Abstract: The human body displays an array of variations of sex characteristics, ranging from expected, normalized variations (i.e. endosex) to minority ones that do not meet medical and/or social norms of binary male and female (i.e. intersex). Naming and classification systems have material consequences for general access to health care but also mental wellbeing. To date, the small amount of language-focused scholarship on sex characteristics and variation has been epistemologically oriented to the metropole. That is, theories developed in ‘global centres’ have been applied to data in ‘peripheral locales’ rather than being reframed or broadened by the ideas there encountered. This study uses metapragmatic discourse analysis (i.e. analysis of talk about language) to mitigate cultural appropriation and commodification, treating interviewees as collaborators who analyze language in a process of joint discovery with the researcher. The data is drawn from interviews with two Hong Kong Chinese health professionals, one an intersex-bodied Chinese Medicine specialist and the other an endosex-bodied Endocrinology specialist. Discourse analysis of the audio-recorded interviews, following the principles of interactional sociolinguistics, serves to reveal affordances and constraints of the globally circulating yet locally interpreted terminology that is available in English, Cantonese and Mandarin. They both relate the painstaking and cautious process of trying to appropriate or coin terms to refer to ‘intersex’ and 'disorders of sex development' in Cantonese spoken discourse (the latter in the medical domain and the former in other domains). In so doing, the interviewees position English and Mandarin terms, circulating into and around multilingual Hong Kong, as requiring a great deal of pondering. Stances are taken on the need for localized terms that are not socially stigmatizing regardless of domain. Another stance taken is that a term’s written and spoken forms must take equal precedence, and the distinct features of Cantonese homophones, tonalities and semantic prosodies must be considered. Terms circulating in from the English-speaking ‘world’ and from mainland China must be scrutinized by Cantonese-speaking insiders so as to anticipate and avoid social pitfalls. Links are drawn to findings in other geopolitical regions, not to create a tally of ‘cases’ that prompt further universalizing discourses, but in hope of contributing to a co-mediation of knowledges. It is a focus that more respectfully brings Asian and multilingual perspectives into the conversation.

About the author: Brian W. King is a critical sociolinguist researching language, bodies and identity at the intersection of ethnicity, gender and sexuality. His work is grounded in considerations of spatiality, geopolitics and biopolitics, taking account of manifestations of state power in intimate and institutional settings and turning this lens inward to academia.

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