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.
