An Episode of Transnational Spectacle
On August 14, 1953, the United Daily News (聯合報, Lianhebao) announced the striking discovery of an intersexed soldier, Xie Jianshun (謝尖順), in Tainan, Taiwan. The headline read “A Hermaphrodite Discovered in Tainan: Sex to Be Determined After Surgery.”1 By August 21 the press had adopted a radically different rhetoric, now trumpeting that “Christine Will Not Be America’s Exclusive: Soldier Destined to Become a Lady.”2 Considered by many as the “first” Chinese transsexual, Xie was frequently dubbed as the “Chinese Christine” (中國克麗斯汀, Zhongguo Kelisiding). This was an allusion to the American ex-G.I. transsexual star Christine Jorgensen, who received her sex reassignment surgery in Denmark two years prior and became a worldwide household name immediately afterward due to her personality and glamorous looks. The analogy reflected the growing influence of American culture on the Republic of China at the peak of the Cold War.3 Within a week, the characterization of Xie in the Taiwanese press changed from an average citizen whose ambiguous sex provoked uncertainty and national anxiety to a transsexual icon whose fate contributed to the global staging of Taiwan on a par with the United States. Centering on the making of Xie’s celebrity, this chapter argues that the publicity surrounding her transition worked as a pivotal fulcrum in shifting common understandings of transsexuality, the role of medical science, and their evolving relation to the popular press in mid-twentieth-century Sinophone culture.4
The feminization of the Chinese Christine became a national story in Taiwan at a critical juncture in the making of Cold War East Asia. Predating the Jinmen shelling crisis of August 1958, this episode of sex transformation commanded public attention at the conclusion of the Korean War (1950–1953) and the nascent “liberating Taiwan” campaign (1954–1955) on the mainland. The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) involvement in the Korean and First Indochina Wars further consolidated the U.S.–Guomindang (GMD) alliance and amplified the long-standing CCP-GMD tensions while achieving what historian Chen Jian identifies as Mao’s aspiration for continuing the momentum of his communist revolution at home and abroad.5 Between 1951 and 1965, Taiwan received steady annual support of $100 million from the United States. American interest in stabilizing Taiwan’s military system and economic growth was folded into the U.S. AID Health Program drafted and distributed in 1954. In the next two decades, American guidance and recommendations would gradually replace the Japanese model and play a central role in shaping the long-term public health policy and priorities in Taiwan.6 Meanwhile, the CCP and the U.S.-backed GMD engaged in repeated confrontations across the Taiwan Strait in the 1950s, thereby making this area one of the main “hot spots” of the Cold War. It was within this historical context of postcolonial East Asian modernity—providing the conditions for such mimetic political formations as the Two Koreas and the Two Chinas—that the mass circulation press introduced the story of Xie Jianshun to readers in Taiwan. This chapter offers a preliminary glimpse of where the parallel contours of culture and geopolitics converged in early Cold War Taiwan.
Dripping with national and trans-Pacific significance, Xie’s experience made “bianxingren” (變性人, transsexual) a household term in the 1950s.7 She served as a focal point for numerous news stories that broached the topics of changing sex, human intersexuality, and other atypical conditions of the body.8 People who wrote about her debated whether she qualified as a woman, whether medical technology could transform sex, and whether the two Christines were more similar or different. These questions led to the persistent comparisons of Taiwan with the United States. But Xie never presented herself as a duplicate of Jorgensen. As Xie knew, her story highlighted issues that pervaded post–World War II Sinophone society: the censorship of public culture by the state, the unique social status of men serving in the armed forces, the limit of individualism, the promise and pitfalls of science, the relationship between military virility and national sovereignty, the normative behaviors of men and women, and the boundaries of acceptable sexual expression. Her story attracted the press, but the public’s avid interest in sex and its plasticity prompted reporters to dig deep. As the press coverage escalated, new names and strange medical conditions grabbed the attention of journalists and their readers. The kind of public musings about sex change that saturated Chinese culture earlier in the century now took center stage in Republican Taiwan.
This chapter adds greater historical depth to this episode of trans-culturation by cross-examining other accounts of unusual bodily condition that the press brought to light in response to the Xie story. In reconstructing the broader context in which bianxingren acquired widespread currency, I focus on examples of “trans” formation that made explicit reference to Xie, especially during moments when Xie and her doctors intentionally withheld information from the public. By trans formations, I refer to concrete examples of “transing”—a phenomenon proposed by Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore that “takes place within, as well as across or between, gendered spaces” and “assembles gender into contingent structures of association with other attributes of bodily being.”9 The examples aside from Xie’s life history tell stories of gender transgression, defects of the reproductive system, uncommon problems related to pregnancy, the marriages of individuals with cross-gender identification, transsexual childbirth, human intersexuality, and sex metamorphosis itself, emanating from both domestic contexts and abroad. Although these stories came to light within an overall narrative of Xie’s transition, they provide crucial evidence for the growing frequency of sex-change-related discussions in Chinese-speaking communities in the immediate post–World War II era.
The excavation of a series of trans formations in postwar Taiwan maps gender and sexual marginality onto the region’s global (in)significance in and beyond the 1950s.10 After weaving together Xie’s narrative with other stories of gendered corporeal variance, this chapter concludes with a historiographical framework in which these diverse examples of transing could be adequately appreciated. Within the field of Sinophone postcolonial studies, these stories have broader historical import, bringing new analytic angles, new chronologies, and new conceptual vocabularies. The Sinophone world, in this context, refers to Sinitic-language communities and cultures situated outside of China or on the margins of China and Chineseness. By contesting the epistemic status of the West as the ultimate arbiter in queer historiography, the history of trans formations in Sinophone Taiwan offers an axial approach to provincializing China, Asia, and “the rest.” The queerness of the trans archive delineated in this chapter is underpinned not only by the very examples of trans subjectivities retrieved and documented but also by the enabling effect of their Sinophonicity to de-universalize existing historiographical hegemonies, whether defined in the conventions of writing the twentieth-century “Chinese” or “Taiwanese” past.11 This queer emergence of transsexuality in postwar Taiwan concludes our study, therefore, by turning our attention to the social origins of a new historical epoch.
Discovering Xie
When the story of Xie first came to public spotlight, the press sutured a direct reference to Jorgensen: “After the international frenzy surrounding the news of Miss Christine, the American ex-G.I. who turned into a lady after surgery, a yin-yang person [hermaphrodite] has been discovered at the 518 Hospital in Tainan.” This opening statement reflects a transitional moment whereby sex-change surgery developed from a common clinical management of intersexuality into a new basis of sexual subjectivity. Early on, the United Daily News released an article suggesting that Xie had in fact been fully aware of his feminine traits since childhood but had kept it a secret until its recent “revelation” under the close attention of doctors in Tainan. Born in Chaozhou, Guangdong, on January 24, 1918, the thirty-six-year-old Xie had joined the army when he was sixteen, lost his father at the age of seventeen, and lost his mother at eighteen. He came to Taiwan with the Nationalist army in 1949. “At the age of twenty,” the article explained, “his breasts developed like a girl, but he had hidden this secret as a member of the military force rather successfully. It was finally discovered on the 6th of this month, upon his visit to the Tainan 518 Hospital for a physical examination due to recurrent abdominal pains and cramps, by the chair of external medicine Dr. Lin. He has been staying at the hospital since the 7th [of August].”12
The initial national excitement focused on deciphering Xie’s sex, sexuality, and gender. In their first impression, the public was given the opportunity to imagine Xie’s sexually ambiguous body with extensive descriptions. According to Taiwan Shin Sheng Daily News (台灣新生報, Taiwan xinshengbao), “the abnormal bodily features of the yin-yang person include the following: protruding and sagging breasts, pale and smooth skin, soft hands, manly legs, squeaky and soft voice, a testicle inside the left lower abdomen but not the right, a closed and blocked reproductive organ, no [male] urinary tract, a urethra opening between the labia, a small symbolic phallic organ, and the capacity to urinate in the standing posture.”13 Another article stated that Xie’s “head appears to be normal, mental health is slightly below average, facial features are feminine, personality is shy, other bodily parts and dietary habits are normal.”14 Dr. Lin Chengyi (林承一), a graduate of the Tokyo Zhaohe Hospital and the external medicine department of the Jingjing Medical School, diagnosed the case carefully and conjectured that Xie needed at least three operations. As stated in the China Daily News (中華日報, Zhonghua ribao) report, the first operation was scheduled to take place on August 20 and would involve the following three major steps: exploratory laparotomy (the opening of the abdominal cavity) to detect the presence of ovarian tissues; labia dissection to examine the vaginal interior, determine the length of the vagina, and confirm the presence (or absence) of the hymen; and finally, “if ovaries and vagina are found inside the womb, removing the penis can turn Xie into a woman; otherwise he becomes a man.”15 From its premise that Xie intentionally concealed his femininity, to its elaborate description of Xie’s convoluted biology, and to its presentation of the criteria involved in Xie’s sex determination, the press operated as a cultural vehicle through which medical biases toward Xie’s body were expressed liberally. Through and through, Xie was assumed to be a biological woman trapped inside a male body, whose feminine-like features gradually revealed themselves under the fingertips of medical experts and in the eyes of the public. This assumption led one observer to complain about the lack of sympathy and humanistic concerns in this wave of flagrant newspaper accounts.16
On the day following the public discovery of Xie, the media called attention to a radical departure of his experience from the familiar story of the American Christine. Whereas the American transsexual celebrity had a deep-seated desire to be transformed into a woman, the Republican Chinese soldier had an unshakable longing to remain a heterosexual man. A Shin Sheng Daily headline declared, “Yin-Yang Person Uncovers a Personal Past … Hoping to Remain a Man.” The article quoted Xie for resenting to become “Christine No. 2.”17 Another article noted that “the yin-yang person Xie Jianshun is still in love with his lover of more than two decades—the rifle” and that he “personally desires to become a perfectly healthy man.”18 Most tellingly, the piece divulged Xie’s heterosexual past, including his romantic affairs with women, and graphic descriptions of his previous sexual encounters. The media narrative reminded the reader of, rather than downplayed, Xie’s physical defects: “At the age of seven, Xie fell sick. At the time, his penis was tied to his labia, but given his living situation in the countryside, going to a doctor for surgical intervention was not immediately feasible. His mother therefore simply tore them apart by hand. From that point on, he urinated from both secretion openings.”19
Reporters disclosed that Xie’s “unpleasant experience with his physical abnormality” started at the age of twelve. That year, his grandmother introduced him to a girl, with whom he was arranged to marry. Although he was just a child, his fondness for the girl grew by day. One day, when no adult was home, he initiated an intercourse with the girl but ultimately failed because of his “biological defect.” They ended up getting around the problem “by using their hands.” Since then, Xie “acquired the habit of masturbation without the ability to produce sperm, being in a state of more physiological pain.”20 After joining the army, he fell in love with another girl. Her father even accepted their marriage proposal. This seemingly positive news, however, upset Xie. Given his “physiological shortcomings,” Xie wanted to avoid leading the girl into an unhappy union. At the time he still did not have the courage to come clean about his reproductive problems. He therefore ran away from the girl and the relationship, a decision some writers interpreted as “a comedy of marriage escape” (逃婚喜劇, taohun xiju).21 Despite this tragic turn of events, a twenty-nine-year-old man from Anhui announced his eagerness to look after Xie for the rest of his life.22
The most significant message that the above biographical synopsis seems to convey is squarely concerned with his forthcoming sex determination. Will Xie turn into a man or a woman? What does he want? A United Daily News article ended with a confident note: “He firmly hopes to remain male, to be able to return to the army and pick up the rifle again” to “defeat mainland China and eliminate the communists.”23 Taiwan Min Sheng Daily News (台灣民聲日報, Taiwan minsheng ribao) corroborated that Xie “prefers to talk about military activities” and “is not interested in domestic life or matters of concern to women.”24 Indeed, the newspapers mentioned more than once that Xie “experiences ‘sexual’ desire when interacting with women, but none toward men.”25 Construed as a respectable citizen of the Republican state, Xie was heterosexualized and masculinized as a national subject fulfilling his duty, even as he faced the possibility of being stripped of his manliness within a week. At least for a brief moment, Xie was able to vocalize his desire of not wanting to change his sex through the mainstream press. And it was the first time that readers heard his voice. The remark, “If my biology does not allow me to remain a man but forces me to become a woman, what else can I do?” marked the first utterance of his opinion in the press.26 On the second day of his media exposure, readers started to sympathize with Xie and considered him, unlike the American Christine, a rather normal, however unfortunate, heterosexual man.27
If doctors and reporters hastened to purport a clear picture of Xie’s hidden sex and sexuality, they tried to detect his gender orientation in a more cautious fashion. As soon as the 518 Hospital scheduled Xie’s first “sex-change surgery” (變性手術, bianxing shoushu), the relevant experts proposed a plan to determine Xie’s gender self-awareness. They sent a group of female nurses to mingle with Xie five days before the operation. Given Xie’s longtime career involvement in the military, “the hospital considers his previous social interactions with men insufficient basis for determining how Xie feels deep down inside as man- or woman-like. In preparing for Xie’s sex reassignment surgery, a number of ‘attractive’ nurses were asked to keep Xie company and chat with him on 15 August.”28 Through Xie’s interaction with these nurses, it was hoped that “a better understanding of his/her inner sense of self as a man or woman could be reached by drawing on the clues from his emotions and facial expressions, which should reflect his inner sense of self.”29 It is worth noting that neither the medical profession nor the popular press locked him into a particular gender category at this juncture. Despite their assumptions about Xie’s biological hidden (female) sex, doctors at the 518 Hospital actually believed that they had adopted a more careful and objective approach to unearth his psychological gender. And despite its covert announcement of his heterosexuality, the press refrained from reaching any conclusion yet about Xie’s gendered sense of self.30
The First Operation
The first turning point in the framing of the Xie Jianshun story in both medical and popular discourses came with his first operation. Again, the press collaborated with Xie’s physicians closely and kept the public informed about their progress. On August 20, the day of Xie’s first operation, the United Daily News published a detailed description of the surgical protocols scheduled for three o’clock that afternoon: “The operation scheduled for today involves an exploratory laparotomy, followed by a careful examination of his lower cavity to detect the presence of uterus and ovary. If Xie’s reproductive anatomy resembles that of a typical female, a second operation will follow suit as soon as Xie recovers from this one.” “In the second operation,” the description continued, “the presently sealed vaginal opening will be cut open, and the vaginal interior will be examined for symptoms of abnormality. If the results of both operations confirm that Xie has a female reproductive system, the final step involves the removal of the symbolic male genital organ on the labia minora, converting him into a pure female [純女性, chunnüxing]. Otherwise, Xie will be turned into a pure male [純男性, chunnanxing].”31
By bringing the reader’s eyes “inward” toward Xie’s internal anatomical configurations, the communique repeated the epistemological claims of the medical operation intended for his sex determination. Step by step, the newspaper article, presumably relying on the information provided by Dr. Lin’s team, told its reader the surgical procedures and criteria for the establishment of Xie’s female sex. Yet no symmetrical explanation was given for establishing a male identity for Xie. The narrative only concluded with the brief remark, “Otherwise, Xie will be turned into a pure male.” One wonders what would happen if Xie’s interior anatomy was found to be drastically different from the normal female sex. What were the doctors planning to do then with his “sealed vaginal opening?” If Xie could be transformed into a “pure female” by simply cutting off his “symbolic male genital organ,” what would turning him into a “pure male” entail? Would that also involve the removal of something? Or would that require the addition of something else? Even if female gonads were found inside his reproductive system and the second operation followed suit, what happens next if his vaginal interior showed signs of anatomical abnormality? On what grounds would the doctors evaluate the resemblance of his vagina to that of an average woman at this stage? To what degree could his vagina deviate from the internal structure of a “normal” vagina before it is considered too “abnormal?” The media coverage answered none of these questions. Under the pretense of keeping its readers informed, the press actually imposed more assumptions (and raised more questions) about Xie’s “real” sex. Shin Sheng Daily asserted that it was “easier to turn Xie into a woman than into a man,” and China Daily News learned that Xie had been so anxious that he cried numerous times about the potential makeover.32 By the day of his first operation, the medical and popular discourses congruently prepared the lay public for a sensational outcome—an unprecedented sex-change episode in Chinese culture. Xie’s sex was arguably already “determined” and “transformed” before the actual surgery itself. This reciprocated the ambiguity surrounding the purpose of his first operation: Was its goal the determination or transformation of his sex?
The following day, the Taiwanese public confronted a lengthy summary of Xie’s surgery in the news billed “Soldier Destined to Become a Lady.” This echoed the headline of the New York Daily News front-page article that announced Jorgenson’s sex reassignment in December 1952, “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty.” The United Daily News piece included a more telling subtitle: “The Yin-Yang Person’s Interior Parts Revealed Yesterday after Surgery: The Presence of Uterus and Ovaries Confirmed.” The Shin Sheng Daily headline read “Yin-Yang Person’s Yin Stronger than Yang,” while China Daily News concluded that Xie’s bodily biology was “thoroughly female.”33 From this point on, Xie was frequently dubbed as the “Chinese Christine.” Whereas in the first week of publicity reporters had used either the masculine pronoun “he” (他, ta) or both the masculine and the feminine pronouns, they thoroughly changed to the feminine pronoun “she” (她, ta) in referring to Xie in all subsequent writings.
In discussing Xie’s operation with the public, Dr. Lin’s asserted that “Xie Jianshun should be converted into a woman in light of his physiological condition” and that this procedure would have “a 90 percent success rate.”34 The news report described Xie’s first surgery with remarkable detail:
Xie’s operation began at 3:40 P.M. yesterday. Dr. Lin Chengyi led a team of physicians, including Le Shaoqing and Wang Zifan, and nurses, including Jin Ming. Because this is the first clinical treatment of an intersexed patient in Taiwan, Dr. Lin permitted out-of-town doctors and news reporters to observe the surgical proceeding in the operating room with a mask on. After anesthesia, Dr. Lin cut open the lower abdominal area at 3:50 and examined its interior parts. The operation ended successfully at 4:29, with a total duration of 39 minutes. It also marked a decisive moment for determining the sex of the yin-yang person Xie Jianshun.35
This excerpt thus familiarized the reader with the clinical proceeding of Xie’s surgery, thereby reinforcing Xie’s status as an object of medical gaze even after the surgery itself. Ultimately, this careful textual restaging of Xie’s medical operation translated its clinical standing into a glamorized cultural phenomenon in postwar Taiwan.
Xie’s growing iconicity as a specimen of cultural dissection also hinged on the detailed public exposure of the surgical findings. According to the press release:
After a thirty-minute inspection of the [lower] abdominal region, the yin-yang person is confirmed female given the presence of ovarian tissues. The uterus is 6 cm long and 3.5 cm wide, which is similar to the uterus size of an unpenetrated virgin (含苞未放處女, hanbao weifang chunü), but slightly unhealthy. Not only are the two ovaries normal, the existence of Fallopian tubes is also confirmed. Upon physical inspection prior to the surgery, no testicle can be detected on the lower right abdominal region and only an incomplete testicle can be found on the left. Because Xie Jianshun once had chronic appendicitis, her appendix is removed during this operation. The five viscera are identified as complete and normal. Based on the above results, have [the doctors] decided to perform a [sex-change] surgery on Xie Jianshun? The answer is with 90 percent certainty.
According to what her physician in charge, Dr. Lin, told the reporters following the operation, the [sex] transformation surgery will take place in two weeks after Xie Jianshun has recovered from this exploratory laparotomy. The procedure for converting [him] into female begins with the cutting open of the presently closed labia majora and labia minora (將閉塞之大小陰唇切開, jiang bisai zhi daxiao yinchun qiekai). After that, a close inspection of [her] vagina will be necessary to see if it is healthy and normal. Anyone with a uterus has a vagina. After both the labia majora and labia minora have been split open and the symbolic phallic organ has been removed from the latter, [Xie]’s transformation into a pure woman will be complete.36
Based on these descriptions alone, the reader was able to join Dr. Lin’s medical team and examine Xie’s physical body carefully, not unlike what happened on the previous day at the 518 Hospital. This narrative even defined the parameters around the anticipation of this unprecedented medicalized sex change in Chinese culture. Although one type of interrogation was conducted in the “private” (closed) space of the operation room and the other was carried out in the “public” (open) domain of printed publications, medical science and the popular press ultimately converged as mutually reinforcing sites for the anatomization of Xie’s sex transformation. One policeman rushed to confess his excitement. He publicly declared his admiration for Xie and his interest in dating her after the operation.37
As the outcome of Xie’s first operation attracted growing publicity, the press further aligned itself with the medical profession by keeping Xie in a public “closet.” This “closet” was characterized in a way different from what gay and lesbian scholars have typically conceived to be the staple features of queer lives in the past: hidden, secretive, and “masked.”38 Instead of concealing one’s sexual orientation in public, Xie’s closet allowed the public to hide his transsexuality from himself. Following the surgery, to quote the exact words in the United Daily News, “ ‘Miss’ Xie Jianshun opened her eyes and looked at her visitors with a slightly painful expression. But she seems to be in a good psychological state. While not a single word has slipped out of her mouth, and although she has not consulted the doctors about the outcome of her surgery, she is at present oblivious of her fate—that she is destined to become a lady.”39 When a snapshot of the surgical proceedings and a photo of Xie became available for the first time in public on August 22, the news of future medical plans to change his sex (including female hormonal therapy) still remained unknown to Xie (figure 5.1).40 Xie was finally “brought out of the closet” nine days after the exploratory laparotomy, which many deemed a success.41 On the afternoon of August 29, Dr. Lin debriefed Xie, and, being the last person to know about his fate, Xie agreed to cooperate in all subsequent medical procedures that would bring about a full sex reassignment.42 Prior to that, by maintaining his sex-change operation as a secret from Xie himself, both the doctors and the press generated a public “closet” that delineated a cultural division between the desire of the transsexual individual and the desire of others. Only in this case, however ironically, Xie, the transsexual, had once expressed strong reluctance to change his sex.43
Why did the medical team not inform Xie of its decision immediately following the operation? As Dr. Lin explained it, his colleagues learned from the nurses that Xie expressed great anxiety about being converted into a woman after having lived as a man for thirty-six years. Given his steadfast desire to remain biologically male, Dr. Lin’s team was afraid that, if Xie found out about their decision to convert his sex so abruptly, he would take his own life, which was implicated in his earlier conversations with the nurses.44 Although the doctors attempted to uncover Xie’s gender orientation (by sending a group of “attractive” women nurses to socialize with him) just a few days before the first operation, the surgical outcome—reinforced by the sensationalist tone of the press—nonetheless suggested that, for them, biology trumped psychology.45 Despite the fact that Xie’s condition was really a case of human intersexuality, the doctors insisted over and again that they were surgically transforming his sex.
Figure 5.1 Xie Jianshun after the first operation (United Daily News, August 22, 1953).
Source: Lianhebao 1953m.
From the beginning, the exploratory laparotomy operation lacked a clear objective. Although the doctors announced their attempt to determine Xie’s sex based on the configurations of his anatomy, they repeatedly proposed a series of surgeries to be performed on Xie’s body and called these “sex-change” operations. After the exploratory laparotomy, bolstered by the breathtaking accounts that stormed the newspapers nationwide, they successfully maintained a “public closet” that prevented Xie from intervening their plan to reassign his sex. Xie’s refusal to be transformed into a woman shifted from public knowledge to an open secret. The doctors continued to push for an opposite surgical outcome, and, as the journalistic sensationalism surrounding his medical condition accumulated, they behaved as vanguards of medical science in the Republic of China by hinting at their ability to alter Xie’s sex just like the doctors abroad. In the shadow of Christine Jorgensen, the construction of Xie Jianshun’s (trans)sexual identity was driven less by his self-determination—his eventual signature on the surgical consent form notwithstanding—and more by the cultural authority of the surgeons involved and the broader impact of the mass circulation press.
The Chinese Christine
Nine months after the New York Daily News announced the sex-change surgery of Jorgensen, readers in postwar Taiwan were told that they, too, had their own “Chinese Christine.” A newspaper article titled “The Chinese Christine” provides a poignant cross-cultural comparison of the two transsexual icons.46 The writer, Guan Ming (管明), began by describing Jorgensen’s situation in the United States, noting the substantial measure of fame and wealth that her sex reassignment had brought her. Guan also rightly noted how the Jorgensen story became harder to “sell” when news of her incomplete female anatomy went public. (Jorgensen did not undergo vaginoplasty until 1954, and, prior to that, many physicians considered Jorgenson’s sex change unsuccessful.) Indeed, after Jorgenson returned from Denmark, American journalists soon questioned her surgically transformed sex. Time declared, “Jorgenson was no girl at all, only an altered male,” and Newsweek followed suit.47
In contrast, Guan observed, “Our ‘Chinese Christine,’ Xie Jianshun, has turned into a 100 percent biological woman, overtaking the ‘incomplete female’ Christine Jorgensen.” Unlike the American celebrity, Xie was inclined to continue living as a man, “let alone earning money [with a dazzling transsexual embodiment].” Guan added that Xie was even “afraid of losing his privilege to stay [in the military] after sex reassignment.”48 The stark contrast in their reactions to changing sex was also observed by a China Daily News writer.49 Based on these differences, Guan concluded, Jorgensen’s transformation generated an international sensation in part because of her “opportunistic inclinations” and the “widespread curiosity in society”; Xie’s sex alteration, in contrast, transpired as a legitimate surgical solution for a congenital bodily defect. “But no adequate social resources were yet available for people like Xie,” wrote Guan.50 At the time of expressing his views, Guan of course could not anticipate the kind of spiritual and financial support that Xie would later receive from various military units in southern Taiwan on a sporadic basis.51 More problematically, Guan had mistaken Xie’s first exploratory laparotomy operation for a full sex-transformation surgery. He also overlooked the convention among experts in the Western medical profession, in the years before Jorgensen, to declare sex-change surgeries as an acceptable treatment for intersexed conditions.52
Nonetheless, Guan’s comparison of the two transsexual icons nicely illustrates how sexualized bodies circulating in the early Cold War–era public milieu represented an ambivalent platform on which claims about national similarities (e.g., between the United Sates and the Republic of China) could simultaneously infuse broader claims about cultural (and even civilizational) divergence between “China” and the West.53 On the one hand, by systematically referring to Xie as the “Chinese Christine,” Taiwanese journalists and commentators interpreted her medical condition and Jorgensen’s transsexual experience as more similar than different. On the other hand, they brought Xie’s intention to remain biologically male to full public disclosure and at one point even suggested the possibility that Xie may be a “true” hermaphrodite and Jorgensen only a “pseudo” one.54 For Guan in particular, whereas the global reputation of Jorgensen’s transsexuality could be attributed to the social norms of “opportunistic” thinking and curiosity in the West, Xie’s publicity in postwar Taiwan reflected the ethical responsibility of Chinese doctors who aimed to provide the best care for exceptional medical conditions. In either case, the popular press portrayed Xie’s condition and her sex-change surgery as a rare and important event in medical science, thereby modeling such advancement in postwar Taiwan after the latest surgical breakthrough in Western biomedicine. In this way, the story of Xie Jianshun helped to situate Taiwan on the same global horizon as the United States.55
Despite the prevailing tendency to compare the two transsexual icons, Xie reacted to her unforeseen stardom in a manner exceedingly different from that of the glamorous American Christine. Whereas Jorgensen enjoyed her international fame, collaborated with various media agents to help shape it, and took other deliberate measures to promote it, Xie did not seize the press coverage of her genital surgery as an opportunity to boost her own reputation. To Xie, the popular rendition of her body as a valuable medical specimen and a concrete ground for U.S.-Taiwan idiosyncratic comparison was less important than her desire to be treated properly and resume a normal and healthy life. Little did Xie realize that the significance of her celebrity came not only from the direct comparisons with Jorgensen but also from the underlying similarities between the evolving perceptions of transsexuals in the popular imagination (due to her publicity) and the subsequent flood of other stories in Taiwan. Both the Christine analogy and the surfacing of other similar sex-change stories in Taiwan were, in many ways, inflected by the global reach of the Jorgensen narrative. As the nominal label of “Chinese Christine” suggests, “the power behind the culture of U.S. imperialism comes from its ability to insert itself into a geocolonial space as the imaginary figure of modernity, and as such, the natural object of identification from which the local people are to learn.”56
The Second Operation
When the Republican government officials took a more serious interest in her case, Xie resisted their top-down decisions. Xie’s second operation was initially scheduled to take place within two weeks after the first, but the only news that reached the 518 Hospital four weeks after the exploratory laparotomy was a state-issued order to transport her to Taipei. The reporters wrote, “In order to ensure Xie’s safety, and in the hope that a second operation will be carried out smoothly, it has been decided that she will be relocated to Taipei. After being evaluated and operated upon by a group of notable doctors in a reputable hospital, [Xie’s sex change] will mark a great moment in history.”57 Xie refused, however. She immediately wrote to government bureaucrats to express a firm preference for staying in Tainan and being operated upon again there.58
To her dismay, Xie paid a price for challenging the authorities. They neglected her and delayed her operation for at least three weeks following her request. The press reappeared as a viable venue for voicing her dissent. On October 17, Xie disclosed her deep frustration with her last menstrual experience, which occurred roughly a month prior. “Given her vaginal blockage, wastes could only be discharged from a small [genital] opening, leading to extreme abdominal pains during her period,” an article with the title “The Pain of Miss Xie Jianshun” explained. Since another menstrual cycle was right around the corner, she urged Dr. Lin, again, to perform a second operation as promptly as possible. But Dr. Lin despairingly conceded that he must receive a formal response from the central government before he could initiate a second surgery. All he could do at this point, as one might have expected, was to reforward Xie’s request to the higher officials and wait.59 At the end of the month, Xie’s former officer, Fu Chun (傅純), paid her a visit, bringing her three hundred dollars to help her get through during this difficult period.60
By late November the prolonged waiting and the accumulated unanswered requests forced Xie to agree bitterly to relocate to Taipei. The newspapers announced the fifth of the following month as the date of her arrival and the Taipei No. 1 General Hospital (台北第一總醫院, Taibei diyi zongyiyuan) as her second home. A medical authority from the Taipei hospital anticipated their takeover of Xie’s case: “In light of Xie’s biology, there is no leap of faith in how successful the second operation will proceed to complete Xie’s transition. The only thing that remains to be determined is whether Xie is a pseudo or true hermaphrodite [偽性或真性半陰陽, weixing huo zhenxing banyinyang]. This can be accomplished by taking a sample from one of Xie’s incomplete testes [一顆不完全的睪丸, yike buwanquan de gaowan] and determine whether it could produce semen.”61 The doctor reinforced the popular perception of Xie’s condition as an extraordinary phenomenon of nature by labeling it “truly rare in the world’s medical history.”62
In early December the United Daily News announced “Chinese Christine Coming to Taipei Today for Treatment,” and many gathered around the Taipei main station that day expecting to greet the transsexual celebrity in person.63 Despite the great measure of patience and enthusiasm with which her Taipei fans waited, their hopes ended up in despair. Xie’s anticipated relocation on December 5 failed to materialize, which disappointed those who were eager to witness the legendary transsexual icon. Journalists reported that “Xie’s Taipei trip has been cancelled or postponed due to unknown reasons” and offered no estimation of her new arrival date.64 On December 9, Min Sheng Daily quoted Xie as declaring, “I have made up my mind not to relocate to Taipei” and “since my body belongs to me, I should have total control over it.”65 To the public’s dismay, it would be at least six more weeks before Xie quietly showed up at the No. 1 General Hospital in Taipei.
The media had heretofore functioned as a key buffer among the medical professionals, Xie Jianshun, and the Taiwanese public. The national dailies in particular served as the primarily means through which readers could learn Xie’s thoughts and gauge her feelings. Those who followed her story closely relied chiefly on the press for the ins and outs of her treatment. Recall that doctors even allowed news reporters to witness the first exploratory laparotomy operation and, afterward, to disclose publicly their decision to turn Xie into a woman before telling Xie herself. Similarly, Xie considered the press as the most immediate (and perhaps reliable) way to publicize her desire to remain biologically male before the operation and her unwillingness to leave Tainan afterward. Almost without the slightest degree of hesitation, both Xie and her physicians readily collaborated with journalists to escalate the initial scoop of media reporting into a nationwide frenzy.
Although the reporters continued to clamor, the coverage took a dip near the end of 1953. In 1954 only three articles in the United Daily News, one in Min Sheng Daily, one in Central Daily News (中央日報, Zhongyang ribao), and none in either China Daily News or Shin Sheng Daily followed up on Xie’s situation. After the cancellation of her December trip, the first update on Xie’s condition came in as late as mid-February 1954. It was only by that point that her reticent move to Taipei on January 16 was revealed to the public. The name of her new surgeon in charge at the No. 1 General Hospital was Jiang Xizheng (姜希錚). Yet, despite the surprising news that Xie was now in Taipei, the closest impression one could gain from reading this article was a description of her hospital room: “Xie Jianshun’s room features simple decorations, with one bed, a tea table, a long table, and a chair. There is a window at the end of the room, but the curtains are almost always closed in order to prevent strangers from taking a peek at [her] secrets.”66 What these words reflected was not only the physical distance between Xie and any curious visitors; these words also captured the metaphorical distance between Xie and the readers who found it increasingly difficult to gather information about her based on the newspaper reports alone. Even as the United Daily News indicated that Xie was now taking hormones so that she was closer to becoming “the second Christine,” it failed to identify the source of that information and the degree of its reliability.67
The long silence in the press coverage might suggest that the public’s interest in Xie’s story had begun to wane. However, the next United Daily News article, which appeared in mid-March, indicated otherwise and put forth a more plausible explanation: “The hospital has been especially secretive about the exact location of her room so as to avoid unsolicited visits from intrusive strangers. Meanwhile, perhaps as a result of her male-to-female transformation, Xie Jianshun has become increasingly shy in front of strangers, so she has asked the hospital staff not to disclose any further information about her treatment to the public while she is hospitalized. Deeply concerned with her psychological well-being, the doctors agreed as a matter of course.”68
Also painting a hyperfeminine image of Xie, both Min Sheng Daily and Central Daily News confirmed that the hospital was “working closely with Xie to protect her privacy.”69 In other words, the dip in the press coverage had less to do with the public’s declining interest in Xie than with a mutual agreement between Xie and her attending physicians to refrain from speaking to media representatives. This constituted the second turning point in the evolving relationship between the medical profession and the coverage of Xie in the mass media. The popular press no longer played the role of a friendly intermediary between the public, the doctors, and Xie herself. To both Xie and her medical staff, the publicity showered on them after the first operation seemed to have impeded rather than helped their plans. Xie, in particular, may have considered the authorities’ indifference toward her request to stay in Tainan to be a result of nationwide media coverage, thereby holding her prolonged waiting against the reporters. Apart from a brief comment about how Xie displayed “more obvious feminine characteristics” post-hormonal injections, the March Lianhebao article included no new information on her situation.70
As the voice of the newspaper accounts became increasingly speculative, and as the mediating role of the press gradually receded to the background, available information about Xie’s second operation proved to be less certain and more difficult to ascertain. The tension between the reporters and those who tried to protect Xie from them peaked around late June, when the United Daily News reported on Xie’s story for the third and final time in 1954. The article opened with a sentence that mentioned only in passing Xie’s “more ‘determinant’ operation performed recently at the No. 1 General Hospital.” Framed as such, Xie’s “second” operation was barely publicized, and even if readers interpreted this statement to mean that Xie had undergone a second operation, the doctors withstood the temptation to give an update on it. When the reporters consulted Xie’s medical team on June 24, they were met with a persistent reluctance to respond to any questions and to permit visitation rights for nonmedical personnel. A staff at the No. 1 General Hospital was even quoted for saying, “We are not sure if Xie Jianshun is still staying with us.”71
In contrast to the sensationalist tone and mundane details that dominated the discussion of the first surgery, the way that the media covered the second operation was less fact oriented and more congested with suppositions. The major newspapers glossed over any information that would support the claim that Xie had become more feminized after relocation. Despite the best intentions of the hospital staff to distance the media people from Xie,
a journalist has conducted an investigation inside the hospital and found signs that suggest that Xie Jianshun has become more lady-like and that she is undergoing an accelerated metamorphosis.… Despite the high surveillance under which Xie Jianshun is monitored, her face can still be seen sometimes. According to an individual who claims to have seen Xie Jianshun in person lately, it is difficult to discern whether Xie Jianshun has transformed into a woman completely. Nonetheless, based on what he saw, Xie has grown her hair longer, and her face has become paler and smoother. The general impression one would gain from looking at Xie now is that Xie Jianshun has transformed into a woman gradually over time [謝尖順已日漸頃向於女性型, Xie Jianshun yi rijian qingxiang yu nüxingxing].72
Not only did this account fail to mention what the second operation accomplished, it only surmised the outcome based on some unknown source. Unlike the step-by-step recounting of the surgical protocols involved in the first operation, the doctors’ strategy for pursuing Xie’s bodily transformation in the immediate future remained opaque.
Sensationalism Beyond Xie
As doctors, the authorities, and Xie became more self-conscious about what they said in public, the press met increasing obstacles in sensationalizing new narratives about the alleged “first” Chinese transsexual. After the exploratory laparotomy, reporters lacked direct access to information about Xie’s medical care, so they began to look for other tantalizing stories of gender transgressive behavior or bodily ailment. Between late 1953 and late 1954, the popularity of Xie’s transsexual narrative instigated the appearance of other similar accounts of unusual body morphology—though sometimes deviating from the actual transformation of sex—in the Taiwanese press. During the pivotal moments when the media attention on Xie took a back seat, these stories of physical trans anomaly came to light in the shadow of Christine’s glamour and thereby played an important role in sustaining popular interest in sex change in Cold War Taiwan.
The media coverage of the Xie story enabled some readers to consider the possibility of experimenting with their own gender appearance. For instance, toward the end of September 1953 the United Daily News published an article, “A Teenage Boy Dressed Up as a Modern Woman,” which included a photograph of the transgender individual in question (figure 5.2a and 5.2b). The nineteen-year-old cross-dresser, Lü Jinde (呂金德), was said to “appear beautifully,” had “a puffy hairstyle”; wore “a Western-style white blouse that showed parts of her breast, a blue skirt, a white slingback, and a padded bra on her chest”; and carried “a large black purse” on a Thursday evening in Taipei.73 This “human prodigy” (人妖, renyao) was found with “foundation powder, powder blush, lipstick, hand mirror, and a number of photos of other men and women” in her purse, and her face was described as “covered with a thick layer of powder” and with “a heavy lipstick application.” She also “penciled her eyebrows so that they look much longer.” “All of these,” the writer claimed, “were aimed to turn herself into a modern woman.”74 Indeed, this may have been the first instance in which the term “renyao” was explicitly associated with the intentionality of transvestism in postwar Taiwan. The only other exception was the infamous trial of Zeng Qiuhuang (曾秋皇) in the early 1950s, where Zeng was found guilty of committing a series of fraudulent offenses. However, the association of Zeng with the label “renyao” centered not only on his “neither-man-nor-woman” (不男不女, bunan bunü) identity and his ambiguous social role of having been married to both men and women but also on the crimes he had committed, which rendered him defiant of the proper legal expressions of human behavior.75
Figures 5.2a and 5.2b Lü Jinde in male appearance, on the left, and female attire, on the right (United Daily News, September 25, 1953).
Source: Lianhebao 1953b.
Lü, who used to work as a hairdresser, was identified by one of her former clients living in the Wanhua (萬華) District. This client followed Lü around briefly before turning to the police, explaining that Lü “walked in a funny way that was neither masculine nor feminine.” After being arrested, Lü told the police that “because I enjoy posing as a lady [做個小姐, zuoge xiaojie], starting roughly two months ago, I have been wandering around the street in female attire [男扮女裝, nanban nüzhuang] after sunset on a daily basis.” Lü confessed that cross-dressing enabled him to “align with his psychological interest” (合乎他的心意, hehu tade xinyi) and that, sexually, he was “attracted to women.” “Although Lü emulated a modern lady quite successfully,” the writer of this article insisted, “his feminine attire still fails to conceal his masculine characteristics, which are easily recognizable in the eye of any beholder.”76 One exceptional observer considered Lü’s cross-dressing behavior unproblematic, pointing out the counterexample of the increasing number of women who had begun imitating the roles of men in society.77 Most commentators reacted conservatively, though, claiming to have witnessed “an immoral, confusing, and gender ambiguous persona that provokes disgust” (不倫不類非男非女的樣子, 叫人看了要嘔吐, bulun bulei feinan feinü de yangzi, jiaoren kanle yao outu).78
Another story of gender transgression falls more appropriately in the category of what historians of gender and sexuality in America and Europe have called “passing.”79 The twenty-three-year-old Ding Bengde (丁甭德) dressed up as a man and was arrested for having abducted another young woman named Xu Yueduan (許月端). Xu’s mother turned Ding in to the police after the two girls reappeared in Xu’s hometown, Huwei District (虎尾鎮), and accused Ding of seducing and abducting Xu. Ding explained that she came to Huwei with the sole purpose of meeting a friend. She had to be able to earn a living to support herself and her family, so she decided to cross-dress as a man in public. This “passing” would lower her chances of being mistreated by her coworkers and other men. Labeled by the press as a “male impersonating freak” (女扮男裝怪客, nüban nanzhuang guaike), Ding denied the accusation made by Xu’s mother. Similar to the coverage of Lü Jinde, the press coverage fascinated its readers with engrossing details about Ding’s masculine appearance: “The cross-dressing freak wore a long-sleeve white shirt, a pair of white pants, no shoes, a sleek hairstyle, and natural body gestures, making it difficult for people to discern his/her true sex [使人見之難別雌雄, shiren jianzhi nanbie cixiong].” The reporters, moreover, hinted at a “deeper meaning” to this case, which the police were still in the process of figuring out. Perhaps by “deeper meaning” they had in mind the possibility, however remote, of a lesbian relationship between Ding and Xu. But neither the concept of homosexuality nor the word “lesbianism” appeared in the textual description of this incident.80
Apart from explicit gender transgressive behaviors, other astonishing accounts of bodily irregularity made their way into the press. In writing about these stories, the reporters always began by referring to Xie Jianshun’s experience as a departing point for framing these rare disorders of the reproductive system. For example, a gynecologist came across a young woman with two uteruses in Tainan, where news of Xie’s sex transformation originated. This coincidence led the reporter to declare, “While the date for the second gender reassignment surgery of Xie Jianshun, the Christine of Free China, remains unsettled, another case in which a surgery was pursued to treat biological anomalies was uncovered in Tainan.”81 The woman was pregnant and near the end of her third trimester when she showed up at the Provincial Tainan Hospital (省立台南醫院, Shengli Tainan yiyuan) for treatment, and it was clear from the start that this case bore very little resemblance to Xie’s transsexuality.
Upon discovering two uteruses inside her womb, Dr. Huang Jiede (黃皆得) decided that, for this woman’s delivery, he would first perform a caesarian section, followed by a tubectomy (tubal ligation). The purpose of the tubectomy, according to Huang, was to prevent “gestation in both uteruses, which may lead to undesirable side effects in the future.” Reporters pressed Huang for further clarification on the safeness and necessity of the C-section procedure. Huang explained that normal vaginal birth would be difficult in this case “because [the patient] has two uteruses.” He stood by his decision “to deliver the baby with a C-section, which is the safest option.” Interestingly, in contrast to the tremendous degree of publicity accorded to Xie Jianshun, journalists complied with the medical team’s instruction to withhold the personal information, including the full name, of this particular patient. What is certain, though, is that the media exposure of this bi-uteral condition hinged on its potential for forthright comparison to the Xie story, given that both shared a certain feature of “rareness [to be investigated by] the medical community.”82
In November 1953 the press discovered another individual with uncommon pregnancy problems. Only this time the patient was a man. Born in 1934, the farmer Liao (廖) had experienced persistent cramps and abdominal discomfort over the past two decades. The pain had become more pronounced over time, especially in recent years, reaching an intolerable state that forced Liao to seek medical assistance with the company of his family. Although this was not the first time that Liao consulted doctors about his condition, it was the first instance that he received surgical (and possibly terminal) treatment for it. Dr. Yang Kunyan (楊坤焰), the president of the Jichangtang Hospital (吉昌堂醫院, Jichangtang yiyuan), situated on Zhongzheng Road in the Luodong District of Yilan County (宜蘭縣羅東鎮中正路, Yilanxian Luodongzheng Zhongzhenglu), operated on Liao on November 7. News of this male pregnancy was circulated at least on two levels: the local district level and the county level. On the local district level, the report explained that “because [Liao’s male body] does not allow for natural delivery, Dr. Yang could remove [the head of the fetus] only surgically.”83 The county-level coverage of Liao’s condition was more detailed: “Dr. Yang found a growth in Liao’s abdomen and excised the pink fleshy bulge that weighed four hectograms [四公兩, sigongliang]. The doctors were unable to determine the causes of this tumor even after careful research and investigation. After removing it from Liao’s body, they found a head [with some hair], a pair of eyes, a nose, and a mouth on the fleshy growth. The only missing parts [which would otherwise make this growth resemble a fetus] are the arms and legs.”84
In the shadow of Xie Jianshun’s transition, the question of Liao’s sexual identity was high on the reporters’ radar. The district-level reporter wrote, “Everyone is curious about where Liao’s baby comes from and whether he will be transformed into a man or a woman. In Dr. Yang’s perspective, Liao is indisputably male [道地的男人, daodi de nanren]. Therefore, after recovering from the delivery and the laparotomy incision surgery, Liao will be able to leave the hospital and enjoy the rest of his life like a normal man.” Similarly, the county-level coverage disclosed Dr. Yang’s confirmation that Liao “was neither a woman nor a hermaphrodite.”85 The venturing into Liao’s sexual identity led to greater clarification of his physical ailment. “The growth,” Dr. Yang speculated, “may have been the result of twin conception during his mother’s pregnancy and that one of the fetuses formed prematurely and remained in his body.”86 The district-level coverage introduced Liao’s male pregnancy with the opening sentence: “The ex-soldier Xie Jianshun, now a lady, has become a household name in Taiwan, being the focus of the most popular current event of the year.”87 The county-level coverage stressed the value of the Liao case by noting the strong interest that numerous medical experts had expressed toward it: “This rare event has taken the county by storm. The medical profession places great emphasis on this case, believing that it bears a tremendous value for medical research.”88 Although neither the woman with two uteruses nor the pregnant man expressed medical symptoms related to sex change per se, the Xie Jianshun story provided an immediate optic for coming to terms with these problems. The papers claimed that, like Xie’s transsexuality, these were extraordinary biological phenomena with the potential of contributing to the advancement of biomedical research. On their end, in both cases, the doctors justified surgical intervention for these “unnatural” bodily defects.
In the midst of Xie Jianshun’s relocation to Taipei in December 1953, the press recounted the story of another transsexual: Gonggu Bao (宮古保), a foreign criminal who at times disguised herself as a man but more often appeared as a woman, and who had lived in various parts of Asia at different points of her life. Born in Siberia in 1902, Gonggu entered the world as Gonggu Baozi (宮古保子). Her father was Chinese, and her mother was half Koryak and half Japanese. After her mother died due to malnutrition during the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), her father married another Japanese woman and moved to Tokyo. At the age of seven, Gonggu Baozi discovered that her facial and other physical appearances began to exhibit “masculine traits.” Doctors performed plastic surgeries on her (how intrusive these surgeries were in terms of direct genital alteration is unclear from the newspaper account), but she still appeared “neither womanly nor manlike” (不像女的, 也不像男的, buxiang nüde, ye buxiang nande). Given the situation, her father and stepmother decided to change her name to Gonggu Bao, believing that by adopting this new, more masculine name, she was destined to pass as a normal man.89
Unfortunately, at the age of thirteen, Bao began to menstruate. This horrified her, as someone who had been assigned a male identity for half of her life up to that point. She began to alienate herself. She never played with other kids at school. Her parents, hugely disappointed at the situation, decided to send her away to live with her grandmother. Since the age of fifteen, so the newspapers claimed, Gonggu had committed at least thirty-eight crimes all over the world, including in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, and even Alaska and Canada. But more importantly, what Gonggu Bao’s story confirmed was that Xie Jianshun’s sex change was neither exceptional nor the first in Asia. Although their life trajectories proceeded in vastly different social, cultural, political, and historical contexts, Gonggu and Xie followed the same legacy of bodily transformation through medical intervention.90 Moreover, the renewed interest in Gonggu Bao implied that it would be too simplistic to consider her, like Christine Jorgensen, merely as a historical precedent to Xie’s popularity; rather, it was precisely the ways in which the popular press served as a central vehicle for disseminating the possible idea of sex change that enabled the stories of Gonggu, Jorgensen, and Xie to command public interest as interwoven and interrelated in Cold War Sinophone culture.
In addition to Gonggu, journalists in the same month uncovered two more domestic stories of human intersexuality. In both cases, the newspaper accounts referred to Xie’s experience as a window into these anomalous medical discoveries. The first concerned a thirty-five-year-old man, Mr. Zheng (鄭), whose ambiguous genital anatomy came to the attention of doctors responsible for screening new military recruits at Yuanli District (苑裏鎮). After a long and careful consideration, the military physician ultimately agreed on the label of “the middle sex” (中性, zhongxing) for designating Zheng’s gender status.91 The second story concerned a nineteen-year-old woman, Lin Luanying (林鸞英), who was a frequent client of a tofu shop in Yeliu Village (野柳村) of Taipei County owned by the widow Li Axiang (李阿向). Building on two years of customer relation, Lin became very intimate with Li’s eldest son, Hu Canlin (胡燦林), and with parental consent, Lin and Hu decided to get married on December 8 of the lunar calendar. As the wedding day drew near, however, Lin began to panic. She believed that something was terribly wrong with her body, so she consulted a doctor at the Yilan Hospital (宜蘭醫院, Yilan yiyuan) and “tried to fix her problem.” The media framed her visit in voluntary terms, describing her as “a yin-yang person like Xie Jianshun,” who also went to the doctors for a checkup after experiencing physical discomfort. “The major difference [between them],” though, “was that Lin was soon turning into a bride.” After performing an investigative operation on Lin (presumably similar to Xie’s first exploratory laparotomy), the doctors were surprised by the incomplete development of her genitalia, with the external absence of labia majora and labia minora and the internal absence of a uterus. The doctors were “astounded by what they saw, but claimed to lack the technical expertise to help her” (醫師見而興嘆, 乏術開闢桃源, yishi jian’er xingtan, fashu kaipi taoyuan). Lin’s condition, they suggested, proved to be more complicated than the simple determination of gonadal tissues that had made sex reassignment in Xie’s case possible.92
As the cast of characters mounted, newspapers published more sensational stories. The most heartbreaking and tragic of these was probably the story of Wang Lao (汪老), a fifty-seven-year-old intersex person who committed suicide in March 1954 due to chronic loneliness and depression. The media interpreted her biological condition as “identical to Xie Jianshun” with the exception that her intersexuality had never been properly attended to by doctors.93 The most optimistic and encouraging story was probably that of the five-year-old Du Yizheng (杜異征). While the result of Xie’s transition was still up in the air, surgeons in Taichung (台中) claimed to have successfully converted this boy into a girl, giving this child a normal life and the public an additional boost of confidence in Taiwan’s medical practice. As the press framed it, this case represented a landmark achievement in the Taiwanese medical profession and enabled parents to have a stronger faith in the way doctors approached clinical cases of intersex children.94
But the story of the transsexual Liu Min (劉敏) stood out as the most puzzling and intriguing of all (figure 5.3). On December 10, 1954, the United Daily News billed the story as one about the transformation of “a fair lady into a heroic warrior.”95 Three days later another article opened with the enigma itself: “For a woman who had given birth and then transforms into a man within a decade is an event that reasonably arouses suspicion on all fronts.”96 Born in Beiping as Liu Fangting (劉芳亭), Liu Min came to Taiwan with the Nationalist army as Xie Jianshun had done in the late 1940s. She had recently acquired visible male physical traits owing to medical complications, but what amazed everyone was the fact that she also had a daughter, Xiaozhen (小真), with her husband. Is it possible for a transsexual to give birth? With the unknown fate of Xie Jianshun (including the effect of her sex-change surgeries on her eventual ability to conceive) still lurking in the media background, the combination of Liu’s past pregnancy with her recent sex metamorphosis seemed all the more bizarre, pertinent, and worth pursuing. For over a week, Liu’s life history prompted the speculations and opinions of people from all walks of life, and the initial coverage soon escalated into a nationwide obsession.97
Figure 5.3 Liu Min (United Daily News, December 13, 1954).
Source: Lianhebao 1954b.
It turned out that Liu had never delivered a baby. Xiaozhen was her half-sister and, accordingly, adopted child. In 1938, after marrying her cousin, Liu felt regular distress in her abdominal region, not unlike Xie’s early conditions. (By that point, Liu’s biological father had already left her and her mother for over a decade.) Her relatives considered these cramps to be signs of actual pregnancy. Upon learning this, her mother immediately disclosed her own recent pregnancy to Liu (without stating who the father was). But her mother’s economic and health situation at that point made it unfeasible to raise a second child. Her mother therefore pleaded Liu to raise her stepsister as her own child in the pretense of casting this whole situation as the outcome of her ostensible pregnancy. With her husband’s agreement, Liu accepted her mother’s request and promised to never reveal this secret to anyone. Meanwhile, over the years, Liu had her uterus surgically removed in Beijing, which led to startling changes in her genital area, including “the closing up of her vagina” (陰道逐漸閉塞, yindao zhujian bisai) and “the formation of a phallus organ on top of her labia” (大小陰唇之上便開始長出男性生殖器, daxiao yinchun zhishang bian kaishi zhangchu nanxing shengzhiqi). According to Liu, the reporter to whom she shared this secret was only the fourth person to know about it.98
By the end of 1954 reporters had lost almost all contact with Xie Jianshun and her medical team. Xie’s case gradually moved from current events to yesterday’s news, but as other stories of unusual bodily problems arose and resurfaced, the media reminded the public that manhood, womanhood, and their boundaries were neither as obvious nor as impermeable as they once had seemed. From Lü Jinde’s transvestism to the lady with two uteruses, and from Liao’s male pregnancy to Lin Luanying’s intersexed condition, the earlier publicity on Xie provided cogent leverage for both the journalists and health care professionals to relate other nominal stories of bodily irregularity to the idea of “transsexuality.” Although not all of them were directly or necessarily about sex change per se, these stories enabled some readers to take seriously the possibility of sex/gender transgression. With an elevated awareness of the malleability of gender, they began to learn what the label “bianxingren” meant and appreciated the immediate role of medical intervention in the reversing of one’s sex. Through the press coverage, stories of intersexuality and sex transition recast earlier questions about human identity in a new light. The alleged authority of doctors to unlock the secret of sexual identity, in particular, became more firmly planted in the popular imagination.
Transformation Complete
The story of Liu Min finally pushed medical experts to come clean about Xie’s situation. After the news of Liu’s fake pregnancy broke, readers channeled their curiosity back to Xie. In January 1955 a newspaper article with the headline “Xie Jianshun’s Male-to-Female Transformation Nearly Complete: The Rumor of Surgical Failure Proved to Be False” shattered any doubts about the stunted progress in Xie’s transition. After the first operation, given the way that Xie’s doctors had intentionally refrained from leaking any word to the press, the public was left with an unclear impression of what was going on inside the hospital specifically and how Xie was doing more generally. Rumor soon had it that the doctors’ long silence meant Xie’s procedures were ultimately unsuccessful. According to the article, the cause of this rumor “can be traced to an incident reported last month in Tainan of a yin-yang person. The general public’s memory of Xie was refreshed by this story of the yin-yang person in Tainan, and as a result of this reminder, the public began to revisit the question of whether Xie had been successfully transformed into a woman.” In an attempt to dispel any doubts, doctors from the No. 1 General Hospital were quoted for confirming that “the rumor is absolutely false.” They clarified that “Xie Jianshun’s sex transformation has in fact proceeded rather smoothly and is reaching its final stages.” Xie, the doctors promised, “is living a perfectly healthy life.” But when the reporters requested to speak to Xie in person, they were turned away and were told by the hospital staff that this kind of request “could only be fulfilled with a permit from the state authorities.”99 Interested readers would acquire a similarly opaque impression from reading the coverage in Central Daily News.100
The initial upsurge of the renewed interest in Xie survived only briefly. It would take another eight months—after the doctors had performed Xie’s “third” and “final” operation—before her name would make headlines again.101 On August 31, 1955, the United Daily News carried an extended front-page article with the headline, “A New Chapter in the Nation’s Medical History: The Success of Xie Jianshun’s Sex-Change Surgery.”102 On the following day, Central Daily News teased the public by announcing that “The Details of Xie Jianshun’s Sex-Change Operations Will Be Publicized Shortly.”103 According to Xie’s physician in charge, “Contrary to a number of fabricated claims, Xie Jianshun’s final operation took place very smoothly on the morning of 30 August. With respect to the protocols and results of this decisive surgery, the medical team promises to release all of the relevant information in a formal report in due course.” The papers glossed over the aim of this operation with the succinct words “to unclog her fallopian tubes,” the obstruction of which had caused her periodic discomfort for months.104 Apparently, Xie felt dizzy after the operation but recovered by the next morning. The representatives from the No. 1 General Hospital explained that both Xie’s own request and the uniqueness of her case constituted their main reasons for holding off on disclosing its clinical details. Since Xie had explicitly asked the medical staff to abstain from speaking to journalists and reporters, the doctors assumed the responsibility of protecting her privacy from media exposure. On the other hand, the doctors believed that her sex-change operations “promise to mark an important medical breakthrough in the country” (此一手術尚為我國醫學界之創舉, ciyi shoushu shangwei woguo yixuejie zhi chuangju), so they wanted to be extra careful in making any kind of public statement. Silence seemed to be the best demonstration of their precaution before the final verdict.105
On the following day, newspapers declared “the success of Xie Jianshen’s sex-change surgery,” pitching it as “a fact that can no longer be shaken.” Although the staff at the No. 1 General Hospital pledged to disclose the surgical specifics in the near future, readers in Taiwan had already learned a great deal on the day following the operation. Xie’s popularity first skyrocketed two years ago, in August 1953, when doctors, scientists, the press, and the lay public “discovered” her. Despite the detailed coverage of her first operation, or because of it, Xie and the people in her immediate circle became much quieter in their dealing with reporters. As its media coverage began to thin out in 1954, the Xie story grew more and more mysterious while other stories of uncommon body morphology abounded in the press. Even the timing and completion of her second operation were never thoroughly announced until this point. The pertinent accounts now clarified that, in the months following her first operation, Xie not only resisted relocating to Taipei but ardently opposed to changing her sex. The second operation eventually took place in April 1954, and it involved “the removal of the two symbolic male gonads.” After the second operation, Xie “began to develop stronger female sexual characteristics” (體內女性生理性能轉強, tinei nüxing shengli xingneng zhuanqiang), which included the enlargement of her breasts and the onset of regular menstruation. Because Xie’s reproductive system lacked a full vaginal canal, her periodic menses caused regular discomfort when excreted with urine through the urethra. As she “started to learn how it feels to live like a woman” (開始嘗到做女人的滋味, kaishi changdao zuo nüreng de ziwei), these physiological reorientations made her more reluctant to identify as female. After wrestling with the idea of relocating to Taipei, she struggled with and eventually failed to convince her surgeons not to transform her sex.106
Amid a world of uncertainties brought about by World War II and its immediate aftermath, the media used the metaphor of the Cold War to depict Xie’s relationship with the doctors. If the estimated timing of the second operation were true, sixteen months had elapsed before Xie entered her recent surgery. To quote the exact words used to frame this extended period of time, “The Cold War [冷戰, lengzhan] between Xie Jianshun and the hospital lasted until 5 April of this year.” What was frozen during this period was not only Xie’s reaction to the decisions made by her physicians in charge but also the overall fate of her medical treatment (or sex transformation). Distinguishing her ambition from the intent of her doctors, Xie requested a second relocation to a different hospital, but her request was ultimately denied. What “ended this Cold War,” according to the newspapers, was a letter that she wrote to the president, Chiang Kai-Shek, in which she expressed her disdain toward how the doctors handled her case and the absence of adequate nutrition provided by the hospital.107
In response to the letter, the Ministry of National Defense sent two representatives to the No. 1 General Hospital to resolve the tension between Xie and her medical attendants. Xie’s complaint about how she was mistreated at the hospital, they found out, was a misleading “expression of her wrong set of mind” (內心理不正常發出的牢騷, neixinli buzhengchang fachu de laosao). They told her that the recurrent cramps that she experienced were due to the menstrual periods, which typified the bodily experience of female reproductive biology. In order to alleviate this somatic (and not psychological) discomfort, the doctors needed to construct a functional vaginal canal for her. Ultimately, the two National Defense representatives succeeded in persuading Xie to accept doctors’ advice and complete her sex transformation with one final surgery. The United Daily News speculated that “perhaps it is due to her prejudice against the hospital staff, or perhaps it is due to her loyalty to the military, she agreed to a third operation after contemplating for only ten minutes or so.”108 The year-long “Cold War” thus concluded with the direct intervention of not the medical experts but state authorities. Whereas, according to historian Elaine May, the contemporaneous structural norms of American families helped to offset the nation’s domestic and foreign political insecurities, Cold War’s metaphoric power, as evident in the example of Xie’s transsexuality, was diffused in the public discussion of sexually malleable bodies in the context of postwar Taiwan, situated on the fringes of China and Chineseness.109
Before doctors released their official report of Xie’s case, details of the third operation and its influence on Xie were already openly discussed by those in her immediate circle. For example, the new surgeon in charge, Zhang Xianlin (張先林), uninhibitedly commented on the nature of Xie’s latest operation. Whereas most peopled considered this operation the most critical and fate determining, Zhang regarded it merely as “a simple reconstructive surgery” (簡單的矯形手術而已, jiandan de jiaoxing shoushu eryi). Because Xie’s reproductive system was already confirmed female, according to Zhang, the operation involved the enhancement of her female biology by “removing her symbolic phallic organ” (把她那象徵性的陰莖予以割除, bata na xiangzhengxing de yinjing yuyi gechu) and, more importantly, “the construction of an artificial menstrual canal” (開闢出一條人工的排經道, kaipichu yitiao renggong de paijingdao), which would allow her to release menses normally. The operation, which Zhang considered to be a breeze, began at eight o’clock in the morning and ended at ten after nine.110 To assess the efficacy of the operation, the doctors vowed to administer an X-ray examination in two weeks.111 When the United Daily News in Taiwan and the Kung Sheung Daily News (工商日報, Gongshang ribao) in Hong Kong published half-nude photos of the “post-op” Xie on September 8, representatives from the No. 1 General Hospital quickly dismissed them as a sham.112 As a sign of their interest in looking after Xie’s psychological well-being, within three weeks after the operation, the Ministry of National Defense awarded Xie one thousand New Taiwan dollars to help her defray the cost of purchasing new feminine attires.113 This generous sum offered Xie greater freedom in constructing a social image—and a new sense of self—that aligned neatly with her new biological sex (figures 5.4 and 5.5).114
As doctors sought to clarify what happened during and after Xie’s third operation, newspapers continued to report on other astonishing stories of sex change. In early May 1955, for instance, the case of a soldier with a medical condition similar to Xie’s was reported in Chiayi County (嘉義縣, Jiayixian). This twenty-eight-year-old “gender ambiguous soldier” (性別可疑的軍人, xingbie keyi de junren), Xu Zhenjie (徐振傑), was born in Henan. The individuals who first raised an eyebrow on his gender identity were those from within his troop. According to them, Xu was always reserved and quiet, and what especially made others suspicious was that he never showered with other men and always left his clothes on whenever he joined them. Initially, the doctors who examined his body had only a vague sense of the structural differences between his genitals and that of other male soldiers, but they could not reach a consensus on his “true” sex. After this incident came to light, the gynecologists and nurses at the Chiayi Hospital recalled that during his previous visit for a checkup, Xu complained about his own gender confusion and unfortunate fate.115
Figure 5.4 The success of Xie Jianshun’s transformation (Central Daily News, September 9, 1955).
Source: Zhongyang ribao 1955c.
Figure 5.5 Xie’s new public image after transition (China Times, October 10, 1956).
Source: Zhongguo shibao 1956a.
The story of Xu echoed elements of the earlier anxiety and fascination with Liu Min, whose fake pregnancy stimulated renewed public interest in Xie. What grabbed everyone’s attention, again, was the intriguing relationship between transsexuals and childbirth. At one point Xu tried to convince his family that his reproductive organ was “more feminine than masculine”; in fact, he suspected, he “may be one hundred percent female.” If that were the case, had he ever menstruated or become pregnant? “Faced with these questions,” Xu only “kept silent and turned away shyly.” It fact, when Xu first joined the army near the Dianmian (滇緬) borders, he self-identified as female. Having eventually enlisted in a men’s troop, however, Xu became close friends with other men in the army. His relationship with one of them became especially intimate, and after revealing his congenital condition to the person, Xu had his child. After delivering the baby, however, Xu considered his own gender identity even more perplexing and distressful. By the time of his military discharge, “one could hardly tell the difference between Xu’s mannerism and physical appearance from other men’s.”116 Even as Xu tried to dissociate himself from a masculine past, the press homed in on a sturdy, masculine image. Although the question of whether Xu had actually experienced menstruation and childbirth (and what happened to the child if he did) remained up in the air, the press seemed to be more interested in using these questions as a foil against which to juxtapose his current embodiment of a heteronormative masculinity.117
In the United States, after the initial stories on Christine Jorgensen dwindled, reporters produced a flood of sensational copy on sex-change operations in newspapers, periodicals, and magazines. Much like the way the coverage in Taiwan centered on Xie Jianshun, each new story confirmed that Jorgensen was not alone and that a number of other people similarly desired to alter their bodily sex. The stories came from all over the world, but those from Britain and the United States attracted the most attention from the American press.118 In the mid-1950s, these stories began to make their way across the Pacific and reached the Chinese-speaking audience. One of these stories in particular, that of Tamara Rees and James Courtland, appeared in Taiwan’s United Daily News in July 1955.119 By reading the brief coverage in the United Daily News, Chinese readers learned not only of the names, ages, and occupations of the couple—the thirty-one-year-old paratrooper Rees (李絲) and the thirty-year-old businessman Courtland (卡德倫)—but also the details of Rees’s transsexual experience in a piecemeal fashion. The article clearly indicated the time and location of Rees’s sex-change operation—in Holland in January 1954—thereby hinting at a much broader and global dimension to sex reassignment surgeries beyond Taiwan and the United States. Of course, what the Chinese coverage did not include were the minor details of Rees’s transition. For instance, born in 1924, Rees had already begun taking hormones and passing as a woman in Los Angeles before she traveled to Amsterdam for her genital surgery. After she married Courtland in July 1955, one magazine even called the wedding “history’s first transvestite marriage.”120 And when the psychoanalyst Ralph Greenson (1911–1979) later published an article on Rees in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis in 1964, he interpreted her gender confusion as a case of “homosexuality similar to that of neurotic adults.”121
In contrast to the American stories, the majority of news of sex change in Taiwan emerged from the medical screening of new recruits at military units. In September 1955, a twenty-five-year-old young man by the name of Wu Kunqi (吳坤祈) was identified with a “dual-sexed genital organ” (兩性器官, liangxing qiguan) by the doctors at Zhongshantang (中山堂) in the Gangshan District of Kaohsiung County (高雄縣岡山鎮, Gangshanzheng Gaoxiungxian). Wu’s medical screening revealed “a tiny hole below his penis” with “a size penetrable by a finger”; his penis “lacked a urethral opening,” and his “urine came out of the tiny hole” rather than the penis. When asked by the doctors, Wu admitted that he often ejaculated from the tiny hole as well.122 In the same month, the father of the twenty-one-year-old Zeng Qingji (曾清吉) arrived at Madou (麻豆), also in southern Taiwan, and requested the doctor responsible for screening new recruits to exempt Zeng from conscription because of his congenital sexual disorder. After a careful examination of Zeng’s body, Dr. Wang Baikun (王百焜) found both a penis and a vaginal opening in his genital area. Like Wu’s, Zeng’s penis did not have a urethral opening, but there was a tiny hole surrounded by a pair of labia underneath the penis. Unlike Wu, whose body could produce semen, Zeng discharged regular small-quantity menses. According to Dr. Wang’s diagnosis, then, Zeng was a “pseudo-hermaphrodite” (假性陰陽人, jiaxing yinyangren), and given his predominant female biological constitution, he could be easily transformed into a woman through the surgical removal of his male genital organ.123 Similar to the experiences of Xie Jianshun and Xu Zhenjie, all of these later accounts of sex change embraced a principal narrative of hiding one’s ambiguous sexual identity. Both Wu and Zeng expressed great disappointment when their intersexuality was uncovered by the medical professionals. Most importantly, in these stories, doctors always construed surgical sex transformation as the most desirable solution after bursting these extremely personal secrets wide open in public.
On October 28, 1955, the United Daily News carried a front-page story that finally proclaimed “The Completion and Success of Xie Jianshun’s Sex-Change Operation.”124 The story continued on page 3, which contained a full-length official report on Xie’s medical treatment released by the No. 1 Army Hospital. China Times (中國時報, Zhongguo shibao) similarly presented Xie as someone who “has transitioned from a masculine man into a beauty” (從此鐵漢成佳麗, congci tiehan cheng jiali).125 The two-page Central Daily News coverage celebrated the “successful and perfect” (圓滿成功, yuanman chenggong) transformation of Xie.126 The excitement was also broadcasted in China Daily News, Shin Sheng Daily, and Public Opinions (公論報, Gonglunbao).127
The official report revealed numerous aspects of the Xie story that overthrew earlier speculations. Of these revelations, the most surprising was probably the fact that Xie’s most recent operation was actually her fourth and not her third operation. Recall that Xie’s second operation received little publicity in the previous year. By June 1954, from reading the scattered newspaper accounts, interested readers could gain a vague impression that doctors in Taipei had performed a second surgery on her, but its date, nature, and purpose lacked transparency. According to this official report, however, Xie’s second operation, which was also an exploratory laparotomy but with the additional step of removing parts of her male gonadal tissues, had taken place on April 10, 1954. Based on the samples extracted from her body during this operation, the doctors confirmed Xie’s status as a true hermaphrodite, meaning that she had both ovarian and testicular tissues in her gonads. The doctors also clarified that by that point, her “testicular tissues were already deteriorating and unable to generate sperm,” but her “ovarian tissues were still functional and able to produce eggs.” In light of a stronger presence of female sexual characteristics, the medical team performed a third operation on August 26, 1954. After the surgery, Xie’s penis was replaced by an artificial vaginal opening. All this happened more than a year prior. Xie’s most recent and fourth genital surgery, which took place on August 30, 1955, was simply a vaginoplasty. Now with “a normal woman’s vaginal interior” (陰道內腔與正常女性一樣, yindao neiqiang yu zhengchang nüxing yiyang), Xie Jianshun’s “transformation from a soldier into a lady is now indisputable.”128 Brought to light by the report, Xie’s personal triumph encapsulated the postwar fears and hopes about the possibilities of medical science.129
Also on October 28, the second page of the United Daily News included the sixteenth installment of “The Story of Miss Xie Jianshun,” a biography of Xie that had been serialized daily since October 13. The concluding installment appeared on November 18, which meant that for over a month, Taiwanese readers were exposed to Xie’s life story with familiar moments and surprising details.130 This extended exposure seemed to reflect the fact that the Xie story continued to sell even two years after the initial frenzy. No less significant, again, was the similarity in the presentational strategies of the Taiwanese and American presses. The stylistic objective of “The Story of Miss Xie Jianshun” closely resembled that of the series “The Story of My Life,” which appeared in American Weekly three days after Christine Jorgensen returned to the United States from Denmark. Jorgensen’s series was billed as “the story all America has been waiting for,” which would have been an equally appropriate description for the Xie installments with a nominal substitution of the word “Taiwan” for “America.”131
But the two series bore significant differences as well. Whereas the first-person confessional format of the American version gave Jorgensen a chance to convey story in her own voice, the third-person observational tone of the Taiwanese version allowed the writer, Yi Yi (憶漪), to narrate Xie’s experience with a unique voice that was at once authoritative and absorbing. This mode of narration, of course, built on the earlier public image of Xie, who had been constantly portrayed as a nationally and transnationally significant figure but never for reasons acknowledged by herself. Although Jorgensen’s full-length personal memoir was eventually published in 1967 and its film adaptation released in 1970, by that point Xie had lost all contact with the press and faded from the public sphere.132 The final media blitz surrounding the Xie story occurred in the late 1950s, during which it was reported that Soong Mei-ling (宋美齡, 1897–2003), Chiang Kai-shek’s wife, and a number of celebrities had visited Xie in Taipei and that Xie had begun working at the Ta Tung Relief Institute for Women and Children (大同婦孺教養院, Tatong furu jiaoyangyuan) under the new name Xie Shun (謝順) after nine, not four, surgeries.133 Ever since the birth of “the Chinese Christine,” the comparison of Xie to Jorgensen had intrigued, satisfied, and resonated with observers time and again, but never without limits.
Queer Sinophone (Re)Production
In their initial diagnoses of Xie, doctors frequently spoke of a hidden female sex. In contrast, the press provided a cultural space for Xie to articulate a past heterosexual romantic life and the desire of not wanting to change his sex in a masculinist voice. Early on, both medical and popular discourses adhered to a neutral position in discussing his psychological gender. Both discourses were fundamentally reoriented by the time of his first operation. The pre-op coverage of his first surgery only foreshadowed a highly sensational outcome—the characterization of Xie as the “Chinese Christine,” the first transsexual in Chinese society. By elevating Xie’s iconic status as both the object of medical gaze and the specimen of (trans)cultural dissection, medical and popular discourses foreclosed any space of epistemic ambiguity concerning Xie’s “innate” sex, gender, and sexuality. Many believed that Xie was destined to become a woman. Or, more aptly put, he became nothing but a transsexual star following the footsteps of the American Christine. In the next two years, the press covered fewer and fewer stories on Xie and began to report more widely on other surprising accounts of unusual bodily conditions. After her fourth surgery in May 1955 Xie’s popularity as the first transsexual in Chinese culture, on top of these other pathological “symptoms” of postcolonial modernity, helped establish the global significance of Taiwan vis-à-vis the neocolonial hegemony of the United States. The persistent comparisons of Taiwan with America, through the comparisons of two versions of transsexuality, became an important arena for articulating a sense of Sinophone difference from Anglophone culture as well as of Republican Taiwanese nationalism.
It is interesting to note that, in the context of the 1950s, the Chinese term “bianxingren” carried almost none of the psychopathological connotations that distinguished its English counterpart, “transsexual.” This probably reflected the relatively late involvement of psychiatric experts in dealing with patients diagnosed with bianxing yuzheng (變性慾症, transsexualism) in Taiwan.134 It was not until 1981 that the national spotlight on the male-to-female transsexual Jiang Peizhen (江佩珍) opened that new chapter in the history of transsexuality in Taiwan. According to Jiang’s psychiatrist and past superintendent of the Tsyr-Huey Mental Hospital in Kaohsiung County, Dr. Jung-Kwang Wen (文榮光), the story of Jiang Peizhen made a huge impact on enhancing the public awareness of transsexualism in Taiwan in the early 1980s. Her case pushed doctors, especially psychiatrists, to come to terms with patients requesting sex reassignment or showing symptoms of gender identity disorder. Physicians also began to consult the Harry Benjamin Standards of Care that had been adopted by American medical and psychological experts since 1979.135 Personal testimonies of transsexuals attested to the breadth, significance, and cultural reach of the Jiang story. Miss Lai (賴), a former male-to-female patient of Wen, noted how the possibility of sex reassignment surgeries was brought to her attention only by the media coverage of Jiang.136 In the 1980s Xie Jianshun and her surgeons had disappeared altogether from the public sphere, and this seemed to confirm that one era had ended. For the new generation of transsexuals and doctors like Miss Lai and Wen, the heroine from the 1980s onward was Jiang.137
Nevertheless, the saga of Xie Jianshun, and that of other media reports of “transing” that followed in her wake, attest to the emergence of transsexuality as a form of modern sexual embodiment in Chinese-speaking society. As one United Daily News front-page article asserted, “to reconstruct a thirty-something year-old man into female is unprecedented in the history of clinical medicine [in Taiwan].”138 Xie’s story, in particular, became a lightning rod for many post–World War II anxieties about gender and sexuality, and it called dramatic attention to issues that would later drive the feminist and gay and lesbian movements in the decades ahead.139 In a different way, these stories of trans formation bring to light a genealogy that exceeds, even subverts, familiar historicizations of Taiwan’s postcoloniality. They illustrate the ways in which the Chinese community in Taiwan inherited a Western biomedical epistemology of sex from not only the Japanese colonial regime (a conventional reading of Taiwan’s colonial past) but also, more importantly, the sophisticated scientific globalism that characterized the Republican period on the mainland.140 This genealogy from Republican-era scientific modernity to postwar Taiwanese transsexuality, connected via the Sinitic language but also made possible culturally by the migration of over one million people from the mainland in the late 1940s, underscores the ways in which the Nationalist government regained sovereignty in Taiwan beyond a monolithic framing of Japanese postcolonialism.141 Parallel to British colonial Hong Kong, Taiwan experienced the highly institutionalized establishment of Western biomedical infrastructure under Japanese occupation.142 In the 1950s, when Mao “nationalized” Chinese medicine in continental China, both Taiwan and Hong Kong represented the most advanced regions in modern Western medicine situated on the geo-margins of the sinosphere.143 Adding to its catalytic role in the transmission of Western biomedical knowledge and practice, British colonialism was instrumental for establishing Hong Kong as a more permissive cultural space when other parts of mainland China were strictly governed by a socialist state.144 These historical factors thus allowed for the immense media publicity showered on Xie Jianshun and on sex change more broadly. Together, the rapid technology transfer of Western biomedicine and the availability of a fairly open social and cultural milieu enabled the Sinophone articulation of transsexuality to emerge first and foremost across the postcolonial East Asian Pacific Rim.
The examples of gender transformation unearthed here must be identified with the broader horizon of Sinophone production, by which I mean a broadening of queer Sinophonicity to refer to a mode of cultural engendering coalescing around the multiple peripheries of dominant geopolitical and social formations. The queer historicity of the transvestites, the bi-uteral woman, the pregnant man, intersexed persons, and other transing characters who came to light in the shadow of Xie rested on epistemological-historical pillars that came from outside the geopolitical China proper, including the legacies of Japanese postcolonialism, American neoimperialism, the recontextualization of the Republican state’s scientific globalism, and Taiwan’s cultural and economic affiliations with other subregions of Cold War East Asia, such as Hong Kong and Japan. Between the end of the Korean War in the mid-1950s and the reopening of the Chinese mainland in the late 1970s, Japan, Okinawa, South Korea, and Taiwan became U.S. protectorates. “One of the lasting legacies of this period,” according to Kuan-Hsing Chen, “is the installation of the anticommunism-pro-Americanism structure in the capitalist zone of East Asia, whose overwhelming consequences are still with us today.”145 Inherent in the concept of the Sinophone lies a more calculated awareness of the implicit role played by Communist China in the stabilization of this (post–)Cold War structure in transnational East Asia. Sociologist Marshall Johnson and anthropologist Fred Yen Liang Chiu’s theory of subimperialism is useful here because the various examples of trans formations explored in this chapter “are not the unfolding of master imperial or orientalist logics. Rather, they exist through agencies whose contingent patterns always admit the possibility of otherwise.”146 None of the queer subjects and embodiments that emerged in 1950s Taiwan can be sufficiently appreciated according to the historical logic of Republican China, Communist China, imperial Japan, or modern America alone, but their significance must be squarely situated at their discrepant and diffused intersections.
Considering Xie’s celebrity and influence as a Sinophone (re)production of transsexuality is also instructive in four other regards. First, the Sinophone approach pushes postcolonial studies beyond its overwhelming preoccupation with “the West.” Postcolonial critics have problematized the West either by deconstructing any variant of its essentialist invocation or by provincializing the centripetal forces of its greatest imperial regimes, such as Europe and America. Naoki Sakai’s essay “Modernity and Its Critique: The Problem of Universalism and Particularism” (1988) and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “Provincializing Europe: Postcoloniality and the Critique of History” (1992) are perhaps the most representative studies of each approach, respectively.147 At other times, critics have attempted to recuperate nativist examples from the histories of third-world nations. Certain modern concepts often understood as imposed from the outside and sustained by the colonial system, they argue, were actually already internal to the indigenous civilization. The work of Ashis Nandy is exemplary in this regard.148 But the West appears to be analytically deployed as a universalized imaginary Other in all three strategies. By perpetually being treated as the theoretical heart in historical narration and cultural criticism, the West continues to function as “an opposing entity, a system of reference, an object from which to learn, a point of measurement, a goal to catch up with, an intimate enemy, and sometimes an alibi for serious discussion and action.”149
On the contrary, viewing trans formations in postwar Taiwan as historical events of Sinophone production repositions our compass—and redraws our map—by recentering the non-West, Asia, and China more specifically. In his provocative book, Asia as Method, Kuan-Hsing Chen invites postcolonial scholars to “deimperialize” their own mode of investigation by moving beyond the fixation of “the West” as a sole historical-theoretical caliber of civilizational, national, imperial, colonial, and Cold War predicaments.150 In his words,
In Asia, the deimperialization question cannot be limited to a reexamination of the impacts of Western imperialism invasion, Japanese colonial violence, and U.S. neoimperialist expansion, but must also include the oppressive practices of the Chinese empire. Since the status of China has shifted from an empire to a big country, how should China position itself now? In what new ways can it interact with neighboring countries? Questions like these can be productively answered only through deimperialized self-questioning, and that type of reflexive work has yet to be undertaken.151
My narration of the history of Chinese transsexuality, centering on the cases of Xie Jianshun and others, can be viewed as an attempt at doing this kind of reflexive work. While the dispersed circuits of knowledge that saturated the Chinese Christine’s glamour question any straightforward conclusion about the Chineseness or Americanness of Xie’s transsexuality, the other contemporaneous stories of trans corporeality represent a highly contingent and conditional response to the nascent genealogy of sex change emerging out of regional currents and global tensions. This chapter in 1950s Taiwanese history refocuses our attention from the “influence” of Western concepts and ideas to the inter- and intra-Asian regional conditions of subjectivity formation—from denaturalizing the West to provincializing China, Asia, and the Rest.
Second, by provincializing China, the Sinophone framework enables us to see and think beyond the conventions of China studies. In the spirit of marking out “a space in which unspoken stories and histories may be told, and to recognize and map the historically constituted cultural and political effects of the cold war,” I have aimed in this chapter to raise a series of interrelated questions that challenge the various categorical assumptions that continue to haunt a “China-centered perspective.”152 Was Xie Jianshun’s transsexuality “Chinese” or “American” in nature? And “transsexuality” in whose sense of the term? Was it a foreign import, an expression (and thus internalization) of Western imperialism, or a long-standing indigenous practice in a new light? How can we take the Republican state’s administrative relocation in the late 1940s seriously? Is it possible to speak of a “Republican Chinese modernity” that problematizes the familiar socialist narrative of twentieth-century Chinese history? Which China was alluded to by the Chineseness of the label “Chinese Christine?” In the yet-to-appear discourse of Taiwanese nativism, did the Republican regime exemplify settler colonialism, migration, immigration, or diaspora? To better comprehend the historical context, we might also ask, “Is the [GMD] regime a government in exile (which would mean that it resides abroad), a regime from another province, a defeated regime, or simply a cold-war regime?”153 Evidently, the complexity of the history far exceeds the common terms used to describe the historical characteristics of postwar Taiwan. To call the GMD a regime from the outside or a colonial government only partially accounts for its proto-Chineseness or extra-Chineseness, and precisely because of the lack of a precedent and analogous situations, it is all the more difficult to historicize, with neat categorical imperatives or ways of periodization, the social backdrop against which and the epistemic conditions under which the first Chinese transsexual became a comprehensible concept. So the queerness of Sinophone Taiwan, as evinced through trans-archiving, calls into question not only the conventions of China studies; it invariably casts light on a symmetrically nested agenda to decenter the normative orientation of Taiwan studies as well. Like China, Taiwan has never been a straight-forward geobody, a political container of sorts, carrying evolving historical cultures that merely reflect a series of colonial governmentality displacements.
Third, understood as “a way of looking at the world,” the epistemological rendition of the Sinophone as “an interruptive worldview” not only breaks down the China-versus-the-West binary; it also specifies the most powerful type, nature, and feature of transnationalism whose interest-articulation must lie beyond the hegemonic constructions of the nation-state. According to Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, the transnational “can be less scripted and more scattered” and “is not bound by the binary of the local and the global and can occur in national, local, or global spaces across different and multiple spatialities and temporalities.”154 If “China” and “Chineseness” have indeed evolved over the course of the history of sex change from castration’s demise to the growing influence of Western biopolitics, then the changes over time we witness in this history have less to do with the “coming out” of transsexuals than with the shifting transnationalism of queer Chinese cultures: from the growing global hegemony of Western conceptions of lifehood and sexuality in major transnational China to the rhizomic interactions of geopolitical forces, historical conditions, and cross-cultural contours in minor transnational China. In other words, the peripheral ontologies of Sinophone queerness demand carefully executed place-based analyses while never losing sight of the ever-shifting parameters of the norms and centers of any given regional space. The transnationalism and interregionalism of the trajectory from Republican China to postwar Taiwan make it evident that any hegemonic understanding of “China” and “Taiwan” as sovereign nation-states will always fall short in capturing the genealogical grounding of those queer livelihoods, maneuvers, and experiences encapsulated in the two categories’ politically contested relationality.
Although I have used mid-twentieth-century Taiwan as the exemplary context of queer Sinophone (re)production, its implications obviously extend beyond Taiwan and the early Cold War period. By bringing the theoretical category of the Sinophone to bear on the non-identitarian history of trans formations narrated here, my aim is to bring together, historically, the reciprocal rigor of queer and Sinophone theoretical critiques, thematizing the coproduction of gender heteronormativity and the hegemonic (Chinese) nation-state as they are articulated through one another. Together, the queerness of Sinophone perspectives and the anti-Sinocentric logic of queering settle on unsettling the overlapping recognitions of Xie Jianshun’s transsexuality as a Chinese copy of a Western original, a Sinophone production of a Chinese original, a straight mimesis of a male-to-female transgendered body, a queer reproduction of an American blond beauty, and so forth. A social history of trans formations in Sinophone Taiwan that exceeds a conventional Japanese postcolonial paradigm comprises the broad spectrum of these potential straightforward convergences and postnormative divergences. The resulting historiographical task challenges a homogenous postcolonial interpretation of twentieth-century Taiwan that figures in either Chinese imperial hegemony or Japanese colonialism (or American neocolonialism for that matter) as its exclusive preoccupation. The intraregional emphasis on these intertwined historical legacies, therefore, accounts for a more sophisticatedly layered “postcolonial Taiwan,” one that complements but complicates the model developed by the literary critic Fang-Ming Chen, yet always insisting on the multiplicity of its possible limits and meaningful points of entry.155 The history of contemporary Taiwan therefore invites multiple interpretative strategies and approaches to account for its “colonial” (read: global) past—a historicism that decenters rather than recenters the hegemony of formal imperial giants such as China, Japan, the United States, and so forth.
This brings us to the last, yet perhaps the most important, contribution of the Sinophone methodology: to appreciate the formation of Sinophone modernity that began to distinguish itself from and gradually replaced an older apparatus of colonial modernity in the course of twentieth-century Chinese history. The year 1989 is a pivotal turning point for reflecting on the historical development of late twentieth-century Chinese and Sinophone cultures. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) government’s military action to suppress the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 has been widely condemned by the international community. Taking place two years after the lifting of martial law in Taiwan, the incident has been construed as a direct reflection of the sharp divergence in democratic characteristics of various Chinese-speaking communities (e.g., across the Taiwan Strait). The latest rendition of this perceived divergence is none other than the 2014 Umbrella movement to challenge the PRC’s suppression of electoral democracy in Hong Kong.156 If the Cold War structure of East Asian capitalist zones had in fact remained intact by as late as the turn of the twenty-first century, it would still be heuristically useful to periodize contemporary Chinese history along this temporal axis.157 In this legacy of the Cold War, and despite its termination, American culture, in both its elite and popular forms, continued to operate as one of the defining forces shaping Taiwanese culture even after Richard Nixon’s normalization of American diplomatic relations with Communist China (completed in 1979) at the expense of ties with Taiwan.158 It is for this reason that the Taiwanese lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender movement took shape in the way it did, as it mirrored the development of these subcultures in the United States.
In the post-1987 era, the Taiwanese social and cultural space soon became home to a vibrant group of queer authors, scholars, activists, and other public figures who passionately emulate North American gay and lesbian identity politics and queer theoretical discourse.159 Apart from social movement and academic theorization, gay men and lesbian women in Taipei in particular have constructed an urban geography of their own with unique subcultural tempos, rhythms, and patterns. As Jens Damm has observed, “Taipei is the only city—probably not only in Taiwan but the whole of East Asia—where a huge open space, the Red House district, has been successfully developed into an area where gays and lesbians have openly created their own urban infrastructure, with bars, restaurants, shops and information exchange opportunities.”160 Since the 1990s, cultural flows between the PRC, Taiwan, and Hong Kong have steadily accelerated. Critics now tend to trace the roots of queer political activism in mainland China in the early twenty-first century to the initial influx of Western queer theory (酷兒理論, ku’er lilun) and the rise of the gay and lesbian movement (同志運動, tongzhi yundong) in Taiwan and Hong Kong in the 1980s and 1990s.161 In terms of lexical circulation, the Chinese vernacular translations of “gay” (同志, tongzhi) and “lesbian” (拉拉, lala) acquired political valence and enjoyed wide currency first in Hong Kong and Taiwan, respectively, and were then imported back into mainland Chinese culture. Similarly, the first gay pride parade in Chinese-speaking communities took place in Taiwan in 2003, followed by Hong Kong in 2008 and Shanghai in 2009. Many gay and lesbian activists in Taiwan and Hong Kong today often claim that they have relatively little to learn from the mainlanders and that the trajectory of activism-strategy appropriation would flow in one direction only (rather than reciprocal in nature), that is, from Sinophone communities to the PRC.162
The queer Sinophone framework underscores the ways in which the particular polities mediating the transmission of foreign/Western knowledge to China (such as Japan in the early Republican period as often viewed through the lens of colonial modernity), at least in the areas of gender and sexuality, have been gradually replaced by Sinophone communities by the end of the twentieth century. Taken together, what the cases of gender transgression recollected in this chapter reveal is a much earlier moment of historical displacement, in the immediate postwar era, when the sociocultural articulation of nonnormative genders and sexualities was rerouted through—and thus re-rooted in—Sinitic-language communities and cultures on the periphery of Chineseness.163 The transition from colonial to Sinophone modernity around the mid-century, therefore, is something that we are only beginning to appreciate.