherent to me but would probably take a lot of explanation for them to get,” he says.

Lee* knows the Mandarin word for “homosexual” — tóng xìng liàn — but struggles with its more clinical connotations compared to colloquial English words like gay or queer. Similarly, the most widely used Korean term for homosexuality — donseongaeja, or “person who loves someone of the same sex” — is a neutral term but has taken on negative associations due to widespread homophobic attitudes in Korean society.

When Belle Lu came out over the phone to their dad in Mandarin ahead of their graduation in 2022, they grappled with the same issue. The then-New York University fourth-year had come out in English to their mother months prior, but their dad speaks mostly Mandarin. If he was going to fly to New York to see them graduate, Lu wanted to know that he was there because he loved them for who they are — not the “lie” they had kept up.

“Hey, I have something important to tell you.”

“Are you doing drugs?”

“No, I —”

But when the time came, the right words still did not. “I’ve labeled myself as ‘queer’ ten thousand times, but I’ve never labeled myself anything in Chinese,” Lu says.

In recent years, LGBTQ+ communities in Asia have developed new slang to describe queerness. Terms like tóng zhì, (used to refer to those attracted to the same sex, literally “comrade”) lā lā (lesbian) and kù’ér (queer) have been adopted by Chinese-speaking online spaces. In Korea, queer people have adopted iban (abnormal person), a playful, ironic subversion of ilban (normal person).

However, for Asian Americans, especially those who grew up outside of their country of origin, vocabulary surrounding queerness can be limited to what they hear at home. Lu says tóng xìng liàn feels inherently shameful to her because she is not involved in Mandarin-speaking queer communities and has only ever heard the term used with negative connotations.

In the end, they steered clear of labels and told their dad “wǒ xǐ huān nü shēng” — “I like girls.” He took it well.

“I think he was glad I wasn’t doing drugs, primarily,” Lu says.

But the conversation ended there. Had she come out in English, Lu says she would have spoken more about her identity, but navigating the conversation in Mandarin would have required her to take on more labels than she was comfortable with.

Lu acknowledges they eventually want to reclaim tóng xìng liàn. For the time being, though, they prefer not to use it. When they came out to their grandmother months after graduation, they did so by saying that they and their girlfriend “zài jiāo wǎng” — “were dating.”

“In English, I’d probably say I’m gay or I’m a lesbian or I’m queer — I’d be really direct about it,” she says. “But in Chinese, for example, you don’t have to be so direct if you don’t want to put a label on yourself.”

To avoid the more impersonal undertones of tóng xìng liàn, Lee*, whose father is a pastor, says he is considering drawing from queer-affirming theological ideas to help him communicate his identity to his family in Chinese. When he comes out, Lee* hopes to say that God’s love is all-encompassing — that God loves him not despite his queerness, but because he created Lee* that way.

“That’s something that they would immediately understand,” he says. “That’s their language and their worldview.”

In some Asian countries, English words and Western cultural references have been adopted by queer communities and serve as shared vocabulary across disparate cultures. Nisha Kommattam, professor of comparative literature at the University of Chicago, says English is used for the sake of practicality in the diverse linguistic landscape of South Asia, where over 600 languages are spoken.

“People who don’t speak English still tend to use the English terms very often, such as ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian,’” Kommattam says.

The word queer has also been adopted by South Asian academics, though its negative connotations sometimes still persist. There’s also the issue of the letter Q doesn’t exist in most South Asian scripts, making the word look “really weird” in writing, Kommattam says.

But Kommattam says some people object to the adoption of English terms to explain queerness. For example, conservatives in India have long argued that homosexuality, along with single parenthood and divorce, is a Western import with no place in Indian societies.

To combat these perceptions, there has been a movement within some activist and academic circles to coin new terms based on Sanskrit to replace English ones — such as sva-vargga-laingika, a Sanskrit-derived adjective that translates directly to “same-type sexual” in Malayalam.

Kommattam says she thinks such terms are a good idea in theory, but in practice, they are unlikely to catch on.

“No one wants to say that,” she says. “It sounds medical, it sounds academic, it sounds like using the word ‘heteronormativity’ at a McDonald’s.”

For Kommattam, translating queerness is a multilayered issue: The translation of English terms to local languages overlaps with the translation of academic jargon to everyday speech.

“What I’m trying to do actually in my classes is raise the awareness of how we don’t want to impose possibly colonial legacies, possibly elitist and English-speaking or Western-dominated terminologies, onto local lived existences,” she says.

This year, Lee* will be traveling to Taipei, where his family is from. He says he’s looking forward to immersing himself in Taipei’s gay nightlife scene and queer communities.

“I feel like I’ll end up absorbing how gay people talk about their own identities,” he says.

For now, Williams says the rudimentary vocabulary he knows doesn’t capture the complexities of how he feels about his identity.

But when his Korean is good enough, he knows what he wants to say.

“Beautiful men can exist, and despite how I was born, I feel like I’m a man,” he says. “When I look at myself and all I can think about is how I have traits that make me a woman … it makes me unhappy with myself. So in changing these things, I think I am helping myself be a more complete person.”

Williams sees his grandparents less now, partly because he’s been avoiding them. Since he started learning Korean, they’ve stopped speaking English with each other.

“That’s really terrifying,” he says. “But I need to be ready to tell them I am transgender.”

*A name in this story has been changed to anonymize a source who has not come out to his family.