Chen Wei-chen’s book The Prehistory of Transgender in Taiwan: Medical Treatment, Customs, and Inter Asian Encounters is a rare example of transgender studies written from within the community rather than about it. Published in 2016 by the Transgender Advocacy Station, it appeared during a decade when Taiwanese LGBTQ scholarship was expanding rapidly, yet still tended to focus on the post-martial law era and on narratives that aligned neatly with Western academic categories. Chen’s work deliberately moves in the opposite direction.
Instead of accepting the familiar timeline in which transgender politics enter Taiwan through American second-wave feminism and gay liberation, the book explores what existed before these imported frameworks arrived and before the vocabulary of gender identity and LGBT politics became standardized. It begins with a simple question that turns out to be surprisingly disruptive. What if Taiwan always had its own forms of gender variance, its own aesthetic and cultural expressions, and its own political struggles, long before English terms shaped how such lives could be narrated. By going back into the mid-twentieth century and even earlier, Chen reveals a layered history of people whose lives were often recorded only through the eyes of doctors, journalists, police, and entertainment managers. Their experiences become a window into how Taiwanese society negotiated gender, desire, and respectability under rapidly changing political and economic conditions.
One of the most striking elements of the book is its exploration of medical narratives from the 1950s onward. Long before any official framework for legal gender transition existed, intersex people were pressured by doctors to conform to binary expectations, while transgender individuals encountered a complicated mix of medical curiosity, moral judgment, and genuine attempts by doctors to help people who they believed were deeply distressed. Chen shows how Taiwanese medical institutions, influenced by European and American sexology, gradually produced a standardized model of transition in the 1980s. Yet the book emphasizes that the medical process was not simply imposed from above. It was shaped by negotiation, misunderstanding, desire, and even hope. For many patients the possibility of surgery felt like a rescue from suffering, even though the operations were technically difficult and often accompanied by judgment from the media. At the same time homosexuality was treated very differently. Gay men were described by the press as a moral danger, while transgender people were sometimes framed as unfortunate individuals who deserved sympathy because they had a “mismatched body.” This uneven treatment reveals how the state and the public used medicine as a tool to enforce social order, offering conditional compassion to those who could be guided back toward a binary ideal while punishing those who simply loved someone of the same sex.
A second major part of the book studies the rise and decline of Taiwan’s third sex host and hostess culture. Anyone who lived in Taipei during the 1990s remembers news stories and rumors about glamorous performers on Zhongshan North Road, the fame of red top entertainers, and the complicated spectacle of men who dressed as women to work in nightlife venues. The book carefully traces this cultural phenomenon from its roots in the sex trade of the 1950s through the clubs and bars of the 1970s and 1980s, showing how the third sex scene became mainstream entertainment for a brief moment at the end of the century.
What makes Chen’s account compelling is not nostalgia but context. These performers were shaped by class backgrounds, by the demands of nightlife economies, and by the divided attitudes of the LGBT movement itself. Many gay activists of the time distanced themselves from nightlife performers in order to construct a politically respectable gay identity. Meanwhile many performers distanced themselves from transgender people who pursued medical transition. The result was a painful splitting of communities that today are often assumed to have stood together. Chen argues that the third sex host culture is a neglected part of Taiwanese transgender history because it existed in a liminal space that was neither fully embraced by LGBTQ movements nor entirely acknowledged by mainstream society.
A third theme of the book involves the regional circulation of labor and performance that shaped the popular image of the “renyao,” a term often associated with Thai or Singaporean trans performers in cabaret style shows. Chen traces how these images entered Taiwan through transnational tourism in the 1970s and 1980s, how foreign performers were recruited through informal networks, and how the shows eventually became part of rural festival culture in Taiwan during the 2000s. What looks from a distance like a simple borrowing of exotic entertainment is shown to be the product of global capitalism and unequal political relationships between Taiwan and other Asian regions. The book invites readers to notice how these performers were viewed simultaneously as glamorous and as objects of discrimination, admired for their beauty onstage but marginalized in everyday life. This helps explain why the popular imagination of gender variance in the Chinese-speaking world often blends fascination, stigma, humor, and fear all at once.
Throughout the book Chen raises a question that continues to matter today. What happens when local histories are overwritten by imported concepts. Once the term transgender became widely used in Taiwan, many earlier identities such as renyao, third sex, cross-dressing, or gender nonconforming male prostitute were reframed as archaic or even shameful. Chen argues that this process does not simply update language. It narrows the space of what can be remembered and what counts as legitimate gender experience. This becomes particularly visible in how mainstream LGBT movements construct historical narratives. Gay and lesbian activism in the 1990s often sought visibility through the language of pride and normality, which sometimes required drawing boundaries that excluded people associated with sex work, nightlife, or feminine performance. The result was a selective history that celebrated those who fit the ideals of a modern LGBT identity while leaving others in the metaphorical night, invisible and unnamed.
One of the most fascinating stories in the book is the account of the performer known as Phoenix, whose life intersected with several of these boundaries. Phoenix moved between roles associated with gay men, cross-dressed sex workers, and people who pursued medical transition. Within gay spaces Phoenix was sometimes accepted and sometimes rejected. In the broader public Phoenix was both sensationalized and misunderstood. Yet Phoenix’s story illustrates how fluid and unstable gender categories were before the era of standardized identity politics. It also shows how people living on the margins developed resilient strategies for survival and self-expression long before Taiwanese society had the vocabulary to describe them.
Chen’s larger argument is that contemporary transgender rights discourse in Taiwan is built on a particular model of respectability that favors individuals with higher education, stable employment, and the cultural capital required to appear as “professional” representatives of the community. Younger transgender people often follow one of two very different life trajectories. Some move toward middle-class integration, advocacy work, and access to legal protections. Others drop out of school or work in low-wage sectors where gender nonconformity becomes a pathway into nightlife or sex related economies. The latter group is rarely visible in human rights discussions even though they remain part of the lived reality of Taiwanese transgender experience. Chen suggests that the real question for the future is not only how to improve legal recognition but also how to imagine economic and social models that allow people at the margins to survive without being pushed into cycles of poverty or stigma.
The book closes with reflections on method and limitations, acknowledging that much of the available evidence comes from newspapers and magazines that were themselves sources of stereotypes. Chen recognizes the risk of distortion but insists that these materials remain invaluable for reconstructing overlooked histories. At the same time the book points toward the need for deeper ethnographic work and more testimonies from people who lived these experiences firsthand. Despite these challenges the book remains an important contribution because it opens conversations that Taiwan has long needed. It challenges readers to rethink the neat categories that activists and scholars sometimes rely on and to recognize that communities are always more diverse, more conflicted, and more inventive than official histories suggest.
The Prehistory of Transgender in Taiwan offers a powerful reminder that transgender history is not simply a chronological story of progress. It is a field shaped by class divisions, medical authority, cultural hierarchies, and regional flows of labor and desire. By recovering the forgotten and sometimes uncomfortable past, Chen Wei-chen’s work expands the possibilities for imagining a more inclusive future, one that honors all the paths that gender diverse people in Taiwan have taken rather than only the ones that fit the daylight version of history.
Available via taaze.tw
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