In Watkins’s particular case, “racial transgression” was very much a zero-sum game, whereby conforming with the demands placed upon her as the wife of a Chinese husband required giving up the privileges that she enjoyed as a white US citizen.
For her, “becoming Chinese” was conditional upon her migration to China as an “Asiatic traveler,” and, concurrently, her renunciation of US citizenship privileges.
As a result, going back to “being white” was not an option available to her. In terms of Chinese gender roles (and to prove wrong her Chinese-in-laws’ prejudices), Watkins had to compensate for her whiteness by diligently—and perhaps excessively—performing the role of the dutiful Chinese wife: taking care of her mother-in-law and the household; raising her children as Chinese; observing the customs of Chinese ancestor worship; and wearing Chinese dress.
Therefore, we can say that Watkins’s access to “Chineseness” was made possiblevia the performance of a particular gender role within a heteronormative and repronormative matrix: that of the patriotic, dutiful, and family-oriented Chinese wife and mother.
In other words, her “Chineseness” is the racialized expression of her sub-ordinate status as the marital dependent and primary caregiver.
Although Watkins’s whiteness enabled her to make sense of her “Chineseness” as part of an antifeminist—and here the audience is “Western” feminism—performance of subordinate femininity, her status as the subordinate wife also shaped the conditions in which this“Chineseness” could become intelligible to herself and her Chinese family.
Indeed, her subordinate status as the marital dependent carved out for her a path of “racial transgression” toward “becoming Chinese” that followed, from the gendered and heteronormative norm that a wife’s racial identity had to match that of her husband and her children.
(context clearer if you read from page 15, but is somewhat verbose; note current url sci-hub.se)
Taking this analogy problematically back to being transgender, in the context of "traditionalist" weebsociety, her anime "gender transgression" is only acceptable through the cisheteropatriarchal lens of being waifu'd.
This is actually an interesting point that I've read about in the context of academic debate on transracialism.
I will quote from one of the critiques that Hypatia has published on their notoriously bad first article on transracialism:
[In 1907, a seventeen-year-old Scotch-Irish girl named Mae Munro Watkins met nineteen-year-old Tiam Hock Franking of Amoy, China, while attending high school in Ann Arbor, Michigan.]
(context clearer if you read from page 15, but is somewhat verbose; note current url sci-hub.se)
Taking this analogy problematically back to being transgender, in the context of "traditionalist" weebsociety, her anime "gender transgression" is only acceptable through the cisheteropatriarchal lens of being waifu'd.