Source: Sinosphere, NYT (1/27/15)
Report Sheds Light on Transgender Sex Workers in China
By Jess Macy Yu
A transgender singer performing at the Guangzhou Sex Culture Festival. Rights advocates acknowledge that China has made progress in its treatment of transgender individuals, but say more must be done.Credit Adam Dean for The New York Times.
When Piao Piao, 26, who was born a boy in Shandong Province, arrived in Beijing in 2008 to live a life as the woman she felt she truly was, she faced innumerable problems. After she began dressing as a woman, while still using official documents that identified her as male, it was difficult for her to find a mainstream job. So she became an entertainer in bars, and supplemented her income as a sex worker.
She earns about 200 renminbi, or $33, a night for her shows, which on good nights end with dates with heterosexual men, whom she brings back to her shoebox-size studio apartment in southeast Beijing.
“I face a lot of discrimination here,” Piao Piao (her stage name) said one recent afternoon at her apartment, where the curtains were drawn. “I’d like to find a real job, but it’s not easy here in the city. So I’ve relied on performing and dancing, and other various means.”
“You can’t live too ostentatiously here,” she continued. “You have to adjust your expectations.”
Piao Piao’s experiences are typical of those of the transgender sex workers in Beijing and Shanghai surveyed by Asia Catalyst, a New York-based nongovernmental organization that focuses on health issues in China and Southeast Asia, in conjunction with two Chinese organizations.
Piao Piao found it hard to find a mainstream job in Beijing, so she became an entertainer in bars and a sex worker.Credit The New York Times
Their recent report, titled “My Life Is Too Dark to See the Light,” draws on interviews with 70 people, most of whom left their rural hometowns to live in more liberal-minded cities, where they make a living from sex work.
The report calls for greater government recognition of the problems of those who have a mismatch between their birth sex and their internal sense of gender. It also calls for actions including antidiscrimination laws, streamlined procedures for changing one’s gender on official documents, and greater access to medical care.
“Transgender female sex workers are among the most marginalized and vulnerable populations in China today,” the report said. They “face a broad array of discrimination in social and policy frameworks, preventing this highly marginalized group access to a wide spectrum of services and legal protections.”
Cross-dressing and sex-change procedures are not illegal in China, but the Chinese Society of Psychiatry classifies individuals seeking to change their gender as suffering from a mental illness — a judgment many rights advocates seek to change.
The report recommends more efficient ways to change gender markers on documents like household registration and personal identity cards — documents that are essential for living in Chinese cities and for finding employment.
Several people interviewed for the report described the obstacles they face in everyday life, like going to one of the public bathhouses that are common in northern China, receiving medical care or even walking on the street dressed as a woman. Some recounted being reported by neighbors to the local authorities, and being evicted from their apartments.
Those employed in sex work, which is illegal in China, reported abuse and extortion by the police. In Shanghai and Beijing, police officers have often relied on entrapment tactics in hotels, posing as clients to solicit transgender individuals. Several said they believed they had been arrested to help the police meet arrest quotas.
Xiao Tong, a sex worker quoted in the report, described the way she was treated at a police station: “Once I went in, they pulled on my wig, really hard, and hit me,” she said. “They asked me if I was a man, and I said I wasn’t. Then they carried out a body search and flipped my bra up and groped around. They asked really perverted questions, like, ‘How do you have sex?’ I turned around and asked, ‘Do you want to try?’ Then he kicked me, really, he really kicked me.”
Rights advocates acknowledge that China has made progress in its treatment of transgender individuals. In 2009, the Health Ministry issued clinical standards for gender reassignment surgery, and several hospitals now offer hormone treatment.
But much more needs to be done, they argue.
“In recent years, we have seen a stronger and more visible rights movement for homosexuals, but we’ve seen few transgender-rights activists,” said Tingting Shen, one of the authors of the report and the director of advocacy, research and policy at Asia Catalyst. “When I talk to transgender activists, they think that right now the government is not fully aware of their situation, or aware that it needs to do something.”
One recommendation is that the government should incorporate the needs of transgender individuals in the H.I.V./AIDS plan for 2016 to 2020 that it is expected to be released in April. Asia Catalyst hopes the plan will expand the existing H.I.V. surveillance system to study the health of people with gender dysphoria and to provide more medical services for sex workers.
“I think the research we’ve done is just a start,” Ms. Shen said. “We would like to see the health department carefully assess the needs of the population because this is a really diverse group, with very diverse sexual activities. They might play different roles with different partners, so this is an urgent issue that we should have a strategy for now.”