Xie Jian Shun 謝尖順 (1918 - ?) soldier

 Xie Jianshun 謝尖順 was born in Chaozhou, Guangdong. The family lived out in the countryside. At the age of seven, he was sick, and a doctor visit was not feasible. It was later reported that his penis was attached to a labium, and the mother simply tore them apart.

In 1934 at age 16, Xie joined the National Revolutionary Army (NRA, 國民革命軍), the military arm of the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) which was commanded by Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石). Xie’s mother died the next year, and his father the year after that. By the age of 20, Xie’s breasts had developed in a female fashion, but he was able to keep that hidden. A brief affair with a young woman was going well. Her father accepted that they would marry. However, Xie could not talk about his body and ran from the relationship.

Xie was with the NRA during the struggle against the Japanese invasion, and then against the Communist Party’s People's Liberation Army (PLA, 中国人民解放军). After the PLA’s victory in 1949, Chiang Kai-shek and the NRA retreated to Taiwan, and imposed themselves on the indigenous population there as a one-party dictatorship using martial law and the so-called White Terror (白色恐怖). Xie, as part of the NRA, was part of the move to Taiwan.

In August 1953, just after the end of the Korean War, Xie was suffering recurrent abdominal pains, and went to hospital in Tainan. Dr. Lin Chengyi, a graduate of the Tokyo Zhaohe Hospital and the external medicine department of the Jingjing Medical School, diagnosed the case carefully and found that Xie had a mixture of male and female organs. The details were discussed in the Taiwanese newspapers. 

The first operation, observed by out-of-town doctors and reporters, was an exploratory laparotomy (the opening of the abdominal cavity) to detect the presence of ovarian tissues; labia dissection to examine the vaginal interior, determine the length of the vagina, and confirm the presence (or absence) of the hymen. As reported in the press, Dr Lin assumed that Xie was a biological woman trapped inside a male body, whose feminine-like features gradually revealed themselves under the fingertips of medical experts and in the eyes of the public. “If ovaries and vagina are found inside the womb, removing the penis can turn Xie into a woman; otherwise he becomes a man”. The press compared Xie Jianshun to Christine Jorgensen, and noted that Jorgensen strongly wanted to be a woman, while Xie wanted to remain a heterosexual man. He was quoted in the press: “If my biology does not allow me to remain a man but forces me to become a woman, what else can I do?” It was announced that a uterus and ovaries were confirmed. From this point onward the press started using the female glyph 她 for ta=he/she rather than 他, the male glyph.

Xie was not informed of the results until nine days later, because they were afraid that, given his stated desire to remain male, he might attempt suicide. However Xie did agree to cooperate in the subsequent operations, and signed a consent form. While the doctors were quite aware that actually Xie was intersex (yinyang ren 陰陽人), they talked of the coming operations as sex-change operations. As Chiang says: “the construction of Xie Jianshun’s (trans) sexual identity was driven less by his self- determination— his eventual signature on the surgical consent form notwithstanding— and more by the cultural authority of the surgeons involved and the broader impact of the mass circulation press”.

Xie’s case had come to the attention of the Kuomintang government which ordered that Xie be transferred to the capital, Taipei: “In order to ensure Xie’s safety, and in the hope that a second operation will be carried out smoothly, it has been decided that she will be relocated to Taipei. After being evaluated and operated upon by a group of notable doctors in a reputable hospital, [Xie’s sex change] will mark a great moment in history.”

Shun (to use her personal name), however, refused, writing to say that she preferred to stay in Tainan and with the same doctors. The punishment for this was that Dr Lin was denied the formal permission to proceed. Around this time Xie’s former commanding officer in the NRA came for a visit and made a financial donation. 

After a few months, in November 1953, Shun finally agreed to relocate to Taipei. In early December the United Daily News announced her arrival and a small crowd gathered at the railway station to greet her, but no avail. On 9 December, she was quoted again as saying that she would not relocate. However in mid January, she quietly arrived at No. 1 General Hospital in Taipei. The new surgeon Jiang Xizheng was in charge, and female hormones were prescribed. Both Xie and the new doctors were far less co-operative with the press which was now not informed of the details of the operations. In the second operation, in April 1954, also a laparotomy, two male gonads were removed. In August 1954, there was a penectomy, and a vaginal opening was created.. The media blackout continued until January 1955 when one newspaper ran the headline: “Xie Jianshun’s Male-to-Female Transformation Nearly Complete: The Rumour of Surgical Failure Proved to Be False”, but with no further details

Shun had been developing stronger female attributes: larger breasts and regular menstruation. However she was not happy. She wrote to the President, Chiang Kai-Shek complaining about how her case was handled, and about the hospital food. This led to a visit from two representatives from the Ministry of National Defense. The doctors explained that her recurrent cramps were actual menstrual periods, and that they needed to construct a functional vagina. The Defense officials quickly persuaded Xie to agree.

By now Xie had a third surgeon, Zhang Xianlin, who had regarded the third operation as a simple reconstruction. A vaginoplasty was done in August 1955. A newspaper in Taiwan, and another in Hong Kong, published what they purported to be half-nude photos of Xie, which were quickly dismissed by the hospital as frauds. The Ministry of National Defense awarded Xie one thousand New Taiwan dollars to help buy feminine clothing.

By now the Taiwanese army had started screening new recruits for intersex conditions, and the majority of such press stories came from this source.

In October 1955, several Taiwanese newspapers ran stories on Xie’s completion and success in becoming female. The United Daily News ran a sixteen-instalment series: “The Story of Miss Xie Jianshun”.

In 1959, Chiang Kai-shek’s wife Soong Mei-ling, and a number of celebrities visited Xie, who was working at a relief institute for women and children. By then Shun had dropped the middle part of her name and was going by Xia Shun, and claimed nine, not four surgeries.

• Howard Chiang. “Gender Transformations in Sinophone Taiwan”. Positions, 25,3, 2017.
• Howard Chiang. “Christine Goes to China: Xie Jianshun and the Discourse of Sex Change in Cold War Taiwan” Chp 8 in Angela Ki Che Leung & Izumi Nakayama (eds) Gender, Health, and History in Modern East Asia, HKU Press, 2017.
• Howard Chiang. “Transsexual Taiwan” Chp 5 in After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China.  Columbia University Press, 2018.
• Jason Lee. “The Rebel”, www.metastasispodcast.com. Online.

EN.Wikipedia

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Xie Jianshun was intersex, and therefore, despite the fuss in the Taiwanese papers, she was not a first in the sense that Jorgensen or Olmos were. Surgical correction of adult intersex persons
(hermaphrodites as they were then called) goes back to the 19^th century.

In the Chinese language (Hàn yǔ) called Mandarin in the West, ‘he’, ‘she’ and ‘it’ are all ‘tā’, and the plural , (they) is ‘tā men’. A unisex pronunciation. However the glyphs are quite different. The male ‘tā’ (he) is 他; the female ‘tā’ (she) is 她. This is the change in the newspaper reports after the first operation.

Traditionally Chinese names have three parts: family name, generational name, personal name. Xie Jianshun can also be written Xie Jian Shun. Her personal name is Shun. Some accounts say that she changed her name by 1959 to Xie Shun. This is not really a change of name, merely a dropping of the middle part.