Drafting Gender: A Critical Discourse Study of Militarization and Transgender Governance In Taiwan

Background and Purpose:
In the aftermath of China’s Justice Mission 2025 military drills, Taiwan entered a period of intensified total defense preparation marked by both geopolitical insecurity and renewed governance of gendered bodies. In December 2025, Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense revised the Physique Classification Standards of Military Service in ways that would require transgender individuals assigned male at birth (AMAB) without gender-affirming surgery (GAS) to serve under military conditions organized around their assigned sex. Such conditions place AMAB transgender individuals at heightened risk of compulsory masculine presentation, harassment, bodily exposure, and psychological harm. Rather than treating the amendment solely as a policy outcome, this study conceptualizes it as an unfolding governance process through which national security discourse, gender essentialism, and transnormativity are mobilized. Accordingly, this study examines how militarization reshapes the conditions under which transgender lives become intelligible, governable, and expendable in Taiwan, while offering critical insight for transgender advocacy and community response.

Methods:
This study employed Foucauldian critical discourse studies to examine how the amendment and related governmental responses constructed transgender bodies within a militarized framework of state governance. Data included the revised Physique Classification Standards of Military Service, official statements, and governmental responses to public controversy following the amendment through March 2026. The discourse analysis proceeded in several stages. First, policy and response texts were read iteratively to identify recurrent patterns in classification, justification, and problem framing. Second, discursive coding focused on how bodies, eligibility, risk, and service capacity were defined and linked. Third, interpretive analysis examined how these texts mobilized gender essentialism and transnormativity. Finally, particular attention was given to how official responses managed controversy through accommodation-oriented language that redirected attention away from structural coercion.

Results:
Findings show that the amendment discourse constructs service eligibility through bodily criteria that collapse sex, embodiment, and military capacity into a biologized notion of the male body while erasing gender identity and social vulnerability. The policy also frames AMAB transgender individuals without GAS not as subjects requiring protection from institutional harm, but as administratively legible bodies available for conditional incorporation into military service. In addition, government responses to controversy shift attention from the coercive structure of military inclusion to the managerial question of how military environments might be made more “friendly,” thereby obscuring the structural risks embedded in the policy itself. This discursive move reframes a question of state violence as one of administrative adjustment shaped by neoliberal logic. Overall, the amendment reproduces gender essentialism while reinforcing transnormative distinctions between surgically modified and non-surgically modified transgender bodies.

Conclusions and Implications:
This study demonstrates how policy uncertainty and administrative discourse operate as technologies of transgender governance before full implementation. It further shows how transgender safety becomes conditional under militarized nationalism in Taiwan. The findings call for immediate attention from social workers and mental health professionals to the institutional and psychosocial consequences of militarized transgender governance, as well as timely adaptation in clinical practice to mitigate systemic oppression. This study also offers a critical framework for monitoring future transgender-related governmental discourse.