Finding the “Humanity” in Human Rights: LGBT Activists and the Vernacularization of Human Rights in Hong Kong

Through an ethnographic analysis of Hong Kong LGBT activists’ fight for a gender recognition ordinance (GRO) that would simplify the process for transgender Hongkongers to change their legal gender, a paradox emerged: Why was a human rights framing of LGBT issues problematic when human rights were central to locals’ understanding of what it meant to be Hongkongers? Local LGBT activists’ vernacularization of human rights—or the process of localization of international human rights law into culturally relevant frameworks—hinged on reframing the need for a GRO as a matter of humanity, not human rights law. Relying on citations of human rights law among “ordinary citizens” violated the existing ways in which Hongkongers talked about human rights as a method of distinguishing Hong Kong from the rest of the People’s Republic of China. Furthermore, this need to differentiate emerged from the 2014 Umbrella Movement in which prodemocracy activists occupied various urban centers in Hong Kong for seventy-nine days. The Umbrella Movement caused a shift in which ordinary citizens became responsible for each other and defending what made Hong Kong unique. Ultimately, the vernacularization process requires closer attention to the ways in which human rights are being talked about on the ground.