A Malleable Essence
In an era when science carried an unrivaled measure of cultural prestige, the comprehensibility of the concept of sex was crystallized through the intersection of its three epistemological coordinates—as the object of observation, the subject of desire, and a malleable essence of the human body. The last two chapters have explored the unilateral labors of visual persuasion, newly invented words, narrative techniques, methodological innovation, expertise friction, professional politics, and contested claims of modernity that anchored the development of new structures of knowledge around the visuality and carnality of sex. The aim of this chapter is to investigate its third epistemic linchpin, mutability, and the vibrant discourse of “sex change” that saturated the mass circulation press from the 1920s to the 1940s.
In the second quarter of the twentieth century, the urban intelligentsia began to envision a more fluid definition of humanity. They no longer drew on the limited language of anatomy to talk about two different but equal sexes; rather, they started to think of men and women as two versions of a universal human body. In this period, Chinese sexologists came to embrace the plausibility of sex transformation based on the vocabulary of sex endocrinology, famous sex-reversal experiments on animals, and a new scientific theory of universal bisexuality (referring to a form of biological sex constitution rather than sexual orientation). Indigenous Chinese frameworks for understanding reproductive anomalies, such as eunuchs and hermaphrodites, provided scientific writers a conceptual anchor for communicating new and foreign ideas about sex. After mapping these cross-cultural shifts, the second half of this chapter reconstructs a highly sensationalized case of female-to-male transformation in mid-1930s Shanghai, the story of Yao Jinping (姚錦屏), and assesses its impact on the wider awareness of human sex change. The tensions of these epistemological reorientations nourished the authoring of a science fiction short story called “Sex Change” (1940) by the pedagogical writer Gu Junzheng (顧均正). The chapter concludes by highlighting the 1940s as a new era in which people began to consider sex-reassignment opportunities through the possibility of surgical intervention.
I argue that over the course of this period, as scientific ideas were transmitted and disseminated into popular culture and the pledge to the value of medical science deepened beyond its professional parameters, accounts of “sex change” gradually loosened its association with animal experiments and human reproductive defects. These accounts turned into sensationalized stories of bodily change that, in the decades before the concept of “transsexuality” was available, introduced Chinese readers to the possibility of transforming physical sex. As stories about the relative ease of sex metamorphosis flooded the press, they made the body seem more mercurial than previously assumed.
A New Hormonal Model of Sex
In the mid-1920s Chinese sexologists gradually withdrew from an anatomical framework and shifted their definition of sex to one based on chemical secretions. Informed by European endocrine sciences, they began to view sex as a variable of specific chemical substances found in the bloodstream.1 Previously, the anatomical register of the human body proved to be a useful guide for deciphering the biological difference between male and female.2 As the May Fourth fervor began to wane, however, Chinese writers no longer looked to the structural underpinnings of male and female reproductive organs as the natural arbiter of sexual difference. Rather, they became invested in the idea that gonadal secretions—specifically, the chemical substance produced by testes or ovaries—were the actual determining agents of human sex difference. Whereas eggs and sperm occupied the center stage in an earlier scientific discourse of sex, hormones—the name that was available for the chemical messengers that control sexual maturity and development—constituted the focus of discussions on sex by Chinese modernizing thinkers throughout the 1920s and 1930s.3
In The Internal Secretions (1924), Gu Shoubai (顧壽白, 1893–1982) expressed this new view of sex in unambiguous terms. A Japan-educated doctor who authored numerous books on biology and medicine for the Shanghai Commercial Press, Gu posited that “in addition to sperm cells,” testes “produce a kind of stimulating substance [刺激素, cijisu] that gives the physical body a uniquely male quality [男性特有之發育, nanxing teyou zhi fayu].” Similarly, for the female sex, “besides eggs, ovaries produce a kind of stimulating substance, whose clinical presence has been experimentally proven by researchers.” The surgical removal of ovaries would thus result in an unfeminine physical and mental state: “Specifically, [a woman’s] body becomes larger and stronger; she lacks gentleness; her genital develops inadequately; she lacks sexual desire; psychologically, she does not show the kind of characteristics and temperaments typically associated with women.”4
Other sexologists spoke more nebulously about the effects of the internal secretions. “Other than producing eggs,” Chai Fuyuan explained in his widely read ABC of Sexology (1928), “the ovary, like testicles, plays a functional role in the internal secretions. It excretes a fluid with an unpleasant odor in the bloodstream that promotes the development of femaleness [形成女性, xingcheng nüxing].” Whereas Gu described the chemical secretion of the sex glands in a more cautious way (by calling it a “stimulating substance”), Chai simply called it a liquid. His reader was thus led to believe inaccurately that hormones are actually fluids. Less ambiguous was Chai’s effort in holding these chemical substances responsible for determining one’s biological manhood and womanhood. He boldly declared that “a woman is a woman only because of this fluid,” which, according to him, “has three main effects on the female sex: first, it increases sexual desire and the intensity of orgasm when the body comes into contact with men. Second, it stimulates secondary sex characteristics [次性特徵, cixing tezheng], including the enlargement of the pelvis, the scarcity of body hair, the smoothness and paleness of the skin, etc. Third, it nourishes the body, strengthens the mind, and increases memory capacity and the ability to imagine.” Notably, two of the three effects identified by Chai correspond to those found in Gu’s discussion above. And lest any reader felt unsure about what to conclude from all of this, Chai pronounced, “without the internal secretions, a woman is not a woman.”5
According to the new vision of sex as articulated by Gu and Chai, the degree of maleness and femaleness depended less on the presence of gonads than on the quantity of chemical agents that Gu called “stimulating substance,” a term he evidently used to translate the Western concept of hormone. It would be at least another half a decade before male and female sex hormones were structurally discovered, isolated, and synthesized by scientists in Europe and the United States.6 But in the 1920s, the Chinese lay public was already introduced to a quantitative definition of sex. As Wang Yang, the head of Zhongxi Hospital (中西醫院, Zhongxi yiyuan), corroborated in 1927, “the development of sexual differences between men and women is entirely contingent on the secretions of the reproductive glands.”7 In this way, the natural construction of manhood and womanhood appeared more malleable than previously thought. Earlier discussions on the subject by May Fourth feminists tended to ground social gender equality in the biological development of dual anatomical sexes. With new ideas from endocrinology, the nature of sex no longer relied on the structural outgrowth of genital ontology but was directly governed by the invisible chemical messengers circulating in the bloodstream.
As a substance whose natural effects depended crucially on its quantity, the internal secretions for the first time solved the mystery of an age-old practice in China: urine consumption. According to an article published in Sex Science, the practices of “replenishing yang with yin” (採陰補陽術, caiying buyangshu) and drinking the urine of young boys represented solid evidence for serious alertness to the endocrine system in ancient China. The article chronicled a history of the endocrine sciences, detailing the work of such crucial pioneers as the German physiologist Arnold Berthold (1803–1861), who experimented on the role of gonads in the development of secondary sex characteristics, and Ernst Laqueur (1880–1947), who coined the term “testosterone” with the Organon research group in the Netherlands. By depicting the male gonad and urine as the key source of male sex hormones, the author claimed that “the reason for the Chinese to consume the urine of young boys stems from an awareness that it contains internal secretions; although the quantity is not much, the advantages are telling if consumed on a long-term basis.” The article described female sex hormones as bearing a functional similarity that boosts vitality and metabolism in women.8 In fact, ever since the French physiologist Claude-Édouard Brown-Séquard (1817–1894) claimed success in increasing physical and mental strength by injecting himself with animal testicular extracts in 1889, scientists and intrigued laypersons all over the world had praised what came to be known as the “Brown-Séquard Elixir.”9 When this “discovery” reached the Chinese press, the presumed rejuvenating properties of testosterones distinguished the new biochemical vision of sex and the perception of hormones as the quintessence of life.10
Hormones straightforwardly linked primary to secondary sexual characteristics.11 They helped to explain, for instance, the positive correlation frequently found in male bodies between penis and testicles, on the one hand, and masculine physical traits such as muscular strength, larger bone structure, deeper voice, and so forth on the other. In a sexological textbook called The Principle of Sex, translated from Japanese into Chinese by Wang Jueming in 1926, “hormone” was referred to as “something without which the development of secondary sex characteristics cannot happen.” The author qualified that “adequate growth of all secondary sex characteristics begins only with the full maturity of the sex glands.”12 The new language of endocrinology was not available to an earlier cohort of reformers and nationalists who also advocated gender equality. From the 1930s on, the growing popularity of endocrinology helped to illustrate the connection between anatomical sex and secondary sex characteristics—those bodily traits typically considered the keystone of masculinity and femininity. To a new generation of Chinese commentators on gender, hormone authorized an enticing biological lexicon for naturalizing the social interpretation of sexed bodies.
A highlight in this transitional period was a special issue of Sex Science devoted to the theme “Sex Endocrinology” (性內分泌科學, xing neifenmi kexue) published in 1936. This issue represented the first sustained treatment of sex hormonal science in a professional serial publication in Chinese. Billed as a “focused section,” the entire issue was in fact penned by a single author, Li Yongnian (李永年), who held a medical degree from the University of Berlin. Li opened his piece by stating that one of the most powerful contributions of modern science had been the discovery of the internal secretions and their role in shaping sexual difference. After going over the familiar numerical calculations of the autosome-to-sex chromosome ratio in humans and animals, Li’s discussion stressed the sex-defining nature of the sperm: because it carried the Y chromosome, “the sperm plays a causal role in the differentiation between male and female sexes.”13
Aware of the ongoing debates about the clinical importance of endocrinology, Li devoted a significant portion of his essay to addressing the issue of homosexuality. His overarching claim was that “homosexuality still cannot be explained by today’s scientific understanding of the endocrine glands.” Under the section titled “nanse” (男色, male lust), Li observed that most “passive” male homosexuals achieved mature sexual development with ease, but their manners tended to be overtly feminine. Since this phenomenon “resembles that of the dan actors in Peking opera,” he concluded that the effeminacy of male homosexuals “has resulted entirely from behavioral habit.” For Li, it was not useful to explain homosexuality through glandular science. After speculating a number of hypotheses concerning the causation of homosexuality, including a troubled marriage prospect and the lack of an appropriate partner for channeling one’s erotic urges in certain social contexts, he endorsed a sociological perspective, rather than one rooted in biology, to explain this “social vice.” This conceptual gap between the science of sex hormones and homosexuality evident in Li’s discussion demonstrates that even as some Chinese sexologists began to imagine the sexed body as more pliable than anatomically predetermined, they still distinguished the biological basis of sex from the subjective realm of sexuality.14
Animal Sex Transformations
In the early twentieth century, the idea that masculinity and femininity were alterable through biochemical agents soon triggered an avalanche of publicity about sex transformation. For decades, European sexologists had produced a vast quantity of clinical literature on “aberrant” gender identification and sexual inclinations. Late Victorian sex scientists often conflated a range of different gender and sexual expressions in their writings, usually under the rubric of “sexual inversion.”15 At the same time, they devised an impressive taxonomy to classify these diverse orientations. As many historians have shown, this vast array of sexological vocabulary emerged from the intervention of people with unconventional gender or sexual identification in that they were not merely passive agents objectified by the medical profession.16 It was only by the mid-twentieth century, nonetheless, that such crucial sexological categories as homosexuality, bisexuality, and transsexuality came to be distinguished more cogently in the medical literature.17 But when this process was just beginning to unfold, scientists in Europe and, to a lesser extent, America were already broaching the broader significance of sex-change surgeries on a frequent basis.
In the 1910s Vienna stood at the forefront of sex-change experiments. The Austrian physiologist Eugen Steinach (1861–1944) attracted international acclaim for his “transplantation” experiments on rats and guinea pigs. In 1912 and 1913, respectively, he published “Arbitrary Transformation of Male Mammals into Animals with Pronounced Female Sex Characteristics and Feminine Psyche” and “Feminization of Males and Masculinization of Females.” The articles soon became scientific classics, and the experiments on which they were based led Steinach to place his research in the larger turn-of-the-century scientific project that attempted to locate the biological essence of sex in gonadal secretions. These groundbreaking experiments also suggested the possibility of medically transforming sex. As he put it, “the implantation of the gonad of the opposite sex transforms the original sex of an animal.”18 His work directly influenced Magnus Hirschfeld, Harry Benjamin, and other sexologists who participated in the delineation of the concept of “transsexuality” around the mid-twentieth century.19
Word of the sex-change experiments conducted by Western biologists reached China primarily through the mass circulating sexological literature in the 1920s. Some Chinese sexologists placed Steinach’s “transplantation” studies in a broader discussion of the relationship between secondary sex characteristics and heredity. As early as 1924 Fei Hongnian (費鴻年), a professor of biology at Beijing Agricultural University, introduced Steinach’s work in his New Treatise on Life (新生命論, Xin shengminglun), which enumerated the effect of “transplantation” surgeries on generation. Fei first described the results obtained by the German scientist Johannes Meisenheimer (1873–1933), who claimed to have inserted ovaries into male moths and testes into female moths, with the outcome that the transplanted organs remained functional and grew without impeding the process of metamorphosis.20 Steinach’s work was then pointed out as another example of the success of gonadal transplantations without producing detrimental effects on animal vitality. Finally, Fei mentioned American physiologist Charles Claude Guthrie’s (1880–1963) findings from grafting ovaries of black hens into white hens and ovaries of white hens into black hens. The change in the color of eggs as a result of ovarian transplantation provided evidence for the effect of transplantation on heredity.21
In the 1920s Chinese scientists considered physical sex transformation the most intriguing aspect of these transplantation experiments. The scientific reports from Europe and America allowed some Chinese to entertain the possibility of sex reversal at least in animals. In The Internal Secretions, for example, Gu Shoubai offered a more sustained discussion of Steinach’s studies under the sections called “The Feminization of Males” and “The Masculinization of Females.”22 He began by stipulating the recent discovery that gonadal secretions bear a causal relationship to male and female traits, both psychological and physical. “According to this line of reasoning,” Gu wrote, “if a male organism’s testes are removed and replaced with ovaries before puberty, he can turn into female [男性當可化為女性, nanxing dangke huawei nüxing].” It was with the intention of providing this statement a scientific basis that Gu presented Steinach’s findings in remarkable detail.23
Gu began by describing Steinach’s laboratory method as succinctly as possible: “Steinach removed the testes from male animals and transplanted ovaries into their body as an attempt to feminize them both physically and psychologically [使其肉體精神均為女性化, shiqi routi jingsheng junwei nüxinghua].” Gu then described Steinach’s findings in great detail. After three to four weeks, Gu noted, Steinach made the following observations about castrated male rats with implanted ovaries: their implanted ovaries developed normally and even produced eggs; their original penis shrank and degenerated (退化萎縮, tuihua weisuo); the size of their enlarged breasts was similar to the size of breasts found in regular female rats, and they even exhibited “maternalistic” tendencies; unlike the thicker body hair found in normal male rats, these animals had finer and smoother hair; they accumulated more body fat; their bone structures were smaller than normal males; and they displayed more “female-like” qualities, including a softer and more gentle physique. But for Gu, the key evidence that suggested the feminization of male animals was the psychological changes induced by the surgeries: the laboratory animals “displayed no male psychological traits”; they were “not passionate, not stimulated, and not excited” when put in contact with female animals; and in contrast, when they were acquainted with other male peers, they “suddenly displayed manners that are uniquely female, including raising the posterior end of their body to seduce male animals.… They basically exhibited any trait typically associated with female animals.”24
In the section titled “The Masculinization of Females,” Gu offered a symmetrical description of Steinach’s experiments on female animals. Steinach inserted testicles into infant female rats whose ovaries had been eliminated. According to Gu, Steinach made the following observations about these transplanted animals: their implanted testicles developed normally; their original vulva degenerated and all or parts of their vaginal opening shrank significantly; their breasts could not grow into the size of regular female breasts; their hair became as thick as regular male body hair; they did not accumulate fat in a way that would give them a regular female physical appearance; their bone structure developed into a manly size and shape; and psychologically they became as competitive as their male counterpart. After presenting Steinach’s experiments on rats, Gu expressed a considerable measure of optimism toward the prospect of similar sex-change phenomenon in humans: “Although the two kinds of sex transformation described above are experiments conducted on animals with success, we do not yet have formal reports of similar procedures tested on humans. Theoretically speaking, though, it is reasonable to entertain the feasibility [of human sex transformation].”25
In the early twentieth century, Steinach’s sex-change experiments soon became classics in not only Western but also East Asian sexological circles. European-trained scientists such as Gu Shoubai and Fei Hongnian had the linguistic ability to introduce a range of European and American scientific research to Chinese readers in a firsthand manner. However, around the same time, more Chinese students on Qing government scholarships studied in Japan rather than Western countries. Indeed, a significant portion of the Chinese public acquired familiarity with Western sexology from reading translations of Japanese sexological literature. Steinach’s work was mentioned, for instance, in Wang Jueming’s translation of The Principle of Sex (1926), originally written in Japanese. The book pitched Steinach’s studies, along with other transplantation experiments, as evidence for the direct influence of glandular secretions on the development of secondary sex characteristics. After briefly summarizing Steinach’s experimental procedures, the author was convinced that “secondary sex characteristics can easily switch between the two sexes.”26
Beside the Steinach experiments, scientific journals brought to light other reports of animal sex change. In 1924 Lingnan Agricultural University’s Agricultural Monthly introduced the writings of Francis Albert Eley Crew (1886–1973), a professor of animal genetics based in the Animal Breeding Research Department at the University of Edinburgh. An article titled “The Sex Change of a Hen” (雌雞之變性, ciji zhi bianxing) impressed its readers with a story of how a hen, as witnessed by Crew, turned into a rooster at the age of three and half. Upon dissection, Crew found “a rounded growth next to the uterus” that was “roughly seven centimeters long” and “blue in color and covered with yellow spots.” Next to the growth, he came across something that “did not look all that different from a testicle” (與睪丸無異, yu gaowan wuyi) with an identical counterpart located symmetrically opposite to it. The seminal epithelium connected to the testes seemed “identical to what can be found in the reproductive organ of normal roosters,” and apparently they even had the capacity to produce sperm cells, though scarce in quantity. The main difference between the genital structure of this sex-changed hen and that of the normal roosters, according to Crew’s observation, was that the testicles seemed “smaller.”27 Crew’s work was later picked up by a Chinese journalist in the 1930s to give weight to the thesis that “among all animals, chickens are the ones most frequently found to undergo sex transformation.”28
Whereas biologists such as Zhu Xi had begun to interpret hermaphroditism through genetic theories, others who espoused the endocrinological model investigated intersexuality in a new light. For example, the zoologist He Qi (何琦), a graduate of Yenching University and a biology instructor at Cheeloo University in Shandong, published an article in 1928 titled “Intersexuality and Hormones” (中間性與內分泌, zhongjianxing yu neifenmi). He began with a seemingly banal insight that the scientific study of animal intersexuality had become increasingly popular in the last decade or so. His discussion focused on the findings of Frank Rattray Lillie (1870–1947), an American embryologist best known for his work on freemartins—the infertile, masculinized female cotwin of a male calf. In 1917 Lillie published his now-classic study in which he showed that these infertile female mammals, though born with both male reproductive organs and nonfunctioning ovaries, were in fact genetically female, but their development had been altered by the hormones of their twin brother, resulting in masculine behavior and development. He Qi highlighted Lillie’s findings to confirm the importance of sex endocrinology: “the sex of animals is determined at the moment of conception, but the sexual organs depend largely on the gonadal secretions for development.” In other words, rather than reinforcing the division between the genetic view of sex and the hormonal view, Lillie’s work helped to reconcile this tension by proving that the two worked in concert.29
Foreign animal sex-change experiments continued to attract the interest of Chinese readers into the 1930s and 1940s. In June 1934 Guo Shunpin (郭舜平), the translator of Maurice Cornforth’s Dialectical Materialism (1952), reviewed the startling hypothesis postulated by the Russian cell biologist Nicholas K. Koltzoff that “electric current determines sex.” Koltzoff founded the Institute of Experimental Biology in Moscow in 1917 and was widely recognized by his peers as the first to consider a chromosome as “a giant molecule” and, later, a critic of Trofim Lysenko (1898–1976). He put forth a theory of cellular mechanism involving the existence of an electric “force field” in the cell and, building on the assumption that the Y chromosome played a sex-determining function, suggested that the sperm cell may be responsive to electric stimulation.30 His hypothesis acquired international acclaim because it carried the potential of enabling “stock raisers to breed for male or female as they wish” and, in Guo’s words, even the “artificial manipulation of human sex.”31 According to Popular Science Monthly, “[Koltzoff’s] discovery now is being tested on an elaborate scale at government farms in Russia,” and he may have “found the answer to the age-old riddle of determining sex.”32 Seven years later the sex-change experiments on swordtail fishes conducted by two biologists at the University of Southern California, E. M. Baldwin and H. S. Goldin, proved earlier understandings of sex hormone functions. Baldwin and Goldin injected male sex hormones into female swordtails and observed the latter’s eventual development of a sword, a characteristic unique to male swordtail fishes. Yun (雲), who wrote about the experiment in Chinese, attributed this sex reversal to “the transformation of the reproductive gland by way of male hormonal injections.”33 Stories of animal sex metamorphosis, induced experimentally or not, fascinated Chinese readers because they debunked a static framework of dual sexes that drove much of the earlier feminist discourse on gender equality.
The Theory of Universal Bisexuality
By the late 1920s the idea that maleness and femaleness were flexible fit nicely with the new endocrinological model of sex. If biological sex was “determined” not through gonadal presence or chromosomal makeup but through glandular secretions, scientists began to question a fixed and immutable definition of sex. In German-speaking circles, thinkers such as Sigmund Freud and Otto Weininger (1880–1903) vehemently challenged the Victorian notion of separate and opposite sexes.34 Social context mattered too. In the late Qing and early Republican periods, Christian missionaries created a steadily increasing measure of educational opportunities for women, and after the 1911 revolution the Nationalist government recommended for the first time coeducation policies in the national educational system.35 As more women pursued higher education, entered the labor force, and participated in social reform movements, Chinese leaders voiced the importance of granting women greater access to the public and political spheres. The new emphasis on gender equality construed men and women as more similar than different. At the same time, the influx of new, Western-derived categories like “feminism” and “homosexuality” called attention to masculine women and effeminate men.36
Against this backdrop, Chinese intellectuals who were drawn to Western natural sciences began to shift their vision of sex. As accounts of foreign research on sex change became available in the bourgeoning print culture, they started to cast doubt on the old notion of binary opposite sexes. Meanwhile, in the 1920s and 1930s Western biochemists learned to extract and detect hormones from the organs and urine of animals, and they soon discovered that men and women had both male and female hormones. Moreover, they found that the chemical compositions of male and female sex hormones highly resembled one another. It made sense in this social and intellectual context to consider all humans as having the potential of being both male and female. Early twentieth-century scientists, in China and abroad, gradually pushed for the argument that male and female were absolute forms that did not exist in reality. What the new wave of scientific findings showed, they said, was that everyone “fell somewhere between the two idealized poles.”37 All females had elements of the male; all males had elements of the female. By the 1930s a significant number of Chinese writers joined experimental scientists in Europe and America to biologize the human body as inherently two-sexed. As the editor of Sex Science proclaimed in 1936, “today, with an expanding corpus of empirical evidence, science tells us definitively that the distinction between the sexes is only a matter of relative difference (性的區別只是程度的差異, xingde qubie zhishi chengdu de chayi).”38 News of surgical attempts at changing sex, along with the emergent hormonal model that conceptualized sex as a malleable construct, posited a new scientific theory of universal bisexuality.
From the start, the introduction of bisexual theory to China relied on the writings of Japanese sexologists.39 Again, the Chinese translation of The Principle of Sex included an elaborate discussion of human innate bisexuality and reviewed the work of Western theorists who supported the view. The chapter on “Sex in Theory and Sex in Practice” listed numerous human conditions that blurred the biological boundaries of gender: men with overdeveloped breasts, women with flat chests; men without facial hair, women with mustaches; men with female-shaped pelvis, women with male-shaped pelvis; men with feminine throats, women with manly throats; women whose voice, facial appearance, temperament, and body hair became mannish after regular menstruations have stopped; and, most notably, women who were “conspicuously masculinized” because they have never conceived. Despite how exceptional these physical conditions may be, the author stressed, “even normal men and women actually possess latent aspects of the opposite sex in their body.” The exceptional cases, then, were simply “extreme” occurrences of the universal bisexual condition. Such biological categories as pure male or pure female only existed in theory, the author insisted, as “they do not exist in reality.”40
The names of renowned Western proponents of the bisexual theory found their way into the book, including Otto Weininger, Robert Müller, Rosa Mayreder, Solomon Herbert, and Edward Carpenter, among others. Out of this group, the name most frequently associated with the theory of bisexuality was Weininger.41 Although Weininger’s ideas anchored most of the discussions, the book closed by highlighting another influential study of the time, The Sex Complex by the British gynecologist William Blair-Bell (1871–1936).42 In siding with Bell’s clinical findings, the author drove home the theory of biological bisexuality: “Each individual has the inner qualities and external morphology of both sexes to varying degrees. All men and women are mixtures of the essential elements of both sexes.”43 What this new theory of sex challenged was the feasibility of discrete categories. To proponents of this view such as Weininger and Blair-Bell in Europe or the author and translator of The Principle of Sex in East Asia, average men were merely made up of a higher portion of “maleness,” or traits typically associated with men, and a lower level of “femaleness,” or qualities normally associated with women. Normal women, on the other hand, were the combination of predominant female elements and a subordinate composition of maleness. Everyone had the potential of expressing both ways. To quote from The Principle of Sex again, all men and women were simply variants of how certain traits “receded” to the background or “lay latent.”44 In the 1920s and 1930s scientific investigations of sex moved toward “an emphasis on individual variation in which categories blended into spectra or continua.” The popular view of sex shifted, that is, “from the categorical to the scalar.”45
Some Chinese sexologists went directly to the original English sources. In 1928 the Shanghai Commercial Press published a translation of Solomon Herbert’s The Physiology and Psychology of Sex. Covering both the biology and psychology of sex, the book offered a comprehensive overview of the main intellectual currents in Western sexology. As discussed in the last chapter, many iconoclastic May Fourth intellectuals had already written extensively about European sexological ideas of homosexuality. By the time the translation of Herbert’s work appeared, the notion of “sexual inversion” (性的顛倒, xing de diandao) invoked by Havelock Ellis, Sigmund Freud, and other sexologists frequently appeared in the vernacular lexicon of urban China. In 1929, for instance, a tabloid article identified a handful of foreign cross-dressers as individuals embodying “sexual inversion.”46 Meanwhile, Chinese writers often mentioned Edward Carpenter’s idea of the “intermediate sexes” to interpret the existence of feminine men, mannish women, and other in-between types.47 By the time that the Commercial Press published a Chinese edition of Herbert’s book, the subtle distinction between somatic and psychological sex had already gained some footing in the popular consciousness.
From reading the Chinese translation of Herbert, one could easily relate contemporaneous findings in endocrinology to the new quantitative definition of sex and the theory of universal bisexuality. “Recent scholars have come to the consensus that rather than assuming sex as something determined by reproductive organs, it is more correct to say that sex is determined by the various combinations of the internal secretions. Any individual with one of the sex glands (testes or ovaries) simultaneously maintains the characteristics of the opposite sex [同時保有他方異性之特徵, tongshi baoyou tafang yixing zhi tezheng].”48 These words prepared the reader for a fuller exposition of what the Western sexologists called “sexual inversion.” In the same paragraph, bodily sex and psychological traits were carefully distinguished to challenge a dominant perspective of this clinical condition: “The general public tends to consider male sexual inverts as individuals with a male soma and a female psyche [肉體為男性而精神為女性, routi wei nanxing er jingsheng wei nüxing], but this view is too extreme and simplistic. In fact, the entire mental state [of the male sexual invert] is not female: only their sexual desire and emotions are female and the remaining parts [of their bodily constitution] remain normal.”49
Unlike most European sexologists, Herbert did not use the soma/psyche distinction to support a straightforward explanation of sexual inversion. Influenced by the emergent perspective of sex as quantitative rather than qualitative, he found fault with the existing interpretation of “a female soul trapped inside a man’s body.” The theory of human bisexuality posited that everyone was a mixture of both sexes. Thus, the paragraph continued: “However, individuals with female characteristics are not a minority even among men, and yet most of them do not have perverted tendencies [變態的傾向, biantai de qingxiang]. Therefore, the difference between feminine men and male sexual invert is all the more difficult to discern based on a single criterion of the presence or absence of female sexual emotion [是否具有女性之性的感情之一點決定之, shifou juyou nüxing zhixing de ganqing zhi yidian jueding zhi]. Similarly, distinguishing sexual inverts from normal [men] is not an easy task.”50 So subtle and confusing was the distinction between normal and pathological individuals. The translation of The Physiology and Psychology of Sex allowed Chinese readers to rethink some of the fundamental issues underlying the subject of same-sex desire, scientific narratives about abnormality, and the nature of sex itself.
Overall, Chinese thinkers reacted to the theory of universal bisexuality in diverging ways. A small, more conservative group adhered to the idea of sexual dimorphism and construed it as an evolutionary benefit for ensuring procreation in higher-level organisms.51 In contrast, a more substantial group of writers pursued the view that sex was a delicate balance of maleness and femaleness. In his 1929 essay, “The Problem of Homosexuality,” Yang Youtian, for instance, asked, “If the male body contains latent degrees of femaleness and the female body contains dormant elements of maleness, what constitutes true male or female?”52 His own response to the question was, “In fact, the categories of male and female are convenient shorthands for describing morphology,” and both men and women should be more accurately understood as “compound sex” (復性, fuxing), meaning that each individual “embodies elements of both sexes.”53 Also writing about homosexuality, Wang Xianli agreed in 1944: “Recent scientific findings suggest that there is no clear boundary that can be drawn to differentiate sex in animals and humans. Female properties exist in male bodies; similarly, male properties can be found in female bodies. In other words, a 100 percent man or a 100 percent woman does not exist—there are no perfect or absolute sexes in the world. Scientists have experimented with glandular transplantations, and it is now possible to transform sex accordingly.”54
Around the same time, a Wanxiang (萬象) article drew on the bisexual theory to explain the sex-change experience of the American Barbara Ann Richards, who was born Edward Price Richards and shared a dorm with Virginia Prince (born Arnold Lowman) at Pomona College in the 1930s.55 The article described Richards’s condition as an example of hormonal imbalance: “A doctor surmised that Richards was born dual sexed,” but “as the level of female hormones in his body rose, they took precedence and suppressed his male hormones.” Since “the human body comprises both sexes,” the article cautioned, “anyone could follow a similar fate.”56
Ironically, as the conceptualization of sex became less rigid, the fluidity of bisexual theory and the traction of the hormonal model led some proponents to argue that homosexuality may be “cured” with gonadal transplantation surgeries. The renowned German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, for instance, referred male homosexual patients to Eugen Steinach and Richard Mühsam (1872–1938), a Dresden gynecologist, for treatment via testicular implants.57 In China, an article that appeared in Sex Science in September 1936 asserted that “we have a scientific way of correcting the constitutional bisexuality of homosexuals: by manipulating male and female hormonal levels, we can consolidate greater distinctions between the desired maleness or femaleness among the sufferers of this illness.”58 The theory of biological bisexuality, then, promoted a definition of sex that seemed more malleable than before, but precisely due to its flexibility, the theory also allowed for the buttressing of conservative attitudes toward sex and sexuality.
Castration and the Feminized Male Sex
However startling or luring, new discoveries in sex hormones, animal sex change, and universal bisexuality convinced some Chinese sexologists in part because they shared aspects of the existing mentalité. Or, to put it differently, the comprehensibility of these foreign ideas had to do with the specific intellectual and political agendas of Chinese modernizing thinkers and social commentators at the time. After the founding of the new Republic, long-standing corporeal practices in China such as footbinding and castration came to be denounced in elite and popular discourses as unfavorable reminders of the past. The first chapter of this book explored how the normative regime of eunuchism came to an end through the lens of the history of knowledge production about the castration operation itself. This section highlights another dimension of its social and cultural demise: how the body of eunuchs provided a concrete example from traditional Chinese culture that enabled Republican Chinese sexologists to focus their attention on and grasp new Western theories of sex. This regendering of eunuchs as feminized males signaled an epistemological departure from the cultural norms of Chinese castration according to which eunuchs retained a distinct masculine identity in late imperial political culture.59
Most of the key figures who subscribed to the theory of universal bisexuality brought up the example of eunuchs to elucidate the glandular model of sex. Again, Gu Shoubai played an important role in disseminating new findings in hormonal biology in this period. In The Internal Secretions, Gu noted that boys at a relatively young age do not have “reproductive desires” (生殖慾, shengzhiyu) and their bodily makeup “is similar to girls.” The rapid development of male sexual characteristics, Gu pointed out, “begins only at the age of sixteen, when a boy enters a stage of human development that is typically called puberty.” At this point, a boy develops “the desire for and fondness of the opposite sex.”60 All of this, however, can be altered by castration:
The removal of testicles will bring obstacles to the physical and mental development of a boy. Even when he reaches puberty, his body will not undergo those physical changes that are uniquely male [男性特有之變化, nanxing teyou zhi bianhua]. Specifically, his muscles are less stringent; his strength is weaker; his body accumulates more fat; he has less body hair; the growth of his larynx stops and his vocal folds do not get any longer or thicker, and as a result his vocal production is similar to that of adolescents; he has no reproductive desire; his mental reaction is slower than normal; and he lacks both moral judgment and the will to compete.61
No other corporeal figures could exemplify these postcastration changes better than the “eunuchs in our country’s past” and the “castrati in southern Europe.” For Gu, Chinese eunuchs (宦官, huanguan) and Italian castrati were “concrete human examples of castration—one created for the purpose of preventing promiscuity [防其淫亂, fangqi yinluan] and the other for the purpose of maintaining a beautiful voice [保其妙音, baoqi miaoyin].”62
By the 1930s, most scientists and doctors considered the biology of castration central to a solid understanding of the endocrine system. In his Sex Science essay “Sex Endocrinology,” Li Yongnian provided a lengthy discussion of castration and its physical consequences before bringing up the testicular transplantation “sex-reversal” (性之交換, xing zhi jiaohuan) experiments. With reference to Chinese eunuchs, he corrected the popular view that the main goal of castration was to eliminate a man’s vitality.
Speaking of castration (去勢, qushi), one immediately thinks of the eunuchs of the despotic past (專制時代的宦官, zhuanzhi shidai de huanguan). Eunuchs serve in the imperial palace. In order to maintain order and avoid promiscuity inside the palace, where many women resided, castration operations were performed to eradicate the vitality of these men (使他們失去一切精力, shi tamen shiqu yiqie jingli). Yet in fact, serving the emperor, eunuchs often intervene in political affairs, sometimes even disrupting the selection of the heir of the imperial throne.… As such, far from lacking vitality, eunuchs possess a tremendous degree of energy that deserves our critical attention!63
Li also alluded to the castrated slaves in ancient Rome, the Skoptsy (the self-castrated) sect in Tsarist Russia, and European castrati singers as comparable examples of a corporeal practice aiming to “maintain a pure body by way of severing the reproductive organ.”64 Since a tradition of castrating animals for agricultural purposes had long existed in China, Li went so far as to ponder: “Did China invent castration? Or was it first invented in Central Asia?”65
For endocrinological experts like Li, the discovery of gonadal secretions pulled people out of “barbaric” and superstitious beliefs and clarified the reasons for castration-induced bodily change. Testicles were not only the “source of sexual development” but also “a prominent variable in bodily growth.” Such an understanding, for example, made it possible to link castration to sexual desire. According to Li, castration would “significantly reduce, but not remove entirely, the erotic interest of any higher-level species with intercourse experience.” In contrast, eunuchs, “although castrated,” would “still feel strong erotic urges by imagining a beautiful lady standing next to him” because “the sexual desire of humans differs from that of animals.” Above all, the physical transformations of the body offered indisputable evidence for the ways in which hormonal stimulation mediated the effects of castration. “If one is castrated at a relatively young age,” Li wrote, “his bodily and psychological developments will be stumped, physical traits will become feminized or intersexual, muscles will turn flabby, and body fat will accumulate significantly.” “Based on the above descriptions,” Li’s point was simply that “castration is against nature, so it should not be executed without sufficient justification.” Endocrine biology handed critics such as Li a new set of vocabularies for foraying into the question of eunuchs’ sexual urges and, relatedly, condemning the practice of castration as “not only cruel, but also harmful to individuals, families, society, and the country.”66
Whatever the perceived value of eunuchs’ existence in imperial China, their image as “emasculated” or “effeminate” living creatures remains pervasive in and out of China.67 If eunuchs were to be recognized as historical agents with some degree of masculinity at all, they were often cast as feminized men with abhorring bodily traits. The discovery of chemical messengers that linked the sex glands to conventional gender morphologies unlocked the secret, for many, of those physical and psychological attributes that observers typically identified with eunuchs. Zhang Luqi (張祿祺), an expert on human development, thus observed in 1941: “The eunuchs of ancient China, the monks of medieval Europe, and the individuals sterilized for their deep-rooted depravity or hereditary diseases in Europe and the United States are all known as castrated persons [閹人, yanren]. After the operation, castrated men develop abnormally and become androgynous, so that they have a gentler temperament, a bulkier physique, a squeakier voice, more body fat, less facial hair, and brighter and more tender skin.”68
These feminizing effects, according to Zhang, precipitated from testicular elimination. Following this logic, the European glandular transplantation experiments “unambiguously confirmed the [sex-]dictating status of hormones.”69 Some scientists such as Chen Yucang, a Japan- and German-educated doctor and proponent of the body-as-machine metaphor, emphasized the “psychological consequences” (精神上的變化, jingshengshang de bianhua) of castration: “most eunuchs are warm and gentle without any degree of masculine temperament, and this is because a particular type of endocrine secretion is missing from their bodies.”70 In contrast to Li Yongnian’s view, Chen depicted “our country’s eunuchs in the past” as lacking “mental sharpness,” “the ability to discern the good from the evil,” and “competitive mindset.”71 Figuratively and materially, the eunuch’s body became an engine of transcultural exchange, a token of historic signifier, and a conduit for the material epistemology of knowledge that allowed scientific thinkers in China to grasp and comprehend the rapidly evolving science of the internal secretions.
Symmetrical discussions about the castrated male body can be found in Chinese translations of foreign sexological texts. In Wang Jueming’s translation of The Principle of Sex, an analysis of the effects of human castration followed the section on Steinach’s sex transplantation surgeries. Since Steinach experimented only on animals, the implications of his studies for humans seemed worth expounding upon: “eunuchs who are castrated at youth” have “underdeveloped genitals.” Their “vocal folds do not elongate,” so “the pitch of their voice is high like women’s.” Their body “undergoes greater fact accumulation” and “grows lesser facial and body hair.” Their pelvis would “not grow properly, just like that of a child.” Their psychological condition rendered them “as gentle and sweet as a virgin youth [溫順如處子, wenshun ru chuzi].”72 Similar statements appeared in the Chinese edition of Herbert’s Physiology and Psychology of Sex: “eunuchs who are castrated at youth [幼年去勢之宦官, younian qushi zhi huanguan] experience no change in ‘vocal production,’ as they still maintain a voice with high pitch like the voice of young children.”73 In 1936 the Chinese translation of an essay by a British physician listed the following qualities to describe the effects of castration: “the degeneration of external and internal reproductive organs,” “scrotum retraction,” “impotence,” “penis shrinkage,” “lack of facial and body hair,” “voluminous hair growth,” “undetectable view of the larynx,” “body fat accumulation,” “abnormal pelvis growth,” and “breast enlargement.” The essay argued that the “feminization of males” (男子變成女性, nanzi biancheng nüxing) and the “masculinization of females” (女子變成男性, nüzi biancheng nanxing) were accompanied by not only physical changes but also “psychological sex reversals” (精神異性化, jingsheng yixinghua) following the surgical removal of gonads.74
Although these quotes were presumably taken from works originally written in Japanese or English, the translators’ cautious word choice in translating “eunuchs” into Chinese—yanhuan (閹宦) and huanguan (宦官)—unravels a long-standing cultural lexicon deeply rooted in the norms of dynastic Chinese social life. But the invocation of these terms in a conceptual horizon shaped by the contours of Western natural science also points to something more: a new consideration of castration as a scientific procedure and eunuchism as a bodily state that defied the fixed nature of sex binarism. This conceptual reorientation would easily alienate Chinese commentators on the subject before the twentieth century (see chapter 1). In the modern period, the body of eunuchs became a “text” whose corporeal feminization suggested that men could become more female. As much as the new biochemical model of sex may have helped to explain the effects of human castration, the castrated male body conferred a concrete material basis for the circulation, transaction, and articulation of new truth claims about sex and its transmutability/embodiment in the transition from late imperial to national Republican China.
Hermaphroditism as a Natural Anomaly
Escalated publicity on surgical attempts at changing sex, on top of a novel biochemical interpretation of the castrated body, led to a renewed interest in natural reproductive anomalies. To readers of the modern sexological literature, castration was an unambiguous case in point of human-induced alteration of sex. For centuries, however, Chinese physicians endorsed various perspectives on individuals born with ambiguous genitalia. The first systematic medical categorization of intersexed bodies appeared in the late Ming, with Li Shizhen’s listing of five “non-males” and five “non-females” in his compendium of material medica, Bencao gangmu (1596).75 As Charlotte Furth has suggested, Qing physicians for the most part adhered to, or at least systematically referenced, Li’s classification.76 As chapter two has shown, the situation started to change with the growing popularity of Western-style anatomical texts since the mid-nineteenth century. By the Republican period, Chinese life scientists readily filtered the competing perspectives and experimental findings on hermaphroditism—even on the microscopic scale of genes and chromosomes—from Europe and the United States.77
In the 1920s, though, some popularizers of sexology boiled down complex scientific theories for a general readership. Toward the end of his widely read ABC of Sexology, Chai Fuyuan included a chapter on “Abnormal Sexual Lifestyle” (畸形性生活, jixing xingshenghuo). The chapter focused on four topics in particular: “incomplete male growths” (男性發育不全, nanxing fayu buquan), “incomplete female growths” (女性發育不全, nüxing fayu buquan), “ambiguous genital sex” (男女性別不明, nannü xingbie buming), and “homosexuality” (同性戀愛, tongxing lian’ai).78 In the sections on incomplete male and female growths, Chai borrowed from Li Shizhen’s categorization to explain human reproductive anomalies in Western anatomical terms. On “incomplete male growths,” Chai wrote:
The incomplete growth of male reproductive organs is a phenomenon commonly known as “natural castration” (天閹, tianyan). There are several types of natural castration. The first type is characterized by the incomplete development of external genitalia. Even with fully functional testicles and the biological capacity to produce sperm, people with this condition cannot mate due to the small size of their penis. The second type is exactly the opposite: although people with this condition are physically capable of mating, they lack sexual motivation and the physiological ability to produce sperm. The last type is a combination of both: people with this condition have incomplete internal and external sexual organs. Internally, their bodies do not possess functional testes; externally, they have an immature penis.79
Chai laid out a commensurate discussion of “incomplete female growths”:
Women with an incomplete set of reproductive organs are typically called “stone maidens” (石女, shinü). The original meaning of “stone maiden” refers to women with genital anomalies of the sort that would make sexual penetration impossible. Eventually, the term was broadened to be associated more generally with incomplete female growths. With the external type, the genital organ is completely in an impenetrable state. It may be that the hymen is too thick so that it covers the vagina, or the labia is too thick and the vaginal opening too small making sexual penetration impossible. With the internal type, the individual either lacks ovaries or lacks ones that are functional, resulting in the absence of sexual motivation and the reproductive organs without proper female functions.80
Interestingly, none of the physical conditions Chai described here would be sufficiently considered “hermaphroditic” by modern standards in Western biomedicine; rather, he merely reiterated a long-standing concern in traditional Chinese medicine for the generational capacity of individuals.81 For Chai, persons with the kind of physical symptoms and sexual experience outlined here would still be treated as reproductively anomalous even if their genital sex per se was not necessarily ambiguous.
But Chai went further and enriched his catalog with modern scientific linings. In his discussion of the congenital malformations of the reproductive system, he included an additional section on “ambiguous genital sex.”
“Ambiguous Genital Sex” refers to people with external male genitalia and internal female reproductive system or with external female genitalia and internal male reproductive system, also known as “half yin-yang persons.” If a man has a penis with a slight vaginal opening, he is called “male half yin-yang” (男性半陰陽, nanxing banyinyang). If a woman has an enlarged clitoris with reduced vagina and labia, she is called “female half yin-yang” (女性半陰陽, nüxing banyinyang). If both ovaries and testes are internally present and a penis, labia, and a vagina are externally present, if an individual is physically capable of engaging in sexual intercourses with both men and women and experience organism from them, and if both the male and the female sex appear in the same body, this condition is called “bisexual half yin-yang” (兩性半陰陽, liangxing banyinyang).82
Using Chinese words with which lay readers felt more comfortable (i.e., nan and nü, yin and yang) than entirely foreign medical terms, Chai implicitly distinguished pseudo-hermaphrodites from true human hermaphrodites. His classification provided a way in which people could understand those new modern anatomical concepts, such as penis, vagina, testes, and ovaries based on traditional ideas about human reproduction.83 The category of “male half yin-yang” was endorsed by such reputable physicians as Ding Fubao (丁福保, 1874–1952), who later published a case study of a patient with both a 3.5-cm-long penis and a vaginal opening with hidden testicles.84 The biological implications of such categories as “male half yin-yang,” “female half yin-yang,” and “bisexual half yin-yang” blended nicely with the emergent theory of constitutional bisexuality. At least in these rare cases of reproductive anomalies, the physical makeup of the human body was portrayed as innately dual sexed.
More often, Chinese urban intelligentsia assumed a more rigorous approach: to avoid simplifying scientific information. In this spirit, the self-proclaimed natural scientist Liu Piji (劉丕基) treated the topic of human hermaphroditism with finer detail in his Common Misinterpretations of Biology (人間誤解的生物, Renjian wujie de shengwu). The Shanghai Commercial Press published Common Misinterpretations in 1928, and, as the title of the book suggests, it was written to inform a popular audience about general misunderstandings of problems in biology. The motivation behind publishing the book squarely reflected the normative ethos of middlebrow print culture in the aftermath of the May Fourth: that it was important for educated Chinese to move toward a greater appreciation of the epistemological value of Western natural scientific knowledge and away from Confucian philosophy or misguided superstitions (迷信, mixin). Liu authored Common Misinterpretations in order to furnish greater public interest in Western science, such as by straightening out those puzzles of everyday life for which modern biology seemed to offer the most adequate and reliable answers.
For Liu, misconceptions of human sexual oddity reflected a crucial oversight in Chinese knowledge about life. Popular errors and unfounded myths about sexually ambiguous bodies were pervasive, but Liu insisted that they could be displaced only with accurate interpretations of modern biological knowledge. In Chai Fuyuan’s ABC of Sexology, for example, earlier typologies of reproductive anomalies (from traditional Chinese medicine) were invoked to render the modern scientific category of hermaphroditism meaningful. Chai never articulated a neat distinction between “true” and “pseudo-” hermaphroditism, but his differentiation of “male half yin-yang” and “female half yin-yang” from “bisexual half yin-yang” was implicitly informed by it. In contrast, Liu was keen to translate the “true” and “pseudo-” distinction more explicitly into Chinese. He began by collapsing various Chinese labels for human hermaphrodites: “Ci-xiong humans (雌雄人, cixiongren) are also known as yin-yang humans (陰陽人, yinyangren), dual-shaped (二形, erxing), or bisexual abnormality (兩性畸形, liangxing jixing).” Despite this variety, Liu asserted that they all designated a similar biological condition, which could be classified into two main categories: “true ci-xiong humans or true half yin-yang” and “pseudo-ci-xiong humans or pseudo-half yin-yang.”85
Liu further divided pseudo-ci-xiong humans into two subtypes: “male ci-xiong humans” (男性雌雄人, nanxing cixiongren) and “female ci-xiong humans” (女性雌雄人, nüxing cixiongren). According to Liu’s definition, the former label referred to individuals who had “internal male sex glands (with testes),” but, externally, his “genital appearance resembles the female sex”; the second subtype referred to those who had ovaries but with male external genitalia. The physical appearance of male ci-xiong humans resembled a woman and the physical appearance of female ci-xiong humans, a man. This left “true ci-xiong humans” for people born with “both types of male and female sex glands (meaning, having both testes and ovaries).” This unique condition, Liu hastened to add, was referred to as “a man yet a woman, a woman yet also a man” (値男即女值女即男, zhinan jinü zhinü jinan) in the late Ming materia medica Bencao gangmu by Li Shizhen.86 To illustrate his point, Liu reproduced a hand-drawn image of the genial area of female ci-xiong humans (figure 4.1) and a picture of Marie-Madeleine Lefort (1799–1864), a famous female pseudo-hermaphrodite (figure 4.2).87
More so than this classification scheme, Liu devoted a significant part of his discussion to the question of why these congenital malformations occurred in nature. He drew on embryological knowledge to explain the existence of these rare human conditions. Supporting the theory of innate bisexuality, he located their cause in irregular embryonic development. In his words, “the sex glands (referring to testes and ovaries) of the human embryo are identical for men and women.… Sexual differentiation begins only during the second to the third month of fetal development, when the sex glands mature into a finer differentiation between the two sexes. This is also the time when [testicular and ovarian cells] are formed.”88 He noted the “disappearance” of the Müllerian duct in normal male embryonic development and the “disappearance” of the Wolfferian duct in the maturation of the female fetus. Typically, the former embryonic duct developed into uterus, vagina, and fallopian tubes in women, whereas the latter would be transformed into seminal vesicle, epididymis, and vas deferens in men. “The concurrent growth of both ducts,” Liu explained, “would thus produce a true ci-xiong individual.”89 On the other hand, the external genitals of male pseudo-ci-xiong humans were “insufficiently developed,” thus “appearing not as a penis but as a clitoris” (不成陰莖而像女的陰核, bucheng yinjing erxiang nüde yinhe), whereas female pseudo-ci-xiong persons had clitorises that were “irregularly developed” and “appear like a penis” (外觀像是陰莖, waiguan xiangshi yinjing).90
Figure 4.1 “The Genital Area of Female Pseudo-Hermaphrodites” (1928).
Source: Liu (1928) 1935, 84.
The scientific classification and explanation put forth by Liu Piji featured none of the overriding concerns with reproductive potential in traditional medicine. In introducing the modern biomedical divide between “true” and “pseudo-” hermaphrodites, he reworked Li Shizhen’s naturalist observations in the new lexicon of glandular and embryological sciences. Chai’s allusion to Bencao gangmu in his ABC of Sexology, on the other hand, foregrounded those issues of generational capacity that was foundational to the naturalist’s original typology. But whether Liu was more “accurate” than Chai is perhaps less important here. The significance of their writings lies in the fact that they provided Chinese readers the first sustained contact with Western biological interpretations of sexually ambiguous bodies. In the 1920s the hermaphroditic body, like the castrated male body, became a “text” whose corporeal significance helped to anchor a new vision of sex. If the embodied experience of eunuchs exemplified the potential transformation of a man into a feminine subject, true and pseudo-hermaphrodites were the most basic and natural examples of the universal bisexual condition.
Figure 4.2 “The Portrait of the Female Pseudo-Hermaphrodite, Nagdalena Lefort (65 Years of Age)” (1928).
Source: Liu (1928) 1935, 87.
Despite the multiplicity of modernizing attitudes surrounding a new vision of sex, early twentieth-century sexologists remained oblivious to the possibility of complete sex transformation in humans. Even though new findings in endocrinology, accompanied by the biological theory of bisexuality, boosted the notion that men could become female and women could become male, for the most part, Chinese scientists spoke with greater confidence (and ease) of sex metamorphosis in animals only. When they discussed explicit examples of human sexual defects, they focused on eunuchs and hermaphrodites. Indeed, Liu Piji intended his scientific exposition of intersexuality to alleviate any misconceptions about renyao (人妖), for which the best English translations would be “freak,” “fairy,” or “human prodigy.”91 Specifically, he wanted to dismiss the validity of this traditional concept, which had been used in Chinese discourses to describe a diverse spectrum of individuals in ambiguous and, according to him, unscientific ways.
After listing the various categories of human hermaphrodites, Liu remarked that “our country has a long history of calling these individuals ‘freaks’ [怪胎, guaitai] or ‘human prodigy’ [人妖]. Many of them were tortured to death, but even for the fortunate minority who survived, they were never treated as decent human beings.”92 Liu’s message was clear: the long-standing popular rendition of renyao lacked a scientific basis, especially as it led to, for centuries, the ostracizing of natural variants in the human population. Popular errors and myths about the figure of renyao, he argued, should be replaced with modern biological accounts of human intersexuality. Liu concluded his chapter, entitled “Ci-Xiong Humans Misunderstood as Human Prodigies,” with the following remark:
With pseudo-hermaphrodites, it is possible for the male sex to change into a female and the female into a male. His/her inner physiology is usually without any defect, but the outer part is not completely formed. As a result, the body undergoes many changes at puberty, when the outer part fully develops and reveals itself in its true appearance. Traditionally, people did not understand the reasons for these changes and considered men who become women and women who become men demonic. Consequently, records of such phenomena in official histories and popular gazetteers have been ambiguous and lacked specificity. In reality, it is nothing but a very ordinary phenomenon; what is there to be surprised about?93
In Liu’s formulation, then, men and women who turned into the opposite sex were basically pseudo-hermaphrodites and nothing more.
Liu restated this view in Scientific China, one of the leading popular science magazines of the Republican period. In 1934 the magazine featured a question-and-answer section on “What Is the Explanation for Female-to-Male Transformation?” Zi Yin, a reader from Shanghai, had learned about the sudden transformation of a sixteen-year-old French girl named Alice Henriette Acces into a boy. According to Acces’s doctor, orthogonadist Robert Minne, “Henriette Acces has become physiologically male,” and “it is entirely possible, and even probable, that Henri can become a father.”94 Scientific China asked Liu to respond to this foreign incident of sex change that Zi Yin had brought up. Consistent with the reasons provided in his book, Liu described human sex transformation as a natural outcome of pseudo-hermaphroditism. Again, Liu insisted, “men who become women and women who become men are only due to their biological structural defect and should not be considered as freaks.” For people with incomplete external genital formations, including Acces, they may switch sex around the age of fifteen or sixteen. Liu suggested that this was because bodily pathologies and defects usually surfaced at puberty. But how come some individuals with ambiguous genitalia never underwent sex transformation? These individuals, according to Liu, were true hermaphrodites who possessed both normal male and female genitals. To underscore his point, Liu concluded: “True hermaphrodites cannot experience sex change, a possibility limited to pseudo-hermaphrodites. Since Acces is a pseudo-hermaphrodite, she can go through the type of sex change that is also known as female-to-male transformation. Such bodily transformation merely reflects her original masculine trait and should not be deemed as a rare and repulsive event.”95
In depicting hermaphroditism as an example of universal bisexuality and sex transformation as a natural occurrence, Liu bestowed a powerful script through which earlier life histories could be brought to light and reinterpreted. For example, in summer 1931, the Tianjin-based Beiyang Pictorial (北洋畫報, Beiyang huabao) published a short journalist account titled “Sex Change” (性變, Xingbian), in which the contributor Qu Xianguai (曲綫怪) recalled a story of a yin-yang person. In 1908 Zhao Tingfu (趙廷芾), a native of Deqingzhou (德慶州), appeared in public wearing government official boots (官靴, guanxue) but walked in a swishy (扭捏, niunie) way. As Zhao explained to the reporter, he was actually born a girl, required by his parents to pierce his ears and bind his feet. Around the age of ten, however, he became very ill one day with swelling genitals, which turned out to be a symptom of sex switch. Learning that their child had suddenly turned into a boy, his parents immediately unbound his feet, but he confessed that it was not easy to walk at first. By the time that he had assumed an official post, he was already fifty years old and even had grandchildren. According to Qu, Zhao’s sex change could be attributed to the fact that he was a “female yin-yang person” whose “condition worsened” around the time approaching puberty. These “physiological” changes were “most certainly possible” and “factual,” and one did not need to resort to “mythic” (神話, shenhua) explanations or to treat this incident as “fictional.”96
This justification for sex change introduced a compelling distinction between hermaphroditic transformations and the feminizing effects of castration. Such a distinction was meaningful at least to Li Shilian (李士璉), a reader of the Shanghai-based Saturday (禮拜六, Libailiu)—a magazine that epitomized the evolving literary output of the so-called Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies genre (鴛鴦蝴蝶派, yuanyang hudie pai).97 In 1934 Li wrote to the editor of Saturday seeking clarification on something he found confusing. Learning from Mendelian genetics, he was under the impression that sex determination
is established at the time of conception … and has nothing to do with the nurturing environment. However, the world is full of surprises. Recently, the news reported on a man with poor health, whose genital organs became severed from his body after falling ill at the age of 10 and consequently turned into a girl all of a sudden. At the time, only his mother and himself knew about his sex change. However, the truth was revealed later when he was accused of adultery and impregnating his alleged sexual partner. The accusation forced him to come clean with his biology, which made it impossible for him to commit the crime. This case demonstrates that sex is not determined through heredity but is in fact shaped by development. Could you please explain why this is so? Does this person have an abnormal set of reproductive organs? And why can he suddenly turn into a woman by way of genital dismemberment? If that is the case, how come eunuchs do not become the female sex after castration? I have also heard that there is a type of individuals that are known as “half man-woman.” How does their biology develop over time? What do their reproductive organs look like?98
The responding editor noted that, although he lacked formal training in physiology and these questions were best left to experts, he had once come across a similar example from Denmark. Again, this case concerned a pseudo-hermaphrodite, who was originally thought to be a man but later, when his female reproductive features predominated, turned into a woman. “As for eunuchs,” the editor added, “they cannot change into the female sex even after genital eradication because the internal makeup of their body remains completely male.”99 This correspondence goes a long way to reveal the growing awareness—among both scientific writers and their readers—of the difference between the genetic and hormonal definitions of sex as well as the distinction between the anatomical sex changes of hermaphrodites and the glandular feminization of eunuchs.
Perhaps the story that epitomized the possibility of sex transformation among intersexed individuals in the 1930s was none other than that of Lili Elbe.100 An acclaimed artist, Elbe was born in Denmark as Einar Wegener and married to illustrator and painter Gerda Gottlieb in 1904. After traveling through Italy and France, the couple settled in Paris, where one day Wegener posed for Gottlieb in women’s clothes and felt surprisingly comfortable in the clothing. The cross-dressed Wegener soon became Gottlieb’s favorite model and adopted the persona “Lili Elbe.” In 1930 Elbe traveled to Germany for a series of sex-reassignment surgeries under the supervision of Magnus Hirschfeld, who by this point had acquired an international reputation for overseeing similar operations at his Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin.101 The book that recounts the transformation of Lili Elbe, Man into Woman: The First Sex Change, appeared in English in 1933, and it was translated into Chinese and serialized in the Shanghai-based magazine Art Life (美術生活, Meishu shenghuo) in 1935.102 The translator, Wei Shifan, echoed Liu Piji’s theory and used Elbe’s intersex condition to justify her sex change.103 Both Chen Yucang and Zhou Zuoren similarly drew on the theory of constitutional bisexuality to underscore the mundane nature of Elbe’s transformation.104 Other accounts in the Chinese press placed Elbe’s experience within a broader framework of natural science, relating this episode to accounts of sex transformation in the Chinese historical record, animal sex-change experiments, and the story of female-to-male Yao Jinping, to which we will return in the next section.105
As embedded and echoed in these popular media discussions, the intention of sexologists like Chai Fuyuan and Liu Piji was, of course, not to generate novel scientific hypotheses about biological malformations but simply to demonstrate the power of modern science to throw light on all aspects of life. In hoping to correct the widespread tendency to demonize and marginalize the renyao figure, Liu in particular implied that human sex change was possible—but only among people born with intersexed conditions. His rendering of human hermaphrodites as normal and benign simultaneously articulated the impossibility of sex transformation in persons with no reproductive deficiencies. Liu’s point was not that human sex reversal was impossible, but just that such a biological phenomenon could be explained with an adequate grasp of modern biological knowledge about natural genital defects. Ultimately, even modernizing voices such as Liu Piji’s did not convey a keen message about the physical change of sex among ordinary (non-intersexed) adults. In the 1920s and early 1930s Chinese scientists entertained the possibility of human sex change and even offered scientific explanations for it, but they oftentimes retreated to biologically anomalous cases such as eunuchs and hermaphroditic subjects. They had yet to articulate a vision of individuals as agents capable of seeking surgical sex transformation for themselves.
A Lightning Strike
The idea that non-intersexed individuals could change their sex began to reach a wider public in the mid-1930s when the press reported on a lady from Tianjin named Yao Jinping, who allegedly turned into a man and changed her name to Yao Zhen (姚震) in 1934. On March 17, 1935, news of Yao’s sex transformation appeared in major papers, including Shenbao (申報) and Xinwenbao (新聞報), and soon became the spotlight of urban public discourses in China. According to Yao’s grandfather, the family lost contact with her father, Yao Yotang (姚有堂), after his army was defeated by the Japanese troops and retreated to Xinjiang. Yao cried day and night and would rarely get out of bed until one night in the late summer of 1934, when a lightning strike hit the roof of their house. Yao suddenly felt something different about her body. On the next morning, she reported her possible sex change to her grandmother, who felt Yao’s covered genital area and was confident that Yao had turned into a man. Her bodily metamorphosis earned the uniform label nühuanan (女化男, woman-to-man) in the media.106
Although surprised by the transition at first, Yao’s grandfather eventually decided to bring her to Yao Yotang’s senior officer, General Li Du (李杜, 1880–1956), who played an important role in defending Northeast China from Japan in the 1930s. They explained the situation to him in Shanghai. On the day before Yao’s news appeared in print, reporters met Yao in person but mainly spoke to her grandfather, who assumed the responsibility of communicating the details of her bodily change to the press. Her grandfather presented several pieces of “evidence” to prove Yao’s former biological femininity, including a diploma indicating Yao’s graduation from a female unisex elementary school in 1930. The most striking evidence that her grandfather showed the reporters were two photographs of Yao taken before and after her sex change (figure 4.3). These photos were printed and distributed in most, if not all, of the newspapers that featured the Yao story.107 Apart from this crucial proof, journalists drew attention to other fragmented hints of femininity, including her pierced ears and slightly bound feet. Given these indications, the headline of Yao’s account in Shenbao read “evidence points to the factual status [of sex change] and awaits examination by experienced physiologists.”108 Xinwenbao described the Yao story as “something similar to a fairy tale” and the evidence brought forth by her grandfather as “nothing like the biji [筆記] notes … but hard facts.”109
On the second day of her publicity, Yao finally opened herself up and narrated her experience to the reporters, in part because they soon considered the details provided by her grandfather “inconsistent.” Yao explained that during her childhood, her life resembled that of an ordinary girl. She underwent menarche at the age of fourteen. One day in the summer of 1934, Yao felt extreme physical discomfort, dizziness, and a notable lack of appetite. She stayed in bed throughout the day until upon hearing a lightning strike in the evening, when her genitals suddenly transformed into the opposite sex. After her grandmother confirmed Yao’s physical change indirectly, Yao was kept in the house for an entire month. Over the course of her recovery, Yao’s chest flattened so that her upper body looked more masculine, and a bulge appeared on her throat that resembled an Adam’s apple. She turned into a man at the age of twenty. According to the account in Shenbao, “these are the biological changes that occurred following the transformation of [her] reproductive organ.”110 Leaking another piece of information about her past, Xinwenbao ran the exposé with the headline “Marriage Arranged Prior to Sex Change Now Canceled.”111
Figure 4.3 “Yao Jinping’s Female-to-Male Transformation” (1935).
Source: Shenbao 1935a, 13.
Upon hearing Yao’s own recollection, enthusiastic reporters jumped to ask about psychological changes. They were eager to find out whether Yao had begun to experience “sexual feelings toward women,” especially in light of her decision to cancel her arranged marriage. Yao expressed unease upon hearing this question, so she refused to respond directly. Instead, she wrote on a piece of paper: “I am currently no different from a normal man. One hundred days after my physical sex change, I started to experience an admiration of some sorts toward other women.” At this point, her grandfather stepped in and told the journalists that although Yao’s genital area had masculinized, it remained underdeveloped. The reporters recommended Yao to undergo a physical examination. But her grandfather insisted that she still needed to rest and recuperate, only after which they may consider a full medical exam. Meanwhile, General Li Du, her father’s senior official, promised to schedule a full physical checkup for Yao. He also expressed a strong willingness to support Yao financially so that she could eventually go back to school.112
On the same day, reporters asked a handful of medical experts to deliver professional opinions on Yao’s case. The most important input came from the president of the National Shanghai Medical College (國立上海醫學院), Yan Fuqing (顏福慶, 1882–1970; figure 4.4). Yan received his medical degree at Yale University and a diploma from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in 1909. Following the fate of many intellectuals in China, he eventually suffered and in fact died in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution. Yan suggested that Yao’s bodily changes were likely symptoms of a “ci becoming xiong” (雌孵雄, cifuxiong) condition, or pseudo-hermaphroditic female-to-male sex transformation. Nonetheless, he insisted, the truth behind Yao’s case could only be confirmed with a thorough physical examination following strict scientific standards. Xu Naili (徐乃禮), the acting chair of the Chinese Medical Association (醫師公會監委), concurred that although a case like Yao’s was indeed rare, the facts remained to be fully uncovered. A definitive diagnosis of Yao’s condition must not be formulated based on unfounded speculations.113
Figure 4.4 Yan Fuqing (1882–1970).
Source: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/颜福庆#/media/File:Yan_Fuqing2.jpg.
On the following day, other interlocutors from the medical profession chimed in. The gynecologist Mao Wenjie (毛文杰) paid Yao a visit on the morning of March 18 and asked to inspect her body carefully. Yao refused to disrobe, so Mao proceeded with an assessment of her genital region in a fully dressed situation, which was identical to the way her grandmother had verified her transformation previously. Based on this indirect observation, Mao conjectured that Yao’s condition was congruent with what doctors normally called “female pseudo-hermaphroditism,” or what was more commonly known in Chinese as “ci becoming xiong.” Mao testified that Yao’s male organ remained underdeveloped because, although he could sense a penis that was immediately erected upon physical contact, he could not detect the presence of testicles. He also called attention to specific residual female traits, such as a large right breast (but a small left one) and a significant amount of vaginal secretion that left a strong odor in her lower body.114
Mao compared Yao to a similar case in 1930 of a man who experienced sex metamorphosis in Hangzhou. The twenty-one-year-old Shen Tianfang (沈天放) had had abdominal pain on a monthly basis since the age of sixteen. By July 1930 the periodic discomfort, which had troubled him for years, reached an unbearable stage, so his mother finally brought him to several doctors for treatment. While some physicians attributed Shen’s condition to intestinal problems, others thought that Shen had contracted some type of venereal disease. Yet still, after a handful of consultations, Shen’s condition only worsened. Finally, in August, Shen and his mother met Dr. Wang Jiren (王吉人) of the Tongren Hospital (同仁醫院) on Qingnian Road (青年路) in Shanghai. Wang specialized in the treatment of sexually transmitted diseases, with a secondary expertise in surgery. He considered Shen’s reproductive organs symptomatic of a congenital defect rather than a venereal infection. Nor did Wang think that there was any problem with Shen’s digestive system. Wang found no testes inside Shen’s scrotum and deemed his enlarged chest area comparable to the size of women’s breasts. Consequently, he gave Shen the diagnosis of “female pseudo-hermaphroditism,” and, as a treatment, he surgically constructed “an artificial vagina” (人工造膣, rengong zaozhi). The Shenbao report claimed that Shen “turned into a woman swiftly” and showed a photograph of Shen’s genital area after the sex-change operation. Therefore, Shen’s medicalized sex transformation provided Mao an important precedent for interpreting Yao Jinping as just another case of female pseudo-hermaphroditism.115
Another physician, named Wang Guning (王顧甯), provided a slightly different diagnosis for Yao’s condition. Wang graduated with a doctorate from the Faculty of Medicine at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and he was a former surgeon at the Beijing Railway Hospital and worked as a neurologist at the Royal Manchester Hospital in England. Wang claimed to have expertise in sexual pathology and interpreted Yao’s incident as one among the many female-to-male sex transformation cases that sat at the forefront of global medical research. Instead of explaining her condition with the popular notion of pseudo-hermaphroditism, Wang introduced a more sophisticated-sounding medical term, “the masculinization of the adrenal gland” (副腎化男體, fushen huananti), to further impress the public with the depth of his professional knowledge. According to Wang, doctors around the world had yet to agree on a consistent set of symptoms for this biological disorder, but it had been identified mainly among women living in the temperate regions. Mature women who had this disorder would undergo bodily changes that made them look like men. However, these changes were typically due to long-term effects of hormonal imbalance. Therefore, Wang contended, Yao’s attribution of her sex change to a lightning strike must be a false illusion as it could not be the actual reason for her transformation. Following other medical experts, Wang concluded that the final word on Yao’s sex change could only be reached after “a licensed practitioner has carefully scrutinized her body.”116
Enthusiastic about the potential breakthroughs that the Yao case may bring to the medical field, all of these experts were careful not to arrive at a conclusive diagnosis too hastily prior to the physical exam. On the day that Yao was transported to the National Shanghai Medical College, its director, Yan Fuqing, met with General Li Du and was surprised to learn that her sex had changed abruptly overnight. According to Yan, the female-to-male transformations resulting from female pseudo-hermaphroditism were typically gradual. In order to figure out what was really going on behind Yao’s self-proclaimed sex change, Yan promised to assign the best practitioners in the hospital to this case, including the chair of the gynecology department, Dr. Wang Yihui (王逸慧), and the chair of the urology department, Dr. Gao Rimei (高日枚).117
Word that Yao’s story was merely a hoax soon shocked the public. On March 21 the Shenbao coverage of Yao’s clinical examination was introduced with the headline “Yao Jinping Is Completely Female.” The Shenbao journalists had confirmed this startling finding with General Li over telephone on the evening of March 20. According to Li, because Yan Fuqing highly valued the groundbreaking prospect of Yao’s case, he assigned six of his best doctors (two Westerners and four Chinese) to conduct a thorough examination of Yao. At nine o’clock in the morning of March 20, they tried to persuade Yao to take off her clothes so that the medical team could examine her body closely, but she persistently refused to cooperate. Eventually, the team had to rely on anesthesia to bring Yao to sleep, and, upon close investigation, the doctors realized that Yao’s body was genuinely female without a slightest hint of genital transformation. This disappointing discovery was confirmed by eleven o’clock in the morning. Pressed by Li immediately afterward, Yao explained that in self-presenting as a man, her sole intent was to join the army in Xinjiang and reconnect with her father. This was not possible for a woman. Li quickly forgave Yao and promised her family an annual support of 300 yuan plus the cost required to send her back to school in Tianjin.118 According to Xinwenbao, the deceiving erected male organ detected (indirectly) by Yao’s grandmother and Dr. Mao Wenjie was nothing more than a bundle of cloth wrapped in a rod-like fashion.119
While news articles put Yao in the spotlight, the Shanghai medical team came under fire as well. Some of their peers felt uneasy about the practice of forcing Yao into an unconscious state. For instance, in the immediate aftermath of Yao’s forced examination, Medicine Review (醫藥評論, Yiyao pinglun) published an article focusing on its legal and ethical implications. The author, likely a medical researcher or practitioner, wrote under the pseudonym Han Gong (憨公) and raised three main objections to the ways in which the Yao case had been handled by the Shanghai medical team. First, human hermaphroditism had been known to the medical profession for centuries, so even if Yao’s condition was confirmed as such, the author asked, “is this finding really that exceptional and unprecedented to be able to advance medical science in significant ways?” Second, the author expressed discomfort at the way the team induced Yao to sleep under the instructions of General Li Du rather than respecting the consent of Yao. The author poignantly asked, “Does General Li Du adequately represent Yao’s interest? What if behind Yao’s refusal to being examined rests a life-threatening reason?” It seemed especially unacceptable to the author that “the hospital went out of their way to sacrifice [Yao’s] free will.” Finally, the doctors should have adhered to an ethical standard that protected rather than breached the confidentiality of a patient’s medical history, but the speed with which the Shanghai team exposed their findings to the public might have made a significant impact on Yao. Who would claim the responsibility, for instance, “if Yao became so emotionally entrenched that she decided to commit suicide?”120 Despite the accelerating interest in the Yao story, some medical professionals found it only right to proceed with caution, value the ethical implications of their work, and resist conforming to public hype.
The Lure of Yao
For the most part, the public viewed Yao Jinping neither as a freak nor as someone embodying the negative connotations conventionally attached to the renyao figure. Instead, when confronted with this highly sensationalized case of sex transformation, Chinese readers reacted in a surprisingly sympathetic tone. In light of the level of publicity that it received, the Yao story provoked interest in nearly every corner of urban Chinese culture in the spring of 1935. In contrast to Yao’s bogus transformation, some magazines claimed, stories of genuine sex change prevailed in foreign countries such as Japan, Egypt, and the United States.121 Above all, the majority of observers endorsed the value of science that was promoted in the sexological literature. Some commentators stressed the importance of gathering sufficient scientific evidence before jumping to any hasty conclusions about Yao’s bodily change; others, following the leading voice of doctors, assumed that her sex change was already real and argued the other way around: Yao’s experience was valuable for unlocking the secret of nature and thus pushing science forward. More often, though, Yao’s ostensible transformation was perceived with a growing sentimentalism that framed her behavior and motivations in extraordinarily positive (usually filial) terms. In the mid-1930s, the press coverage of Yao Jinping generated a “public passion” on an unprecedented scale toward the issue of sex change.122
On March 18, the day after Yao Jinping’s name made headlines in China, a commentary that appeared in Xinwenbao attempted to offset the sudden peak of public interest and anxiety surrounding the Yao story. The writer, Du He (獨鶴), began by pointing out the prevalence of both female-to-male and male-to-female transformations in the Chinese historical record. The popular tendency to dismiss these cases as outright impossible, according to Du He, should be corrected. In fact, around this time another case of female-to-male transformation was widely reported outside China. The message was clear: this coincidence of “Sino-Western reflection” (中西對照, zhongxi duizhao), in the author’s words, suggested that Yao’s experience was not exceptional. Locating the cause of Yao’s transformation in congenital physiological defects, Du He argued against seeing it as an irregular or surprising event. Here the view articulated by Chinese sexologists (such as Liu Piji) in the 1920s had filtered down to the popular level: modern science could throw light on puzzles of life previously less well understood.
Interestingly, Du He insisted that Yao was already a man regardless of his physiology. Apart from the fact that Yao was consistently referred to in the masculine pronoun, “he” (他) instead of “she” (她), the entire discussion proceeded on the assumption that Yao had undoubtedly turned into a man. To Du He, Yao embodied a masculine gender worth praising rather than being disparaged about:
Yao Jinping missed his father deeply when he was a girl. He cried day and night. Now that he has become a man, he promised himself to find and reconnect with his father. It is evident that he is not only filial but also masculine-hearted by nature. People like him and those who are associated with him should be applauded and granted extra love and care. With positive support, he can turn into a “good man” (好男兒, haonan’er). His physiological changes should not be the focus of discussion, which would render him as a biological oddity.
By placing an equal, if not greater, emphasis on gender embodiment, the author differed from the sexological elites who upheld science as the only answer to all aspects of sexual life. Notwithstanding his reinforcement of gender stereotypes, Du He wanted to convey a larger point regarding the societal treatment of people who changed their sex: that their social status should not be stigmatized by scientific narratives of abnormality.123
Others perceived the relationship between science and Yao’s unconventional changeover in a less antagonistic way. According to an article that appeared in the Shanghai tabloid newspaper Crystal (晶報, Jingbao) on March 21, “Research on Female-to-Male Transformation” (女轉男身之研究, nüzhuan nanshen zhi yanjiu), the significance of Yao’s experience and the value of scientific research should be more adequately understood in reciprocal terms. The author, Fang Fei (芳菲), opened with the observation that there had been plenty of historical documentations of sex change in China, “but, without reliable evidence, they are not trustworthy.” Fang claimed that Yao’s transformation, on the other hand, provided a rare and important opportunity for the scientific assessment of similar phenomena. Even “the pierced ears and the bound feet” in Yao’s case “do not constitute solid evidence because they are the result of human labor [人為, renwei].” In contrast, such natural changes in Yao’s physiology as genital transformation, the flattening of breasts, and the development of an Adam’s apple and, according to Fang, “the most surprising observation that all of these were induced by a lightning strike” warranted “further investigation by researchers.”124
By and large, Fang’s discussion endorsed the outlook of scientism bolstered by May Fourth sexologists. In her view, Yao’s case presented researchers and medical doctors a golden opportunity to study the nature of sex transformation based on hard evidence and, by extension, to advance the status of the Chinese scientific community. Because actual human sex change was “such a rare event in life” (人生難得之遭逢, rensheng nande zhi zaofeng), Fang encouraged experts in medicine and biology to not let this opportunity slip. Similar to Du He, Fang’s assumption here, before knowing the eventual outcome of Yao’s story, was that Yao had already become male. But unlike Du He, Fang did not take science as a powerful force of cultural authority that necessarily pathologized and marginalized the social status of people like Yao Jinping. Fang argued instead that precisely due to its rarity, Yao’s unique experience should actually make her proud after “abandoning any feeling of shame and offering [herself] as a candidate for scientific research.”125
At the peak of Yao’s publicity, some tabloid writers followed the leads of earlier sexologists and brought to public discourse similar bodily conditions, such as hermaphroditism and eunuchism. In a Crystal article entitled “Reminded of A’nidu Because of Yao Jinping,” the author, Xiao Ying (小英), recalled a lady named A’nidu from the Shanghai Courtesan House after learning about Yao’s story. A’nidu, who passed away a few decades before the Yao incident, turned out to be the foster parent of the famous Shanghainese courtesan Wendi Laoba (文第老八). According to Xiao Ying, A’nidu’s body was masculinized in ways similar to Yao’s transformation: she “had a yang presence but a yin face,” and “she wore women’s clothes to emulate a ci [female] appearance, yet her large physique resembled a man.” When A’nidu was still alive, many assumed that she was an “underdeveloped man” (發育未全之男子, fayu weiquan zhi nanzi). Xiao Ying regretted that A’nidu’s body was not subjected to postmortem examination. For Xiao Ying, the difference between a man and a woman (男女之別, nannü zhibie) could not be determined solely based on genital appearance: the internal structures of the reproductive system mattered, too. Writing in a language similar to Chai Fuyuan’s notorious ABC of Sexology (especially his discussion of “incomplete male growth”), Xiao Ying applied some of his sexological ideas about natural reproductive anomalies to the case of A’nidu.126
With respect to Yao, Xiao Ying’s main point was that any claim put forth about her sex change could only be inconclusive prior to a thorough medical exam. “Although Yao Jinping is publicly known to have transformed from yin to yang,” Xiao Ying carefully asserted, “her lower body parts have not been properly investigated. The claims that her grandfather, Yao Qingpu, made about her penile development have not been verified. Most doctors judge the case to be the ‘ci becoming xiong [雌孵雄, cifuxiong]’ type, but it seems to be too early to draw this conclusion.” Unlike Du He and Fang Fei, Xiao Ying did not take for granted Yao Jinping’s sex transformation. Xiao Ying brought up A’nidu precisely to underscore the importance of a careful physical checkup, especially in order to achieve a reliable assessment of Yao’s anatomical status. “It would be most welcome,” Xiao Ying wrote, if “the determination of Yao Jinping as either ci or xiong by doctors” could “be reported in various newspapers and print venues.” In arguing that the result of Yao’s sex determination should be publicized rather than emphasizing her marginal and stigmatized status, Xiao’s intention, similar to the previous two writers, was to promote the value of science in an age of social and political uncertainties.127 Another article embraced this scientific faith by criticizing the media’s emphasis on a “lightning strike” and a “strange dream” as ungrounded explanations for Yao’s transformation.128 This echoed some of the criticisms leveled by medical experts about superstitious claims.
Xiao Ying also avowed that the whole publicity on Yao Jinping brought back memories of eunuchs. Four days after the article on A’nidu appeared, she contributed another piece to Crystal called “Reminded of Eunuchs Because of Yao Jinping’s Female Body.” As reflected in its opening sentence, news of Yao’s unchanged female sex was widely reported by this point: “The female status of the self-proclaimed female-to-male Yao Jinping was confirmed after being medically examined by a group of seven doctors—Chinese and Western—at the National Shanghai Medical College.” But Xiao Ying did not offer a straightforward rendition of what happened. “The doctors discovered that her fake male genital appearance was made possible by a phallic-shaped bundle of cloth and not the result of an actual transformation of the reproductive organ. This bears striking similarities to the castration surgeries operated on eunuchs for the immediate effect of dismemberment [若昔之太監淨身脫然而落也, ruoxi zhi taijian jingshen tuoran erluo ye]. [Upon uncovering the truth behind Yao’s sex change,] Professor Yan Fuqing and his medical team must have enjoyed a good laugh.”129
Yao Jinping reminded Xiao Ying of castration in both realistic and metaphoric ways. Realistically, Yao’s female body was laid bare in front of medical experts like a eunuch’s body lacking a penis. In Xiao Ying’s metaphoric formulation, the doctors’ discovery of Yao’s true sex became a performative restaging of castration itself—the public enactment of a medical procedure that “removed” Yao’s highly publicized male identity. Whether Yao Jinping was reminiscent of the hermaphroditic body (via A’nidu) or the allegorical experience of castration (via eunuchs), her intention to become a false male never abhorred Xiao Ying. Xiao Ying merely approached Yao’s sex change from the angle of rendering medical science as the cradle of truth.
After the public exposure of Yao’s disguise, or perhaps because of it, the tabloid press continued to identify physicians as the most authoritative to answer questions related to reproductive defects. Shortly after Xiao Yin associated Yao’s sex change with hermaphrodites and eunuchs, another Crystal writer reported on the opinion of an eminent gynecologist named Yu Songyun (余忪筠). As the national spotlight on Yao was just beginning to recede, the subject of her sex change came up in a conversation the writer had with Yu, who established the Gynecological Clinic of Zhongde Hospital (中德醫院平民產科醫院, Zhongde yiyuan pinmin chanke yiyuan) in Shanghai. Yu suggested that even if Yao’s case did turn out to be a real “ci becoming xiong” transformation, a national sensation would still be an overreaction given that she would not be the first in China anyway.
Five years earlier, in 1930, Yu had delivered a child born with the genital appearance of both sexes. The medical team diagnosed the child as more biologically female than male, so Yu distinguished her from Yao Jinping and categorized her instead as an example of “xiong becoming ci” (雄孵雌, xiongfuci). The parents refused to listen to the doctors, who tried to dissuade them from viewing the baby’s rare birth defects with disgust. The baby was eventually transported to the Jiangping Children’s Home (江平育嬰堂, Jiangping yuyingtang) to be raised there. The hospital kept her file, which included her photographs, her date of birth, and the names of her parents. Based on his experience as a practicing gynecologist in Shanghai, Yu Songyun also encountered births with “an external fleshy bulge in the shape of grapes” (產肉葡萄一束者, chanrou putao yishuzhe) and “internal organs formed on the body’s exterior” (產五臟六府在外之兒者, chanwuzang liufu zaiwai zhi erzhe).130 Similar to Xiao Yin, the writer of this article did not view Yao Jinping as a freak of nature. His goal in reporting Yu’s clinical experience converged with the aim of the other tabloid writers and contemporary sexologists: to deepen a middlebrow print culture that promoted a vision of modernity grounded in the pursuit of accurate scientific knowledge. In this context, clarifying the epistemic ambiguity surrounding sex change became a spirit embodied by all participants of this new cultural production.
Meanwhile, many critics argued that China’s feudalism and patriarchy were responsible for Yao’s fabrication. A contributor to Reading Life (讀書生活, Dushu shenghuo) anticipated that after the revelation of Yao’s hoax, some people would grab onto “such an amusing story” to hark back to and defend “old morale,” taking away the lesson that “extraordinary things can happen to filial [people].” This author vehemently criticized those who ignored medical knowledge about hermaphroditism and bought into unscientific explanations of Yao’s transformation.131 Another writer underscored the “innovative” nature of Yao’s incident, as it happened at a juncture when science carried an insurmountable degree of cultural authority. According to this author, Yao’s “creation” was highly original because it precisely called into question long-standing “feudalistic beliefs” that may lead some to surmise that “God could turn a woman into a man simply to reward her for extreme filialness.”132 Moreover, since Ruan Lingyu (阮玲玉), one of the most iconic female celebrities of the time, committed suicide in the same month that Yao’s story hit the headlines, many observers inferred a close connection between these two tantalizing events.133 One writer thus claimed, “as we all know, Ruan Lingyu’s suicide is the consequence of immense patriarchal pressure. Isn’t it obvious that the root of Yao Jinping’s desire to turn into a man lies a similar problem?”134 Even Lu Xun criticized the media sensationalism poured onto Luan’s suicide and Yao’s transition. In his preface to Xiao Jun’s Village in August (1935), Lu Xun hinted at the urgency of pulling the Chinese nation out of a dark and feudalistic past through enlightenment knowledge.135 One writer even went so far as to claim that the success of the feminist movement would eventually “wipe out the practice of cross-dressing” because, as Yao’s story demonstrated, “the only way for women to enter the public sphere is to dress up as men.”136
These critics had put their finger on a familiar trope in Chinese culture. The “feudalistic beliefs” that they decried had long justified a woman’s desire to change gender as a sign of filial expression. For example, the positive image of Hua Mulan, a woman warrior who joined the military on behalf of her father, had circulated in popular culture since the Northern Wei dynasty (386–535). In the late Ming, stories of female-to-male transformation “were subject to less questioning, scrutiny and skepticism” than transformations in the opposite direction because, to quote Charlotte Furth, “gender transgression often merely serves the accepted social hierarchies by a controlled display of their inversion.”137 In the late Qing period, a Shanghai lithograph recounted a tale in which a filial daughter cooked her own flesh to feed her sick father. However, being a girl and the only child, she prayed to transition into a man so that she could continue the family bloodline. One day she had a strange dream in which an old lady with white hair gave her a sugarcane and two oranges. Upon waking up, she developed male genitals in her lower body. She eventually got married and had two children (figure 4.5).138 The close association of female-to-male transformation with a daughter’s filialness provided Yao a powerful cultural resource for rationalizing her lie. It was precisely this loaded connotation that modernizing thinkers wished to overturn in their effort to fortify the conviction to scientism.
And the public attention soon shifted to the role of other cultural agents. Some critics held reporters, journalists, and popular writers responsible for the public disappointment about Yao’s deceiving sex change. According to a Crystal article that appeared on March 23, “At first, the news of [Yao’s] transformation into a man due to a lightning strike came from Tianjin,” and “reporters and journalists from all major presses visited Yao, interviewed her family, gathered together narratives of her past, and vigorously spread the word about the incident.” “Because they demonstrated a conspicuous lack of common knowledge,” the author, Xin Sheng (辛生), contended, “newspaper reporters and journalists must take at least half of the responsibility for [Yao’s] fraud.” According to Xin Sheng, “Current scientific knowledge posits that the reversal of male and female physiology overnight is impossible. From the start, the author and his friends have firmly believed that the sudden national spotlight on Yao would only extend nonsense and superstitious attitudes toward the supernatural and the strange [荒誕神怪之不良觀念也, huangdan shenguai zhi buniang guannian ye]. Now that the truth is unveiled … it is truly a joke.” For Xin Sheng, news such as Yao Jinping’s sex-change story attempted to lure Chinese readers with shocking accounts of unusual phenomenon, rare biological problems, and astonishing medical solutions. He took them as unhealthy press coverage that contributed nothing positive and “deeply hope[d] that press editors do not publish any more circumstantial writings of this sort without the support of solid evidence.”139 Rather than blaming Yao for her self-fashioned sex change, some educated observers compared the role of journalism to that of modern scientific knowledge as important vanguards of a more reliable civil society.
Figure 4.5 Late Qing lithograph “A Filial Daughter Becomes a Man” (1893).
Source: “Xiaonü huanan,” 1893.
In the wake of the Yao story, creative writers, too, began to articulate their own vision of cultural modernity.140 Apart from serious tabloid commentaries, the publicity showered on Yao Jinping inspired a few poems and song lyrics that appeared in both mainstream and tabloid presses.141 The tone of much of these creative pieces tended to cast Yao as a filial subject and, like the above article, attribute the growing disappointment with the outcome of Yao’s medical examination to a shallow grasp of scientific principles. One poem lamented the absence of comparable public interest and historical record on male-to-female transformation.142 This poem, simply titled “Female Becoming Male” (女化男身, Nühua nanshen), expressed the author’s affection toward another man and his wish to reincarnate as a woman, revealing a subtle appreciation of how his desire differed from homosexuality.143
In these tabloid accounts, not a single author passed a moralist judgment on human sex change. None of the commentators cast Yao Jinping in a negative light, and, before she was medically examined at the National Shanghai Medical College, some observers even described her bodily state as a rare and unique biological condition that could potentially provide scientific researchers and medical doctors a multitude of research possibilities. All of them invoked medical knowledge to naturalize birth defects and human anomalies. But more importantly, Yao Jinping’s story played a decisive role in turning the mass circulation press into a platform for expressing a normative ethos of scientism. This gradually transformed “sex change” into a more general category of human experience not confined to congenital bodily defects. Despite its shocking outcome, Yao’s story invited a wide range of reactions that looked beyond the single medical explanation of pseudo-hermaphroditism. As the commitment to the power and authority of science deepened, the idea that even non-intersexed individuals could change sex gradually took shape in Chinese popular culture by the 1940s. The next section recounts an episode of this crystallization process through a close reading of the science fiction short story called “Sex Change” (1940), arguably the first transsexual autobiographical narrative in Chinese history.
Gu Junzheng’s “Sex Change”
In 1940 Gu Junzhen’s science fiction short story “Sex Change” (性變, Xingbian) was serialized in the magazine Scientific Interest (科學趣味, Kexue quwei). A popular science writer, novelist, and translator, Gu became an editor in the translation department of the Commercial Press in 1923. He then relocated to the Kaiming Bookstore (開明書店), which was established in 1926, and became one of its chief editors in 1928. His interest in popular science literature began in the early 1930s and led him to cofound the magazine Scientific Interest in 1939. His three other more well-known science fiction short stories—“The London Plague” (倫敦奇疫, Lundun qiyi), “Below the North Pole” (在北極底下, Zai Beiji dixia), and “A Dream of Peace” (和平的夢, Heping de meng)—also appeared in Scientific Interest in the 1940s, and they dealt mostly with the theme of wartime turbulence and chaos and a disturbed world order. In questioning the category that seemed most fundamental and fixed of all, “Sex Change” stood out for diverging from the predominant emphasis of the science fiction genre on war and anti-imperialist nationalism at the peak of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945).144
The narrator begins by recalling a homicide case that occurred roughly eight to nine years prior. Also known as “the case of a mad murderer” (瘋子殺人案, fengzi sharen’an), the incident involved the abrupt disappearance of the famed biologist Dr. Ni Weili (倪維禮) and his daughter, Ni Jingxian (倪靜嫻). Equally mysterious was an old woman who was found dead along with an unconscious teenage boy in Dr. Ni’s research laboratory, both of whose identity had since remained unknown. On the same day, Ni Jingxian’s fiancée, Shen Dagang (沈大綱), showed up in a nearby police station and confessed that he was responsible for the crime. The case seemed all the more puzzling because Shen’s motivation was unclear. His subsequent suicide added another layer of mystery to the case. According to the forensic report, Shen’s death was caused by self-poisoning one to two hours before he turned himself in, suggesting that his motivation for committing suicide probably had nothing to do with guilt.
The narrator then refers to the entry titled “The Case of Shen Dagang’s Surrender” in a book called Mystery Cases of the Twentieth Century written by the supposedly authoritative criminal psychologist Huang Huiming (黃慧明), who is of course, like Dr. Ni, a fictional character. In deciphering Shen’s motivation for killing the Ni family and, eventually, himself, Huang eliminates the possibility that it stemmed from conflicts over money or relationship (because Shen’s salary was quite high at that point, and he remained deeply invested in marrying Ni Jingxian). Huang raises two related question. First, who are the old lady found dead and the teenage boy found unconscious in Dr. Ni’s laboratory? Their identities are still unknown, and the boy suddenly disappeared one day from the hospital where he had been taken for treatment. Second, what happened to the bodies of Dr. Ni and his daughter? If the Ni family was indeed killed by Shen, as revealed by himself, what did he do with their bodies? Most popular accounts simply explained the incident away by suggesting that Shen Dagang had gone mad. But Huang considers this too simplistic of an explanation and concludes instead that, without the necessary clues and sufficient facts that can shed new light on the above two questions, “The Case of Shen’s Surrender” must remain one of the greatest mysteries of the century.
In citing the perspective of an authoritative criminal psychologist, the narrator of “Sex Change” seems to hint at the possible limitations of modern science. However, to begin with Shen Dagang’s crime, he also sets it up as an enigma for which the story of “Sex Change” itself can offer a crucial solution. The narrator thus writes: “But Mr. Huang, you are wrong. The answer to the true mystery you described can be found here [in the following pages].”145 As such, the structural underpinning of “Sex Change” can be viewed in a question-and-answer format, with an introductory “question” section that delineates the parameters of a homicide mystery and the rest of the narrative bringing forward the “answer” that supposedly holds the key to resolving it. Here, metaphorically, the medical possibility of “sex change” and its desirability are mediated through the genre of science fiction, as the story of “Sex Change” testifies the value of medical science by playing the role of scientific discovery itself that promises to provide answers to a commonly misunderstood problem—in this case, Shen Dagang’s motivation for committing the crime and the fate of Dr. Ni’s family.
After describing “The Case of Shen’s Surrender,” the narrator immediately brings the reader back to where it all started: Shen Dagang’s return from the city where he has been working and his decision to pay Dr. Ni a visit on a sunny day in late spring. On his way to Dr. Ni’s research laboratory, Shen reflects on his career development and the growth of his love for Ni Jingxian over the last two years. Previously, Dr. Ni had refused his daughter’s request to marry Shen on multiple occasions, explaining that Shen’s career instability constituted a major obstacle. Now with a stable income, Shen is excited about the prospect of proposing to Ni Jingxian again even though they have not been in touch for over two years. But upon Shen’s arrival in his office, Dr. Ni immediately focuses their conversation on his most recent research breakthrough, leaving Shen almost no opportunity to bring up the marriage proposal.
Dr. Ni’s ability to convey the latest scientific theories and research on sex designates one of the most unique features of the story: its accurate recounting of modern scientific knowledge. The main source that Gu Junzheng relies on in developing Dr. Ni’s extensive overview of the scientific study of sex seems to be the writings of the renowned life scientist Zhu Xi, whose work we encountered in chapter 2. Gu begins this part of the narrative by citing Zhu’s Humans from Eggs and Eggs from Humans (1939) and ends with a reference to his Scientific Perspectives on Life, Aging, Illness, and Death (1936).146 In addition to drawing from the work of the best-known authority on reproductive biology in twentieth-century China, the story touches on the embryological theory of sexual development to underscore the point that, in Dr. Ni’s words, “all new embryos display a common feature: they are sexless. They all have the potential to develop male and female characteristics.”147 Dr. Ni also discusses the chromosomal theory of sex determination, explaining that, whereas in women the sex chromosomes are the two X chromosomes, men have one X chromosome and one Y chromosome. But he continues, “although it might seem that sex is naturally determined at the moment of conception, something that happens randomly and cannot be altered by will, all of this is not set in stone.”148
Evidently, in his discussion Dr. Ni begins to move toward a definition of sex as something malleable. After noting his dissatisfaction with the genetic theory of sex determination, Dr. Ni describes biological sex using the metaphor of a “balance” (天平, tianping), something that, when tipped one way or the other, would result in the predominant expression of maleness or femaleness. Here Dr. Ni points out European scientists’ recent discovery of parasitic castration, a natural phenomenon in which anthropodan animals such as bees or crabs would switch their sex after their gonads have been attacked by parasites.149 Speaking of parasitic castration “makes the old professor even more excited,” leading him to make the following remark: “Consequently, I think the sex of human beings is not predetermined. If we know the criteria of sex determination, we would be able to change people’s sex.”150 To add credibility to his comment, Dr. Ni brings up Eugen Steinach’s classic experiments that induced male-to-female (雄化雌, xionghuaci) and female-to-male (雌化雄, cihuaxiong) transformations in rats. And to make all of these ideas about sex change sound even more plausible and convincing, Dr. Ni finally introduces Shen Dagang to the idea of “sex hormones,” the internal secretions that play a decisive role in sexual maturation. Like the Chinese sexologists and tabloid writers discussed earlier, Dr. Ni seizes this opportunity to use the example of “eunuchs of the Qing dynasty” to highlight the significance of sex glands: as a result of not having a functional gonad, these castrated individuals “remain beardless even at an old age, and their physical appearance resembles neither a man nor a woman.”151 These passages demonstrate that the scientific theory of universal bisexuality has now been absorbed into and rearticulated in the cultural domain of popular fictional literature, and Chinese indigenous examples of reproductive anomalies such as eunuchs continue to operate as a cross-cultural epistemological anchor for crystallizing foreign ideas about sex and sex transformation.
Moreover, the careful application—and not just the nominal referencing or presentation—of modern scientific knowledge could be said to be a staple of an early wave of literary production that simultaneously pushes for a greater degree of flexibility and creativity in the science fiction genre.152 In “Sex Change,” this is best exemplified by the biomedical breakthrough for which Dr. Ni prides himself throughout his conversation with Shen Dagang. According to Dr. Ni, the “experimental product” of his latest breakthrough is a white potion that “can turn a woman into a man both biologically and psychologically in four days after injection into the bloodstream.”153 As the reader would soon discover, Dr. Ni has belabored the various scientific theories of sex and introduced this recent invention of his to Shen only because he has used it to change the sex of his daughter, Ni Jingxian, thus making it impossible for Shen to propose to, let alone marry, his only child. The example of Dr. Ni’s sex-change potion reflects a tremendous degree of informed creativity on the part of the author, Gu Junzheng, who has not only appropriated and accurately presented Western scientific ideas about sex but also built from them and deliberately proposed a new method of human sex transformation beyond the existing scope of medical technology. This is best captured in Dr. Ni’s own words before he shows Shen the actual potion:
Scientists have now confirmed that secondary sex characteristics in humans are determined entirely by the secretions of the sex glands, so these sex characteristics can be easily modified with the surgical techniques of castration, transplantation, or [hormonal] injections. However, there is still no procedure that can change an individual’s primary sex characteristics. In other words, although scientists can make a woman look like a man and a man look like a woman, they are still unable to turn a woman into a man and a man into a woman completely. But allow me to inform you now that, after many years of research and experimentation, I have found a way to alter sex characteristics on the primary level.154
Although the potion is a fictional entity, its material possibility and functional comprehensibility is circumscribed by the existing biomedical lexicon of sex. Whereas bodily modification techniques such as castration, tissue transplantation, and the administration of synthetic hormones constitute a crucial source of imagination, the author’s presentation of the potion as the sole technological innovation that can transform one’s true sex achieves a level of literary production and originality that exceeds any existing epistemological configuration of medical science. This thus marks a radical departure from the science fiction novels written before the Republican period.
As a story about a topic as ahead of its time as sex alteration, the plot of “Sex Change” ironically embraces and reflects broader cultural claims about the relationship of science to gender. Dr. Ni’s rationale for creating the potion, for instance, is undergirded by a prevailing discrimination in Chinese culture that values sons over daughters. After being told that his intended bride-to-be had turned into a boy, Shen Dagang presses Dr. Ni for an explanation. Posing “an implicit sign of victory,” Dr. Ni responds:
You think I would back off and just let you take [my daughter] away from me? You fool! You have no idea how much I love her. For years I have focused on my research day and night for the simple reason that I wanted to turn her into a son! You fool! Do you think I would let some stupid kid to propose to her just because he selfishly thinks that he loves her and to use her to threaten me? This is something that I would never allow to happen, because she is my child. If she is a boy, I would not have to worry about anyone proposing to her. If I have a son, I can make him pursue my unfinished work. His accomplishment can open a fresh chapter for the Chinese scientific community. How wonderful and valuable would that be?!155
The white potion gives Dr. Ni a son by transforming his daughter, a female character, into a masculine subject, a supposed sign of scientific progress. Dr. Ni’s explanation implies that what women want and long for plays no role in the determination of their fate. Instead, it is only the men—the father and the potential husband—that participate in the manipulation, a power play of sorts, of women’s lives. Dr. Ni’s words make it evident that whether his daughter actually wants a sex change is insignificant. What is at issue here is his own desire for his daughter’s sex change (which fulfills his ambition to contribute to the progress of science and China), mirroring Shen Dagang’s subsequent desire for Ni Jingxian to undergo a second sex change (so that she can be turned back into a girl). In other words, the male voice and opinion dominate the entire structural dynamics of the relationship between Dr. Ni, his daughter, and Shen Dagang, relegating the female voice, not only here but throughout the narrative, to the background and even a status of nonexistence. Medical technology, the plot seems to imply, helps men to perpetuate the value of their sexed existence.
It can be said that the author is making an implicit criticism of ideas about gender and the body in traditional Chinese culture. Or, more specifically put, the story of “Sex Change” can be interpreted as formulating an indirect critique that plays off on the gender dynamics of a society in which such corporeal practices as footbinding thrived. Both footbinding and Ni Jingxian’s sex change involve the transformation (if not “mutilation”) of the female body, but mainly for the explicit pursuit of male pleasure, desire, and ambition.156 By narrating the story about Ni Jingxian’s change of sex through the power struggle between Dr. Ni and Shen Dagan, the author similarly reveals the underlying patriarchal biases, unfair assumptions, and male selfishness of such gendered customs as footbinding.
However, throughout the narrative of “Sex Change,” the reader is never exposed to the voice of Ni Jingxian, such as regarding how she feels about her predetermined fate to change sex and its consequent effects on her life. Her only spoken dialogue in the story appears immediately after Shen Dagang comes face to face with the masculinized version of her: “Ah, Dagang … this wasn’t my intention. I thought my father has told you that already.”157 These meager words reveal the author’s intentional effort to make room for the expression of female agency in the text only through the masculinist discourse—the voice of Dr. Ni and his reasons for changing his daughter’s sex. And perhaps what distinguishes Ni Jingxian’s sex change from footbinding is again the role of medical scientific invention. In the story, the sex-change potion symbolizes scientific progress, and what it can do symbolizes male success and accomplishment. Even as the narrator of “Sex Change” is revealed in the end to be (the post–sex change) Ni Jingxian her/himself, this exposure only further suggests that the act of uncovering “truth” (in this case, the truth behind the homicide mystery introduced at the beginning of the story) can be done and articulated only by a masculine subject (for the narrator is really no longer the female Ni Jingxian but a married physiologist and father of two children).
The story’s perpetuation of patriarchal values is also exemplified by its overall message that science remains a masculine endeavor. Pressured by Shen to turn Ni Jingxian back into a girl, Dr. Ni comes up with another potion for which he needs an experimental subject. Running out of patience, Shen immediately injects the new potion into Dr. Ni’s body, exclaiming “you are the most convenient experimental subject, old fool!”158 Contrary to the positive tone associated with Dr. Ni’s success in changing her daughter’s sex, his own transformation leads to a disastrous final episode, for which the author gives the subtitle “A Tragedy.” Unfortunately, after Dr. Ni becomes an old woman, she is no longer capable of creating the magical sex-change elixir again. After Shen has repeatedly begged the old woman to remake the potion that can potentially bring back the female Ni Jingxian, “The old woman adamantly stares at Shen and frowns. She finds his request distasteful and says nothing. She is no longer a professor passionate about the progress of science. She has completely forgotten about science, as if she has never learned a thing about it.”159
This passage conveys the author’s explicit association of science with men (or the masculine gender), implying that the pursuit of science remains outside the scope of women’s sphere. Correspondingly, an underlying message of the story implies that male-to-female transformation is less preferable than female-to-male transformation, which again reinforces a central component of Chinese society that puts fathers and sons instead of mother and daughters at the center of kinship relations. Reminiscent of how most tabloid writers approached Yao Jinping’s intention to alter the public appearance of her sex, the depiction of Ni Jingxian’s female-to-male transformation in “Sex Change” is layered with various positive signs of scientific progress and gendered modes of ambition. On the other hand, Dr. Ni’s sex change resulted in the shattering of hope (specifically, Shen Dagang’s hope). And the truth behind the entire incident would only be recovered and uncovered years later through, once again, the voice of a masculine subject who was previously female.
“Will Not Surrender Until I Become a Woman”
At the start of the twentieth century, a few scattered accounts of human sex change surfaced in news pictorials, popular magazines, and medical journals. They featured both male-to-female and female-to-male transformations and represented a geographical diversity: stories came from Liaoning, Shandong, Hunan, Henan, and beyond. Although these extraordinary tales explored complicated social issues (such as marriage), involved graphic descriptions of bodily transformation, and even delved into the unusual prospect of reproduction, they rarely resorted to medical understandings of hermaphroditism to justify why certain individuals turned into the opposite sex.160 Astonishing and odd, these stories built on earlier rumors of women becoming men and men morphing into women, and they cohered neatly with the binary construction of sex upheld by scientists and doctors since the late nineteenth century.161 But in the late 1920s and 1930s, and especially after Yao Jinping’s celebrity, a new meaning of sex as hormonal, scalar, and malleable opened up different ways of not just thinking about but also explaining human sex transformation.
This chapter has traced an evolving discourse of “sex change” in the mass circulation press from the 1920s to the 1940s. Relevant scientific ideas including the theory of constitutional bisexuality first articulated in early twentieth-century sexology were filtered through media sensationalism and publicity on sex change, climaxing in Yao’s media blitz, and finally diffused and absorbed into the popular imagination, as exemplified by fictional works like Gu Junzheng’s “Sex Change.” As new biomedical interpretations of reproductive anomalies reached a wider public, the concept of “sex change” gradually moved away from a specialized term circulating primarily in the scientific literature and became a more general category of experience with which individuals hoping to alter their bodily sex could come to associate.
But the idea of transforming physical sex alone was insufficient. The dissemination of information about surgical intervention made it a convincing reality. Toward the midcentury, Chinese readers were exposed to testimonies of people seeking and receiving sex-reassignment operations in Europe and the United States. The most famous examples of these, and widely reported across the world, were European women athletes who became men. Zhang Ruogu (張若谷), a renowned author and the founding editor of Greater Shanghainese (大上海人, Da Shanghairen), discussed some of these examples in an article in Sex Science. In 1935 Zdeňka Koubková, a Czechoslovakian track athlete who won two medals at the 1934 Women’s World Game, “decided to abandon her world record” and “changed her name to [Zdeněk] Koubek” after surgery. In summer 1936 the British javelin, discus, and shot-put champion Mary Weston changed her name to Mark and divulged that “I decided to consult a medical specialist two months ago. After two operations and six weeks of recovery, I have become a man.” As Weston put it, the Charing Cross Hospital in London had seen at least “twenty or so similar cases” by the time of her treatment.162
Chinese readers soon learned more about Weston’s surgeon, the South African–born Dr. Lennox Ross Broster, who attracted considerable press attention to London for his “sex-change” operations in the 1930s.163 His work on endocrine diseases, especially what would later be known as adrenal congenital hyperplasia, formed the centerpiece of an article titled “Marvelous Stories of Sex Change” (性變奇談, Xingbian qitan) published in West Wind in 1937 (later serialized in Desert Pictorial [沙漠畫報, Shamo huabao] in 1940). According to the author, Li Xinyong (李心永), humans with intersexed conditions (“yin-yang persons”) have existed throughout history since the Greco-Roman world. However, the last few decades saw significant breakthroughs in this area of research. In narrating the experience of notable intersexed individuals in France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Britain, and the United States, Li repeatedly pitched genital surgery as the fulcrum of their life histories. The article broadcasted in detail Broster’s infamous adrenalectomy procedure (the removal of the adrenal glands), including how he came to this idea, the kind of patients who went to him for help, the steps involved in the treatment process, and the success with which he “turned women with mustaches into beauties and effeminate men into machos” (使有鬍鬚的女人變成美女，使柔弱如女子的男性變成雄糾糾的大丈夫, shi youhuxu de nüren biancheng meinü, shi rouruo ru nüzi de nanxing biancheng xiongjiujiu de dazhangfu). Though it was obvious that Broster was not working alone in the field of intersexuality research (for example, the works of Oscar Riddle at the Carnegie Institution of Science, Francis Crew at Edinburgh, and medical endocrinologists at Johns Hopkins were mentioned in passing), Li singled out his accomplishments and praised him as “a magician at the Charing Cross Hospital.” Yet the overall tone of the article tended to stress the “corrective” function of Broster’s surgeries, implying that they ultimately helped to “restore normal sexual development” (恢復性能的正常發展, huifu xingneng de zhengchang fazhan).164
In the first half of the twentieth century, an affluent discourse of mutability, on top of the visual and carnal aspects explored in the previous two chapters, turned the concept of sex into an intellectual and cultural mainstay in China. Whereas biologists highlighted sex dimorphism in visual illustrations and sexologists collected scientific data about people’s sexual desire, experts drawn to the endocrine sciences argued that everyone could easily convert to either sex. This completes our mapping of the three coordinates of this modern “epistemic nexus.” By the late 1940s, the press had dampened an immutable view of sex and begun to foreground stories of sex-reassignment operations on a more regular basis. In 1947, for example, Victory (勝利, Shengli) announced a twenty-four-year-old woman in Sweden, who “has recently turned into a man after receiving a surgery.… The hospital refuses to comment on this case or disclose the name of the patient.”165 Another article in New Woman Monthly (新婦女月刊, Xinfunü yuekan) focused on two sisters in Rome, Italy, who “changed into the opposite sex after their parents agreed to surgical intervention.” As a result, both of them “gradually grew into a man with robust physique” (逐成為健壯男兒, zhucheng wei jianzhuang nan’er) and “got married to their neighbor’s two daughters.”166 In the immediate postwar years, these reports hinted at a global possibility for transforming bodily sex through technology.
In this context, West Wind received a startling letter from a male reader in Beiping named Feng Mingfang (馮明方) in 1948.167 In writing the letter, entitled “Will Not Surrender Until I Become a Woman” (不變女子誓不休, bubian nüzi shi buxiu), Feng’s intention was twofold: to request an adequate answer for “a problem that has troubled me for a long time” and to make his concerns public so that “others with a similar condition can benefit from reading about it.” As Feng put it, his father “treated me like a daughter before the age of seven” and “dressed me up like a girl.”168 In high school, he often “looked into the mirror and admired my own pale and soft skin, round and smooth hip, and curly body … oftentimes forgetting that I am actually a man.” He constantly asked himself “isn’t it a pity for such a beauty to be trapped inside a male body?” Recently, he “has a pressing urge with growing intensity … to be castrated and grow larger breasts in order to become a true woman [變成一個道地的女子, biancheng yige daodi de nüzi].” The “more I try to suppress this longing, the stronger and more persistent it becomes,” so he begged the editors to “save me, hurry!” In their reply, the West Wind editorial team cited the recent findings of Alfred Kinsey in the United States and recommended psychoanalytic consultation, but they also expressed “great sympathy toward [his] pain.”169
Written in an era of immense political unrest and without the existence of an organized underground network for gender variant people in China, the publication of Feng’s quest for sex change indicates a broader desire for reaching out to people with a similar experience. Whereas a binary division of sex provided an earlier generation of feminist activists a powerful language, the burgeoning writings of scientists, doctors, educators, researchers, reformers, popular authors, critics, and readers colluded in renouncing its tenacity by the midcentury. With a mercurial definition of sex, alongside a growing awareness of surgical possibility, Chinese people soon “discovered” their first transsexual in postwar Taiwan. But this version of transsexuality emerged at a historical juncture when Chinese geopolitics began to assume new configurations under the ambit of global Cold War Asia. This new chapter in the mutually generative history of China’s geobody and the body corporeal is where we turn next.