From Surgical Records to Community Hotlines: Six Documentary Regimes in Mainland China’s Transgender Public History, 1983–2022

Abstract

The public history of transgender life in mainland China survives in records produced by institutions with very different purposes. Hospital histories preserve dates of gender-reassignment surgery and clinical procedure. Newspapers, television, and documentary film turn individual biographies into mass-cultural narratives. Public-security and health authorities translate sex-marker change and gender-affirming care into administrative procedures. Community organizations preserve histories of counselling, hotlines, referral, training, and peer support. Litigation and national surveys convert individual experiences into legal and statistical evidence. Digital archives now reconnect many of these scattered documents and make their versions traceable over time.

This article reconstructs a public chronology from 1983 through 2022 and proposes a model of six documentary regimes: clinical records; news and audiovisual media; administrative regulation; community services; litigation and surveys; and digital archives. Peking University Third Hospital’s current materials date an early surgery led by Wang Damei to January 10, 1983, while an older hospital anniversary publication placed a first operation in October 1984. The discrepancy is itself historical evidence: institutional memory has versions, and a reproducible history records both the page version and retrieval date (Peking University Third Hospital 2012a, 2012b, 2018, 2026). During the 1990s, publicly reported cases and Jin Xing’s 1995 surgery broadened mass-media visibility. Rules from 2002, 2009, 2017, and 2022 connected legal sex-marker change, clinical eligibility, hospital responsibility, and medical quality control to formal procedures (MPS Third Bureau 2002; Ministry of Health 2009; NHFPC 2017; NHC 2022).

A second transformation took place through community infrastructure. The Beijing LGBT Center’s transgender hotline began in December 2015 and expanded in 2018 into a national service involving several organizations and independent participants (China Development Brief 2018; Trans Counseling Group 2022). The Guiyang employment case beginning in 2016, a national LGBTI attitudes survey in 2016, the 2017 national transgender survey with 2,060 valid responses, and the 2018 UNDP review of legal gender recognition created new legal, statistical, and policy records (China News Service 2016; The Paper 2016a, 2016b, 2016c; UNDP 2016, 2018; Beijing LGBT Center & Peking University 2017). Together, these materials support a central conclusion: transgender public history in mainland China is best reconstructed as the layering of documentary regimes. Each regime expands one kind of visibility while carrying its own selection rules and preservation biases.

Keywords: transgender history; mainland China; gender reassignment; legal gender recognition; community organizations; Beijing LGBT Center; National Transgender Hotline; digital archives; public history; historiography

1. Research question: where does transgender history survive?

Transgender lives precede the contemporary Chinese vocabulary of kuaxingbie (跨性别, transgender), large national surveys, social-media platforms, and standardized gender-affirming health services. Historical reconstruction therefore begins with a question about records themselves: which institutions had the capacity to leave durable evidence, and which lives became legible to those institutions?

Howard Chiang’s histories of sex and gender in the Sinophone world connect medicine, geopolitics, language, and changing systems of knowledge. Hongwei Bao’s work on queer documentary and digital-video activism in China shows how film festivals, community media, and online circulation create historical memory. Sha Liu’s research on Chinese transgender people’s digital gender practices examines self-presentation, authenticity, social relations, and platform conditions as interconnected processes (Chiang 2018, 2021; Bao 2015, 2018, 2019; Liu 2023). Read together, these studies suggest a method that treats a source as evidence of an event and evidence of the system that produced the record.

This article calls such a system a documentary regime: a relatively stable combination of recorder, format, admission rule, vocabulary, and preservation path. Hospitals preserve charts, department histories, diagnostic language, and clinical protocols. Mass media preserve interviews, profiles, television segments, and film. Administrative authorities preserve approvals, household-registration rules, and medical-technology standards. Community organizations preserve hotline announcements, project descriptions, training materials, referrals, and organizational memory. Courts and survey teams preserve cases, pleadings, questionnaires, statistics, and policy reviews. Digital archives subsequently assemble these dispersed materials into searchable collections.

A practical source card can track seven fields:

This structure is especially useful for claims built around words such as “first” or “earliest.” Early sources often differ in year, definition, geographical scope, or degree of public visibility. A historian can retain “earliest institutionally documented case currently located,” “early publicly reported case,” and “later institutional retrospective” as separate claims. R. Hickman’s discussion of trans historiography and Chiang’s Sinophone framework both support this open chronology, in which bodies, practices, classifications, and later identity vocabularies enter the archive through different historical routes (Hickman 2021; Chiang 2021).

2. The clinical regime: the 1980s enter institutional time

Peking University Third Hospital’s plastic-surgery department currently preserves several histories of early gender-reassignment surgery, and the pages contain a revealing date discrepancy. A 2018 description of its multidisciplinary clinic states that the hospital conducted an early operation in 1983 under Professor Wang Damei. A 2026 memorial article supplies a much finer chronology: the patient entered the hospital on January 3, 1983 and underwent an operation lasting roughly twelve hours on January 10. The page also records the institutional prerequisites described for that case, including health-authority approval, parental signatures, psychiatric diagnosis, and the patient’s work unit being informed (Peking University Third Hospital 2018, 2026).

An older sixtieth-anniversary album from the same institutional network instead lists October 1984 for “China’s first” related operation, while an anniversary timeline pairs 1984 and 1992 as early male-to-female and female-to-male surgical landmarks (Peking University Third Hospital 2012a, 2012b). The later 1983 account contains more granular internal chronology, so this article uses January 1983 as the current hospital’s strongest detailed anchor while preserving the 1984 institutional version as an explicit historiographical variant.

The disagreement shows why hospital history belongs to both clinical history and institutional-memory history. Medical sources can preserve exact clinicians, departments, procedures, approvals, diagnoses, and technical changes. Anniversary histories and commemorative pages can also revise terminology and reconstruct the institution’s own past. Chiang’s After Eunuchs places modern Chinese transformations in sexual science, medicine, bodily classification, and gendered knowledge within a longer historical arc; gender-reassignment surgery belongs to this intersection of medical practice and changing concepts of sexed personhood (Chiang 2018).

By around 1990, Shanghai’s Changzheng Hospital and surgeon He Qinglian also entered public accounts of early gender-reassignment surgery. Later historical compilations identify Qin Huirong as an important publicly reported case associated with this period (Transgender Sinophone Chronology 2026). This introduces a second timeline alongside technical capacity: publicity. The date of surgery, the date a case entered a hospital record, and the date a person became visible in mass media can diverge substantially.

The clinical documentary regime therefore establishes more than a sequence of operations. It records the process through which bodily transition became legible to departments, ethics and approval procedures, diagnostic categories, surgical technique, and medical administration. Its selection rule is equally important: people outside specialist hospitals, people using hormones through informal channels, and people whose transition involved social or legal change outside surgery leave a much thinner clinical paper trail.

3. The media regime: biographies become public narratives in the 1990s

In 1995, dancer Jin Xing underwent gender-reassignment surgery. Interviews, television programs, biographical writing, and visual records subsequently made her story one of the most durable mass-cultural entry points through which mainland audiences encountered transgender experience. Director Zhang Yuan filmed Miss Jin Xing around this period; later online circulation and press coverage repeatedly connected the 1995 surgery, changes to identity documents, professional life, family, and the documentary footage (China News Service 2011a, 2011b).

This “person–surgery–family–documents–career” narrative has exceptional media durability. It also reveals the admission rule of the mass-media archive. Public figures with recognizable careers, sustained access to television and print, and biographies that can be organized around dramatic turning points accumulate unusually dense records. The same media archive offers thinner coverage of people whose transitions unfolded through ordinary work, family, migration, online communities, or private medical decisions.

Mass media remain valuable precisely because their records answer different questions. They show which vocabulary reached wide audiences, which bodily details journalists emphasized, how interviewees framed their own lives, how identity documents entered popular narratives, and how the surrounding culture changed its questions over time. A longitudinal reading of Jin Xing’s interviews can therefore study both personal self-definition and the changing interview environment.

Bao’s scholarship on queer documentary and digital-video activism adds another axis. Film can place queer and transgender people under a public gaze, and community video can also give participants greater control over production, narration, circulation, and audience. From independent film festivals and DV documentaries to online video, control over the camera and distribution channel changes who becomes a historical subject and who gets to describe the meaning of an event (Bao 2015, 2018, 2019).

The 1990s mass-media archive and later community-produced media can thus be read as a shift in documentary agency. Celebrity profiles and television often organize a story through editorial conventions of transformation and revelation. Community video, interviews made within advocacy networks, and platform-native first-person media introduce additional narrators and peer audiences. Both belong in a public history, while their different production structures remain visible in the source card.

4. The administrative regime: 2002–2022 turns gender change into procedure

On September 4, 2002, the Third Bureau of China’s Ministry of Public Security issued a reply concerning changes to the sex field in household registration after gender-reassignment surgery. The document states that an applicant can submit proof of successful surgery from a designated national hospital, after which public-security authorities can process a sex-marker change, assign a new citizen identity number, and replace the identity card (MPS Third Bureau 2002). This is a strong anchor for administrative legibility because it explicitly connects medical certification to household registration and national identity documents.

In November 2009, the Ministry of Health issued the trial Technical Management Specification for Sex Reassignment Surgery. It placed medical institutions, practitioner qualifications, technology management, and patient-related requirements within a nationwide framework for restricted clinical technology (Ministry of Health 2009). A 2017 revision reorganized the management of restricted medical technologies and superseded the earlier trial specification through a new set of technical standards (NHFPC 2017).

In 2022, the National Health Commission issued a new national restricted-technology directory and clinical-application standards. The current text uses the term “gender reassignment technology” (性别重置技术), classifies it as G05, and updates requirements concerning institutions, physicians, ethics review, preoperative documentation, follow-up, and quality control (NHC 2022). A legal chronology maintained by Project Trans compares the versions and highlights changes such as an age threshold of eighteen and revised diagnostic language that includes “gender anxiety, or gender incongruence,” alongside adjustments to documentary requirements (Project Trans 2026). The comparison is useful for locating differences, while the official NHC documents remain the primary textual authority for each version.

Changes in the names and requirements of the 2009, 2017, and 2022 frameworks are themselves historical material. They show how the state’s medical vocabulary, technical governance, age thresholds, diagnostic references, documentary prerequisites, and quality-control expectations were reorganized over time. A chronology can therefore record both the date of a regulation and a structured diff of the fields that changed.

Administrative sources have unusually clear dates, document numbers, scopes, and procedures. Their admission rule is equally specific: they focus on activities that pass through hospitals, public-security offices, identity documents, and regulated medical systems. UNDP’s 2018 Legal Gender Recognition in China broadened this administrative view by connecting household registration to education, employment, health care, and public-service encounters, while also recording community advocacy around legal gender recognition (UNDP 2018). That review creates a bridge between procedural history and everyday life.

This documentary regime also illustrates a useful distinction between legal identity and lived identity. A household-registration rule records the path for changing an official sex marker under stated conditions. Community and interview records capture the much wider set of social transitions, names, pronouns, presentation choices, health practices, relationships, and workplace experiences that occur before, during, or outside the formal process. Preserving both source types avoids treating one administrative pathway as the full history of transgender life.

5. The community-service regime: 2008–2018 turns individual requests into infrastructure

The Beijing LGBT Center was established in 2008 and later developed sustained work in counselling, legal support, social work, gender and sexuality education, and transgender programming. Surviving organizational descriptions and independent NGO directories identify transgender anti-discrimination work, hotlines, health advocacy, legal advocacy, and leadership development among its activities (China Development Brief 2026; Mapping Chinese Feminism 2022).

In December 2015, the Center launched a transgender hotline. A 2018 announcement for the national service looked back on nearly three years of operation and reported more than one thousand instances of assistance. In August 2018, the Beijing LGBT Center’s transgender department initiated an expanded National Transgender Hotline together with the Trans Counseling Group, Anhui Wanan Tongzhi Group, Trans Youth Education Center, Suzhou LESGO core volunteers, and independent participants (China Development Brief 2018). A 2022 “Hotline 2.0” page preserves the organizational lineage and describes the service in terms of companionship, support, information consultation, and resource referral (Trans Counseling Group 2022).

Other transgender-led or transgender-focused groups appeared in the same period. ShanghaiPRIDE’s 2018 beneficiary profile records that Trans-Life was founded in January 2015 by sixteen transgender people and provided health and legal information, help with document changes, workplace training, and social-integration consultation. Public organizational records for the Trans Youth Education Center place its establishment in 2017 and emphasize education and youth economic empowerment (ShanghaiPRIDE 2018; Trans & Gender-Diverse Archive 2026).

Community-service records preserve a different historical unit from celebrity media: a request for help, a referral, a training session, a legal consultation, a peer-support conversation, a volunteer network, or a repeat question that gradually becomes organizational knowledge. Services turn dispersed experiences into durable infrastructure and produce their own vocabulary for needs, risk, peer expertise, and referral pathways.

Lifu Guo’s case study of the Beijing Tongzhi Center, the scholarship collected in Queer/Tongzhi China, and Ana Huang’s account of the relationship between “T” and transgender identity in Chinese lesbian culture all show organizational boundaries that overlap and change over time (Guo 2018; Engebretsen, Schroeder & Bao 2015; Huang 2015). A transgender organizational history can therefore preserve founding dates, programs, collaborators, constituency language, and self-description as separate fields. Later identity categories can then be used as interpretive metadata while the source’s own vocabulary remains intact.

The service regime also changes what counts as historical evidence. A hotline announcement can establish a launch date and collaboration network. A service retrospective can establish the scale and categories reported by the organization for a defined period. Training manuals and referral guides can show which recurring questions became institutional knowledge. Organization pages can document how a group described its own constituency and mission at a particular moment. Each format captures a different layer of community capacity.

6. Litigation and surveys: 2016–2019 creates legal and statistical public evidence

In March 2016, a transgender man widely identified in reporting as Mr. C sought labor arbitration in Guiyang after an employment dispute. The case then moved into litigation and generated months of reporting on gender identity, gender expression, workplace rules, dismissal, and discrimination claims. On December 30, 2016, the Yunyan District court found the termination unlawful while leaving the discrimination claim outside its finding (China News Service 2016; The Paper 2016a, 2016b, 2016c).

The historical significance lies in the documentary chain as much as the monetary outcome. A personal workplace experience became a sequence of arbitration, pleadings, hearings, legal arguments, judicial findings, interviews, and follow-up reporting. These records gave later researchers and advocates a public set of texts through which employment discrimination and gender identity could be discussed in Chinese labor-law terms. Valentina Fappani’s 2024 analysis of transgender workers in China places such cases within the larger interaction between formal law and social practice (Fappani 2024).

At roughly the same time, surveys created a national-scale evidentiary form. Being LGBTI in China, conducted by UNDP, the Department of Sociology at Peking University, and the Beijing LGBT Center, received nearly thirty thousand valid responses covering every province-level region and addressed law, education, employment, family, health, mental health, media, and social services (UNDP 2016). In 2017, the Beijing LGBT Center and Peking University’s sociology department published a dedicated national survey of transgender and gender-nonconforming people with 2,060 valid questionnaires, described at the time as one of the largest quantitative studies of the population in mainland China (Beijing LGBT Center & Peking University 2017; China Development Brief 2017).

UNDP’s 2018 legal-gender-recognition review synthesized policy and community experience. Amnesty International’s 2019 report drew on interviews with fifteen transgender people and policy materials to document barriers to gender-affirming health care, family-consent requirements, information access, and informal hormone acquisition (UNDP 2018; Amnesty International 2019). A 2021 recruitment campaign for a national transgender health survey associated the Beijing LGBT Center with clinical researchers including the Second Xiangya Hospital of Central South University, indicating a continuing effort to connect health, policy, law, and community needs through research (Beitong Culture 2021).

Survey history becomes stronger when the sample-formation process is preserved together with headline findings. Online recruitment, NGO networks, platform circulation, and identity terminology shape who encounters a questionnaire. Those mechanisms also reveal the organizational capacity and conceptual vocabulary available to a community at the time of data collection. A survey is therefore evidence about social conditions and evidence about knowledge production.

The trend is visible in academic literature. Lin and colleagues’ review of English- and Chinese-language LGBTQ health research from 2011 through 2018 identifies changing research priorities, while Dahlkemper and colleagues focus specifically on transgender health-care access in China (Lin et al. 2022; Dahlkemper et al. 2019). Shi’s work on transgender identity experience, Wu and colleagues’ 2024 forensic-clinical case analysis, and Liu and Wu’s legal scholarship on gender-choice rights add further disciplinary layers (Shi 2022; Wu et al. 2024; Liu & Wu 2018). During the late 2010s, transgender life increasingly generated records across law, medicine, psychology, sociology, NGO research, and human-rights reporting.

7. The digital-archive regime: dispersed records become reproducible history

China’s digital public sphere has moved through BBS forums, blogs, microblogs, WeChat, video platforms, and other infrastructures. Shaohua Guo describes these transformations as conditions of “creative visibility,” in which technologies and media institutions shape what kinds of user production become discoverable and durable (Guo 2020). For transgender history, these platforms hold first-person narratives, Q&A, health information, organization announcements, legal commentary, video diaries, and community debates, while redesigns, account deletion, link migration, and search ranking continually change access.

Liu’s study of Chinese transgender digital practices treats online space as an environment for gender presentation, relationships, and negotiated authenticity. Z. Xu’s 2026 chapter directly examines kuaxingbie and transgender identity in the age of digital platforms, bringing platform structures into the conceptual history of the term itself (Liu 2023; Xu 2026). These studies suggest that a digital historical source needs fields for page content, platform function, publication time, current status, and archival route.

Dedicated Sinophone transgender preservation projects now provide such routes. The Trans & Gender-Diverse Archive collects government documents, media, NGO and community files, and scholarship by source type and region. The Transgender Sinophone Chronology arranges events by year, region, and document type. The public project-polymorph/content_archive repository describes a web archive containing more than fifteen thousand preserved pages and frames preservation as an effort to make disappearing records available to future readers (Trans & Gender-Diverse Archive 2026; Transgender Sinophone Chronology 2026; Project Polymorph 2026).

These projects are research infrastructure and historical events in their own right. They mark a stage in which community archivists actively design what future researchers will be able to discover about the past. Selection rules become explicit: what sources enter the corpus, which metadata fields are recorded, how duplicates are handled, how dates are inferred, and how original and archived URLs are connected.

Digital preservation converts disappearance risk into manageable provenance. Each event can carry an original page, an archive copy, a content hash, a capture time, a source role, and a claim scope. When a host changes or a page is revised, the claim retains a version trail. This approach aligns with web-history scholarship on temporal versions, collection scope, and archive bias, and it creates a foundation for future histories of Sinophone transgender forums, platform migration, organizational websites, and first-person digital narratives (Brügger 2018; Nielsen 2016).

8. A layered chronology, 1983–2022

The chronology intentionally keeps several histories parallel. Surgical history asks when institutions developed techniques and approval procedures. Media history asks when publics encountered transgender people through particular narrative formats. Administrative history asks how identity documents and medical practice became procedural. Community history asks how transgender people and allies built sustained services. Litigation and survey history asks how experience became rights language and aggregate evidence. Archival history asks how all of those records gained longer preservation paths.

Intersections among these lines are especially informative. The 2002 administrative rule linked medical evidence to identity documents. The 2015 hotline translated recurring individual needs into an organizational service system. The 2016–2018 period connected community networks with national surveys, litigation, and policy research. Digital archives now preserve documents produced by all five earlier regimes, making cross-regime comparison possible.

9. Counterevidence and calibration: four biases travel with the chronology

The first is version bias. The 1983/1984 discrepancy within Peking University Third Hospital’s own histories shows that an official institutional account can evolve. A robust chronology records each version, publication date, retrieval date, and the evidentiary detail that supports the current working anchor.

The second is media-selection bias. Jin Xing provides unusually rich first-person and visual records because of professional prominence and sustained media access. Her archive is invaluable for studying representation and self-narration. Community hotlines, surveys, organizational records, and anonymized interviews provide a broader set of life situations for population and community history.

The third is institutional-access bias. Hotlines and national online surveys disproportionately reach people who encounter participating organizations or digital recruitment channels and who can use the vocabulary and technologies through which the study is distributed. Historical comparison becomes more reliable when recruitment method, valid sample size, geography, identity categories, and partner organizations are retained beside the findings.

The fourth is archival-survival bias. Durable institutional websites, large news organizations, government portals, and already-archived pages are easier to recover today than early personal homepages, closed chat groups, defunct forum images, and deleted accounts. An archive can preserve an explicit “search gap” as research metadata, turning missing temporal or regional coverage into a map for future source discovery.

Geography also deserves a dedicated field. Hong Kong, Taiwan, and overseas Sinophone communities have distinct legal systems, medical histories, movements, and vocabularies. Chiang’s “Sinophone Pacific” framework offers a powerful comparative perspective; the institutional chronology in this article is bounded to mainland China, with cross-regional scholarship used for comparison (Chiang 2021). A clear region field preserves each locality’s historical rhythm while enabling future comparison.

A fifth calibration follows from terminology. Earlier clinical and administrative documents use labels such as “易性症,” “变性,” and later “性别重置,” while contemporary community writing more often uses “跨性别” alongside many more specific identities. The source card retains the original term, then adds a contemporary interpretive description as separate metadata. This preserves linguistic history while allowing modern readers to navigate the archive.

10. Original synthesis: six axes of documentary capacity

The collected evidence supports a model more precise than a single curve of rising visibility. Transgender public history can be represented through six changing capacities:

clinical recordability × media narratability × administrative processability × community serviceability × rights evidentiary capacity × archival preservability.

Early gender-reassignment surgery strengthened clinical recordability. Public cases and Jin Xing’s 1995 media presence strengthened media narratability. Household-registration and medical rules from 2002 through 2022 strengthened administrative processability. Hotlines and inter-organizational networks after 2015 strengthened community serviceability. Litigation, national surveys, and policy reports after 2016 strengthened the capacity to produce evidence for rights claims. Digital archives strengthened preservability across all of these layers.

The six axes can move at different speeds in the same year. A person may have high media visibility and limited access to an administrative pathway. A legal or medical rule may be highly legible on a government website while community knowledge about using it circulates through peer networks. A hotline may accumulate extensive practical knowledge while retaining only public-safe aggregate traces. A deleted platform post may once have had substantial community reach while leaving a fragile archival footprint. Treating these as separate axes allows historians to describe the actual institutional change.

The model offers three practical benefits. First, it specifies the meaning of “visibility” in each claim. Second, source conflict becomes version information rather than a failed chronology. Third, an earlier hospital record, forum page, local organization archive, or policy file can be added to the appropriate axis while the larger framework remains updateable.

For GenderLibs, the method can become a durable archival schema. Each future historical item can carry event_date, record_date, retrieved_at, record_regime, source_role, region, original_term, archive_url, claim_scope, and selection_rule. With enough records, the same corpus can generate a chronology and a research map showing which periods are dominated by media evidence, when first-person organizational records become denser, and where institutional or regional gaps remain most visible.

This schema also makes cross-period comparison more disciplined. A 1983 hospital history, a 1995 television interview, a 2002 public-security reply, a 2015 hotline launch, a 2017 survey, and a 2026 digital archive all have different documentary purposes. Their metadata make those differences explicit before they are connected into one historical argument.

Conclusion

Between 1983 and 2022, transgender public history in mainland China developed through an expanding set of documentary infrastructures. Hospitals recorded bodies, technique, diagnosis, approval, and institutional memory. Mass media turned life stories into public culture. Public-security and health authorities translated identity and care into procedures. Community organizations accumulated requests into service networks. Litigation and surveys converted experience into public legal and statistical evidence. Digital archives now connect these records across time and preserve their provenance.

The intersections among the regimes are where the history becomes especially rich. The internal 1983/1984 hospital-date discrepancy reveals the revision of institutional memory. Jin Xing’s long-running media record shows sustained self-narration inside changing public formats. The 2002 and 2022 rules show administrative and medical vocabulary evolving across two decades. The 2015 and 2018 hotline milestones show dispersed needs becoming collaborative infrastructure. Cases and surveys from 2016 through 2019 show rights, statistics, policy, and community research beginning to reinforce one another.

The next stage of transgender historical research can extend in both temporal directions. Earlier medical literature, newspapers, local archives, and personal collections can deepen the pre-1980s history. Contemporary platform content, organizational notices, and first-person narratives can be preserved while they remain accessible. A source card that carries recorder, version time, admission rule, original vocabulary, and archival route allows Sinophone transgender history to grow from a handful of famous milestones into a reproducible, revisable, and sustainably preserved public archive.

References

1. Amnesty International. 2019. China: “I Need My Parents’ Consent to Be Myself”: Barriers to Gender-Affirming Treatments for Transgender People in China. https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa17/0269/2019/en/
2. Bao, Hongwei. 2015. “Digital Video Activism: Narrating History and Memory in Queer China, ‘Comrade’ China.” In Queer/Tongzhi China: New Perspectives on Research, Activism and Media Cultures. https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1105849/
3. Bao, Hongwei. 2018. “From ‘Celluloid Comrades’ to ‘Digital Video Activism’: Queer Filmmaking in Postsocialist China.” https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/49485/
4. Bao, Hongwei. 2019. “Queer Comrades: Digital Video Documentary and LGBTQ Health Activism in China.” In Film and the Chinese Medical Humanities. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-edit/10.4324/9780429507465-17/
5. Beijing LGBT Center & Department of Sociology, Peking University. 2017. 2017中国跨性别群体生存现状调查报告：跨性别者与非性别常规者. https://cnlgbtdata.com/doc/43/
6. Brügger, Niels. 2018. The Archived Web: Doing History in the Digital Age. MIT Press.
7. Chiang, Howard. 2018. After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China. Columbia University Press.
8. Chiang, Howard. 2021. Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific. Columbia University Press. https://howardchiang.faculty.eastasian.ucsb.edu/publications/books/
9. Dahlkemper, J., B. Diaz, F. Lawanson, et al. 2019. Transgender Health Care in China. https://cnlgbtdata.com/files/uploads/2020/04/Transgender_Helathcare_in_China.pdf
10. Deng, Mingyu. 2016. “性别苦恼的临床研究新进展（DSM-5新标准）.” 中国健康心理学杂志. https://digital.transchinese.org/学术文献/医学/性别苦恼的临床研究新进展DSM-5_新标准.pdf
11. Engebretsen, Elisabeth L., William F. Schroeder, and Hongwei Bao, eds. 2015. Queer/Tongzhi China: New Perspectives on Research, Activism and Media Cultures. NIAS Press. https://cnlgbtdata.com/files/uploads/2024/06/Queer_Tongzhi_China.pdf
12. Fappani, Valentina. 2024. “The Protection of Transgender Workers in China: Between Law and Society.” Rivista di Diritto dell’Asia Orientale. https://edizionicafoscari.it/media/pdf/article/rivista-di-diritto-dellasia-orientale/2024/1/art-10.30687-RIDAO-4713-223X-2024-01-003.pdf
13. Guo, Lifu. 2018. “Tongzhi Solidarity under Chinese Authoritarian Government: A Case Study of the Beijing Tongzhi Center.” https://repository.dl.itc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/record/49786/
14. Guo, Shaohua. 2020. The Evolution of the Chinese Internet: Creative Visibility in the Digital Public. Stanford University Press. https://www.sup.org/books/asian-studies/evolution-chinese-internet
15. Hickman, R. 2021. “What Is ‘Trans History’, Anyway?: Historiographical Theory and Practice in a Flourishing Field.” Midlands Historical Review. http://www.midlandshistoricalreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/What-is-%E2%80%98trans-history-anyway_.pdf
16. Huang, Ana. 2015. “On the Surface: ‘T’ and Transgender Identity in Chinese Lesbian Culture.” In Queer/Tongzhi China. https://cnlgbtdata.com/files/uploads/2024/06/Queer_Tongzhi_China.pdf#page=126
17. Lin, T., Y. Cheng, T. L. Hughes, et al. 2022. “LGBTQ Health and Wellbeing in China: A Trend Analysis of English- and Chinese-Language Research, 2011–2018.” https://www.moderntreatise.com/s/LGBTQ-Health-and-Wellbeing-in-China-A-Trend-Analysis-of-English-and-Chinese-Language-Research-201120.pdf
18. Liu, Sha. 2023. Performative Authenticity: Chinese Transgender People’s Digital Gender Practices. PhD thesis, London School of Economics. https://etheses.lse.ac.uk/4608/
19. Liu, Yunsheng, and Zhaojun Wu. 2018. “性别选择权：性质界定与法权塑造.” 东北师大学报（哲学社会科学版）. https://digital.transchinese.org/学术文献/法律/性别选择权性质界定与法权塑造.pdf
20. Nielsen, Janne. 2016. Using Web Archives in Research: An Introduction. NetLab.
21. Shi, Z. 2022. “An Exploration of Transgender Individuals’ Identity Experiences in the Chinese Context.” https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3ca0/8047554f49ca7297f715cd3247534782c314.pdf
22. Wu, Yujiao, Yueqin Zhou, Yiwen Shen, and Jieqing Jiang. 2024. “39例性别重置术后法医临床性别鉴定案例分析.” 法医学杂志. https://digital.transchinese.org/学术文献/医学/39例性别重置术后法医临床性别鉴定案例分析.pdf
23. Xu, Z. 2026. “Kuaxingbie and Transgender in the Age of Digital Platforms.” In Gender and Digital Media. https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/112150/9781040515600.pdf
24. Bai, Tianyi. 2026. “No-One Signed Up: Fatigue, Failure, and Fragile Optimism in Chinese Trans Advocacy.” https://doi.org/10.22459/mic.11.01.2026.13
25. Beitong Culture. 2021. “2021年全国跨性别健康调研.” https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1RB4y1c7db/
26. Peking University Third Hospital, Department of Plastic Surgery. 2012a. “北医三院整形外科60年画册附录.” https://www.sar.com.cn/xinwen/syyydt/4132.html
27. Peking University Third Hospital, Department of Plastic Surgery. 2012b. “60年专题.” https://www.sar.com.cn/zt60/
28. Peking University Third Hospital, Department of Plastic Surgery. 2018. “易性症综合治疗门诊.” https://www.puh3.net.cn/zxwk/info/1005/1041.htm
29. Peking University Third Hospital, Department of Plastic Surgery. 2026. “妙手换新颜 传承至美——纪念王大玫教授.” https://www.sar.com.cn/xinwen/syyydt/13337.html
30. Ministry of Public Security, Third Bureau. 2002. “关于公民实施变性手术后变更户口登记性别项目有关问题的批复（公治〔2002〕131号）.” https://project-trans.org/china-legal/spec/2002-09-04/mps-2002-131/
31. Ministry of Health. 2009. “关于印发《变性手术技术管理规范（试行）》的通知（卫办医政发〔2009〕185号）.” https://www.nhc.gov.cn/wjw/gfxwj/200911/6341a0f92cad4f09acfae1e5d5b56477.shtml
32. National Health and Family Planning Commission. 2017. “关于印发造血干细胞移植技术管理规范（2017年版）等15个‘限制临床应用’医疗技术管理规范和质量控制指标的通知.” https://wjw.shanxi.gov.cn/tzgg/zcwj/202203/t20220311_5330105.shtml
33. National Health Commission. 2022. “国家限制类技术目录和临床应用管理规范（2022年版）.” https://www.nhc.gov.cn/yzygj/c100068/202204/2655831f6f444b00b3e50604e67531f5.shtml
34. Project Trans. 2026. “中国大陆跨性别相关法律法规变迁.” https://project-trans.org/china-legal/
35. UNDP. 2014. Being LGBT in Asia: China Country Report. https://www.undp.org/china/publications/being-lgbt-asia-china-country-report
36. UNDP. 2016. Being LGBTI in China: A National Survey on Social Attitudes towards Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Gender Expression. https://www.undp.org/china/publications/being-lgbti-china
37. UNDP. 2018. Legal Gender Recognition in China: A Legal and Policy Review. https://www.undp.org/china/publications/legal-gender-recognition-china-legal-and-policy-review
38. China Development Brief. 2017. “中国跨性别群体生存现状调查报告圆满发布.” https://www.chinadevelopmentbrief.org.cn/news/detail/17772.html
39. China Development Brief. 2018. “全国跨性别热线正式上线啦！” https://www.chinadevelopmentbrief.org.cn/news/detail/19107.html
40. China Development Brief. 2026. “机构简介：北京同志中心.” https://www.chinadevelopmentbrief.org.cn/company/detail/532.html
41. Trans Counseling Group. 2022. “全国跨性别热线2.0上线啦！” https://kuaerxinli.org/社群资源/1335
42. Mapping Chinese Feminism. 2022. “北京同志中心.” https://mappingchinesefeminism.com/organizations/北京同志中心/
43. ShanghaiPRIDE. 2018. “骄傲节支持：2018年跨儿公益组织.” https://shpride.com/beneficiaries2018/
44. China News Service. 2011a. “金星谈变性：感谢老天给我身材，给我做女人的条件.” https://www.chinanews.com.cn/yl/2011/10-14/3388986.shtml
45. China News Service. 2011b. “金星暂别《舞林大会》 变性手术纪录片曝光.” https://www.chinanews.com.cn/yl/2011/10-11/3380072.shtml
46. China News Service. 2016. “‘女扮男装’员工被开除 当事人申请仲裁已获立案.” https://www.chinanews.com.cn/m/sh/2016/03-16/7799284.shtml
47. The Paper. 2016a. “贵阳跨性别就业歧视案开庭，公司辩称辞退该员工因不穿工装.” https://m.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_1454923
48. The Paper. 2016b. “贵阳跨性别就业歧视案仲裁结果出炉，当事人不满意将起诉.” https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_1467450
49. The Paper. 2016c. “贵阳跨性别就业歧视案宣判：被告属违法辞退，但不认定是歧视.” https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_1590861
50. Trans & Gender-Diverse Archive. 2026. “跨性别组织或机构.” https://digital.transchinese.org/社群及NGO文件/其他组织文件/跨性别组织或机构_page/
51. Transgender Sinophone Chronology. 2026. “《他·她·TA：跨性别华语编年录》.” https://project-polymorph.github.io/trans-history/
52. Project Polymorph. 2026. 跨性别与多元性别网页档案馆. https://github.com/project-polymorph/content_archive