Lin Yinhe’s secret is out

Source: NYT (3/6/15)
Sex Expert’s Secret Is Out, and China’s Open to It
By Andrew Jacobs

BEIJING — Li Yinhe, China’s leading advocate of freewheeling sexuality, has been shocking this outwardly prudish nation for three decades.

An American-trained sociologist, she promotes one-night stands, sings the praises of sadomasochist sex and has called on the government to decriminalize pornography. She is also a hero to gay and lesbian Chinese, having for years pushed a same-sex marriage bill in China’s legislature despite little chance of passage.

But in December, Professor Li, 63, who recently retired from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, reluctantly moved the nation to the threshold of a new frontier: transgender love.

After a blogger accused her of being a closeted lesbian, Professor Li shot back with a blog post announcing that her partner of 17 years, although born a woman, is a transgender man.

“I am a heterosexual woman who has fallen in love with a transsexual person,” wrote Professor Li, who was married to Wang Xiaobo, a well-known Chinese novelist, until his death in 1997. “I treat him as a man.”

Her announcement has both stunned and intrigued China, where there is little familiarity with transgender men. To the surprise of Professor Li and members of China’s almost invisible transgender population, the reaction has been overwhelmingly sympathetic.

Her initial blog post has been read more than 360,000 times, and in January, she and her partner, Zhang Hongxia, 50, posed for the cover of People Weekly, one of the nation’s most widely read magazines. The country’s mainstream news outlets have been jostling for interviews and producing respectful profiles.

“Everyone is unique in some way, so let’s work to have society catch up with science,” People’s Daily, the Communist Party flagship news media outlet, wrote on its microblog account. “Respecting the choices of people like Li Yinhe is respecting ourselves.”

Xiaogang Wei, a gay rights activist, said many people were familiar with Jin Xing, a former army colonel and a member of a military dance troupe who was born a man but underwent gender-reassignment surgery in the 1990s.

“People have this stereotyped idea of a man trapped in a woman’s body,” Mr. Xiaogang said, “but a biological woman who identifies as a man is something new here. It took a lot of bravery for Li Yinhe to come out like this, and to her credit she has been using her relationship as a teaching moment.”

THERE have been a few small bumps, with arrows from outraged traditionalists and critiques from transgender doctrinaires who say she muddled the message by misusing words like “transsexual”; a few have complained that her partner is still technically female, having yet to undergo gender-reassignment surgery.

Professor Li, left, with her partner, Zhang Hongxia, leaving their apartment in Beijing.CreditGilles Sabrie for The New York Times

Professor Li, long accustomed to withering criticism and official censure, has taken all the hubbub in stride. She said the positive reaction to the revelations about her relationship reinforced what she has long maintained: that unlike the tradition-bound men who run the country, ordinary Chinese are a tolerant lot.

“I find people here to be pretty accepting and open,” she said one recent afternoon at a teahouse near the apartment in south Beijing that she shares with Mr. Zhang and their adopted son.

Professor Li has been tracking Chinese attitudes about sex since the late 1980s. It was then, after nearly a decade spent working on a doctorate at the University of Pittsburgh, that she returned home to find a nation still constrained by the puritanical mores imposed by Mao, who died in 1976.

In the early years of the Communist revolution, love, let alone sexual pleasure, was seen as a bourgeois predilection that threatened to distract the masses from class struggle, food production and industrialization.

“It was just like in Orwell’s ‘1984,’ with antisex youth groups advocating celibacy,” said Professor Li, who spent part of her adolescence digging ditches in the countryside. “Everyone I knew was a virgin until they got married.”

During her first survey in 1989, 15 percent of the 2,500 young people in Beijing she interviewed reported having premarital sex, and most of the outliers were already engaged and simply waiting for the bureaucracy to produce a marriage license.

In a nationwide follow-up study with 4,000 subjects she did in 2013, that figure had increased to more than 70 percent.

“The changes have been revolutionary,” she said.

Still, the government is priggish when it comes to matters of sexuality. Communist Party members can be purged for serial infidelity, orgies are strictly illegal and television censors have been on an anti-cleavage campaign of late, though their efforts have generated widespread public ridicule. One of China’s biggest online pornography operators is serving a life sentence.

Professor Li practically harrumphs when asked about the government’s antisex policies. “Medieval,” she says with a roll of the eyes. She does more than complain. In 2010, after the police arrested 22 members of a swingers’ club in Nanjing, she was one of the few public figures to speak out in their defense, calling the charges a violation of basic human rights.

The so-called group licentiousness law provides up to five years in prison for consenting adults who repeatedly have sex with more than two other people. “Laws like this need to be abolished because the purported crimes don’t have any victims,” she said.

Still, she considers it progress that the one defendant who refused to plead guilty, a middle-aged computer science professor, was given three and a half years in prison. Last year, a doctoral student in Shanghai was sentenced to just five months for a similar crime, this time involving several gay men who met one another online.

“To be honest, real change will only come once this generation of leaders dies out,” she said.

In the meantime, some of her work continues to be stymied. In the decades since Chinese publishers refused to accept her translation of a study on bisexuality, Professor Li has produced several books that have been repeatedly rejected by mainland Chinese publishers, including a study of polysexuality and her most recent work, a collection of sadomasochism-themed short stories that will be published in Hong Kong this year.

One of the tales involves a researcher who is punished for making a mistake while working at her stiflingly highbrow academy. Asked whether such stories were inspired by experience, Professor Li cracked the faintest of mischievous smiles. “Of course,” she said.

It was just then that her partner, Mr. Zhang, swept into the teahouse, exuding a buoyant, boyish charm. A former Beijing taxi driver, Mr. Zhang is uninhibited and impulsive in a way that Professor Li is not.

“God meant for us be together,” Mr. Zhang said.

Their first encounter was not especially romantic. Professor Li, recently widowed, was speaking to a group of lesbians at a private home in Beijing when Mr. Zhang — who at the time still identified as a lesbian — started flirting with the guest of honor. For all her expertise in the realm of sex, Professor Li misread the signals, though later suggested that the two meet at a McDonald’s.

Mr. Zhang was thrilled, thinking it a date. “But when I saw her take out the pen and paper, I realized I was just a research subject to her,” he said, glancing sidelong with a smile. “Our love was one-sided at first, but I slowly melted her heart.”

DURING their long courtship, Professor Li also helped Mr. Zhang come to realize that he was transgender, a concept that was then even alien to most Chinese gay men and lesbians. For years, he said, the notion that he was a lesbian did not feel right — especially because he identified as a man and was drawn to heterosexual women.

Recalling his early 20s, he said he would recoil at the slightest physical contact from the men he was dating. “If a guy would put his hand on my knee, my hair would stand up on end,” Mr. Zhang said. “I thought, ‘This is what I should be doing to other girls.’ ”

Through it all, his mother was nonjudgmental and never pressured him to marry. Today, she lives across the hall from the couple, preparing meals and helping to take care of their 14-year-old son, who is developmentally disabled.

These days Mr. Zhang is kept busy managing Professor Li’s frequent speaking engagements, many of them overseas. (Next month she will be lecturing about gay rights at Brown University.) “All I want to do is spend the rest of my life with her,” he said. Professor Li nodded silently.

But in announcing their relationship, Professor Li did not mince words. “Love is so simple and spiritual,” she wrote. “It is not related to social status, age, or even sexual identity.”