To understand queer linguistics is to understand how gender and sexual "identity categories and social reality are (re)produced or contested through language" (Milani, 2013, p. 618). Queer linguistics is known to have a strong tradition in US-based linguistic anthropology while non-Western cultures are often less represented in this field ((Motschenbacher & Stegu, 2013). This paper wishes to bring in the discussion of how the transgender notion and queer linguistics, often understood in Western context, is understood in Hong Kong, focusing on how social workers made sense of transgender category and how such understanding might affect or even limit transgender people's experiences in social work services. A portion of the existing work on queer linguistics used a community of practice model to investigate the production and contestation of normativity within groups that may or may not hold uniformity in identity formation (e.g. Bucholtz, 1999; Mendoza-Denton, 1999). As this paper shows, such production and contestation of normativity (in particular cisnormativity) can also be reflected in social workers' trainings in building their professions and discursive interaction with transgender clients. Social work practices in general emphasize distinct borders when planning and deciding the social services that they can provide. Social work services are being caught between the social constructionist approach that views identity categories as open to interpretation and the essentialist approach that maintains the fixed identity categories (McPhail, 2004). Situating the discussion in the Hong Kong's context, this paper argues that cisnormativity is what usually framed social workers to view transgender individuals and caused potential misunderstanding and even unease moments between them. However, as Hall (2013: 638) argues, "the social meaning granted to heteronormativity, even if its idealization persists, is always shifting across the interactions of those associated with it". With an increasing awareness of transgender and other gender possibilities topics, it is possible that the "semiotic evolution" that Hall (2013) suggests can occur in Hong Kong social work field and one can witness the resignification of the meaning of "normative" and "deviant", resulting in a different discourse that celebrates fluidity, changes, and possibilities in Hong Kong.
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