In the aftermath of the New Culture Movement (1915–1919), Western-trained biologists in China helped establish a popular understanding of sex dimorphism that construed bodily morphology and function of the two sexes as opposite, complementary, and fundamentally different. Starting in the mid-1920s, urban Chinese intelligentsia began to construct a more fluid definition of humanity. They argued that at base, all humans are equal. They no longer drew on the limited language of anatomy to talk about two different but equal sexes. Rather, they started to think of men and women as simply two versions of a universal human body. They appropriated from Western endocrinologists the theory of universal bisexuality, which posits that everyone is partly male and partly female. This paper shows that a vibrant discourse about “sex change” existed in the mass circulation press of Republican China (from the 1920s through the 1940s). It traces how Chinese sexologists entertained the possibility of sex transformation based on a new hormonal vision of universal bisexuality and famous animal sex reversal experiments in Europe; it demonstrates how indigenous Chinese frameworks for understanding reproductive anomalies (hermaphrodites, eunuchs, etc.) provided an epistemological point of reference for communicating new and foreign ideas about sex; it assesses the impact of a highly sensationalized case of “female-to-male” transformation in mid-1930s Shanghai on people’s awareness of the possibility of human sex change; and it analyzes the culminating effects of these epistemological reorientations in a science fiction short story called “Sex Change” (1940) by the pedagogical writer Gu Junzheng.
