【by Panchen Lo, Dec. 2024】
Celebrating Wei-Niang Community in Taipei
At the end of 2018, I attended to a wei-niang subculture party in Taipei. There were about 70 guests, most of whom lived in northern Taiwan and others coming from central or southern Taiwan. The styles of their outfits varied. Some wore coats and casual dresses that were likely found on the street, some chose more formal or flamboyant gowns with high heels, and some preferred Lolita fashion clothing. Others still were cosplayers in costumes of fictional girl characters. What did these folks have in common? While they were all born as male and given the legal gender identity of men throughout their social lives, they were into women’s clothing and the aesthetic of cuteness rather than social expectations of what men ought to look like. As a result, they started to search for information on how to dress the way they wanted, ask others for help on how to do this, learning skills and mannerisms. In gender studies, these practices would be primarily legible under the signs of crossdressing, gender transgression, and transgender identity. But instead of using these aforementioned terms, the title of the party, wei-niang, made use of a new word and idea that had become prevalent throughout East Asia (notably, Japan, China, and Taiwan) and Southeast Asia in the 21st century.
The word wei-niang has at least two meanings. The first meaning is a type of fictional character from Japanese anime, comics, and games (ACG) subculture since the 1970s. Wei-niang is a Mandarin translation of Japanese words including otokonoko (literally boy-girl) and joso shonen (literally boy in women’s clothes). The other meaning refers to people living in the real world, such as the guests of the party mentioned above. Although these two meanings are related to each other in some cases, it is clear that not every wei-niang is familiar with Japanese ACG. While the term wei-niang itself was developed in the last twenty years, the ages of the wei-niang community in Taiwan range from around 16 to 60. This age range implies that the concept is not really brand new to these community members. The binary typology of “transsexuals” and “crossdressers” (abbreviated here as “TS-CD”) has been prevalent in Taiwan for a long time (Ho 2002), with transsexuals referring to those who undergo medical procedures for transitioning to one’s gender identity and crossdressers referring to those who identify as male but occasionally dress up as girls or women. The TS-CD label is frequently used by many members of the wei-niang community to describe themselves. It is worthy noted that the wei-niang identification has a different logic from transgender, non-binary, and other gender categories arising in the context of global LGBT+ identity politics. Most wei-niang still view themselves as straight males rather than changing or transitioning out of their gender assigned at birth. On the other hand, many trans women find the term “wei-niang” offensive and try hard to stay away from it in an attempt to maintain a boundary between “TS” and “CD” and thus maintain the ability to insist on the authenticity of their gender identity.
There is no denying that wei-niang could be understood as a variant of crossdresser, yet such equivalence should not overshadow the specific aspects of wei-niang culture and history that the English term “crossdresser” overlooks. The idea of wei-niang originated from the online Japanese ACG (otaku) community at the end of the 20th century. Shortly after in the beginning of the 21st century, physical sites such as bars and changing rooms for crossdressers began to appear in urban areas. As for Taiwan, salons and studios for wei-niang opened in three cities (Taipei, Taoyuan, and Kaohsiung) in the 2010s. These places provided community members with makeup services, spaces to dress up, and closets to deposit their “equipments.” Today, more businesses and spaces for wei-niang are emerging in Taiwan and other parts in Asia with new subcultures and forms of entertainment that are associated with social change at both the local and global levels.
The ACG Subculture and Taiwanese Wei-Niang
Wei-niang became widespread in the 2010s in Taiwan and across the Sinophone world. The overseas expansion of Japanese creative industries was an important factor in facilitating this spread. Many Taiwanese wei-niang were highly influenced by Japanese subcultures including ACG, Lolita fashion, and even certain genres of pornography. Otokonoko and wei-niang have already spread out fromthe otaku community to the field of popular culture in both Japan and Taiwan, and the definitions of these terms became more flexible and general than the meticulous gender categorizing that is seen in ACG subculture.
Sawako, a “sister” I met in the Taiwanese wei-niang community, was inspired by the comedy comic Dosperado (2007) to start on her crossdressing journey. Created by Hideki Ōwada, the story of Dosperado (ドスペラード; Magicians of Moe for the Chinese title) referred to the image of the gangsters’ underworld in Japan. The twist was that these gangsters fought with magic, instead of using guns or fists. The protagonist, Eiji, was a tough guy. He turned out to be qualified for learning the most powerful magic, moe (萌, an affective response with adorable characters, see Galbraith 2019) because he still kept his virginity when reaching 30 years old. Every time Eiji used the magic of moe, his outfit changed into a cute style like a maid dress, while his figure remained muscular and masculine. This was not a common portrait of wei-niang characters adored by most otaku. However, Sawako found it interesting and exciting, so she decided to put on makeup, women’s clothes, and a wig on her 30 years old birthday. Since then, she had explored her looks and gender identification, sometimes playing 2D characters as a coser, sometimes dressing up like 3D women. For Sawako, wei-niang and transgender were not contradictory states to each other, and many sisters shared this cognition. In the case of Sawako, not only did the ACG subculture provide alternative worlds where its fans could run, but it also affected how people thought about their lives in reality and encouraged them to turn back to reform their given conditions just like the parallel universes overlapping in fiction.
Another sister, Yuna, was also inspired by comics and novels featuring wei-niang, otokonoko, or joso shonen. Reading these works made her realize her desire of crossdressing. Yuna told me she only want to be a girl in dreams rather than having surgeries and transitioning in reality. Nonetheless, she insisted that trans women should be treated as women. She accepted that there were plural cognitions about how to define a person’s gender identity. What she felt uncomfortable about and disliked was that there are people who cannot tolerate the difference nor listen to others’ voices inside and outside the community. The attitude of Yuna implied a possibility toward a relational ethic of coexisting with others and heterogeneity.
Gi-Di: Building a Place for the Community
Wei-Niang Gi-Di (literally a base for crossdressers) was established by Taiwanese trans woman Yuri in 2018. Yuri said that wei-niang were men who made their ideal feminine appearance in general, so she was not a typical wei-niang, because most of them did not take hormones like her. But actually, Yuri did not insist on clarifying who is and who is not wei-niang. The reason she picked this term is that it was more comprehensible to most people. In contrast, the term “transgender” was often associated with sex affirming surgeries and kept people who identified as straight males staying away. But the latter outnumbered the former who took living as a woman full-time and totally as the goal. What’s more, they were the main customers of the Gi-Di and also the new market left to be developed. Newcomers constantly turned to Gi-Di every year, so Yuri believed that if she had chosen other terms accepted by the trans community, a large number of people would have been excluded. Just like the Girls Club in Japan, Yuri stated that whoever thought of crossdressing could come to Gi-Di and give it a try. Gi-Di aimed to provide the “sisters” with the opportunity to make the first step toward the journey, instead of advanced instruction in makeup or styling.
Speaking of the dispute around the selection of words, many trans women dislike wei-niang, especially wei, which means “fake” in Mandarin. Furthermore, people who accepted to be called like that were regarded as weirdos by some trans people.Yuri responded with two points. Firstly, there were other people who didn’t think the term was a big deal. She acknowledged the heterogeneity of gender transgression in the trans community, and she reckoned it a diversity that could benefit survival and expansion. Survival was Yuri’s original intention when she came up with the whole plan. Besides, from her viewpoint as someone who runs the Wei-Niang Gi-Di, it was those crossdresserswhosupported the resources to maintain the spaces. Secondly, Yuri mentioned that people didn’t have to share the same gender identity as a common ground. It didn’t matter whether each individual identified as wei-niang or not. For her, the most important of all is that if people were able to understand and relate themselves to Wei-Niang Gi-Di as a place for them to connect with each other and build a network, which implied a sense of belonging to the community. Yuri’s thinking was affected by her experience as a community construction and cultural revitalization worker in a local neighborhood in Southern Taiwan.
In Mandarin, identification is translated as ren-tong, which also means “to agree with” or “recognition”. In Yuri’s narrative, the topic was cleverly switched from personal gender identification (xing-bie ren-tong) to collective belongingness and recognition (ren-tong wei-niang). She paid more attention to exploring the possibility to produce connections and relationships than drawing boundaries between categories. Hence, wei-niang is a strategy for coalition and an inclusive plan. Anthropologist David Valentine (2007) argued that “transgender” was an inclusive plan to bring a variety of diverse people together in the context of LGBT social movements in the United States. The distinctness in personal identification was not the main concern. As the case of Wei-Niang Gi-Di implied that the relation between wei-niang and transgender is not different positions on the gender spectrum, but more close to the disposition of the network with intersections where identity politics interweaves with popular culture, subculture, social movements, and academic knowledge, and they manage to make connections to create conditions of survival and living.
A trans pride flag and a non-binary pride flag at Gi-Di. 2024 by Panchen Lo
Another Parallel Universe: Alternative Time and Space
An announcement at Gi-Di claimed that the main function is to provide wei-niang sisters with “a place to hide away from the nuisances in other parallel universes”. The parallel universes here meant the normal world outside Gi-Di or their daily lives in men’s clothes. Interestingly, during my fieldwork, I often heard another version of the saying, where parallel universes referred to new lives and alternative times and spaces opened up by crossdressing. According to the notion of parallel universes, these two versions are not contradicted since all the universes are parallel universes, whether the universe where wei-niang could play and take adventures in women’s clothes or the universe where they are constrained to live in normative gender roles.
In an interview by You (2019), Yuri considered circumstances where wei-niang wore men’s clothes as “other parallel universes”. From her point of view, she spent time with those sisters with their women’s appearance, and most of their makeup and styles were made with her own hands. It seemed that the biggest difference between the universes was “if it’s allowed to crossdress or not”. Not only did the imagination of parallel universes reflect restrictions on gender roles, clothes, and appearances, but it also related to the desire for reversible time, more specifically, they felt a longing for youth, even though that is a youth they had never experienced.
“Perhaps in another parallel universe, I already went beyond the borders of gender.” (Kelly)
Kelly, a wei-niang in her 50s, wrote down this as her self-introduction on social media. She seldom went to Gi-Di, she came to Yuri for the makeup service about once a month or two months. Kelly had married and raised two daughters, and she never refused or regretted being their father. Kelly deemed that it was her responsibility to keep the secret to herself and play the role of a father when her daughters were around. Kelly told me that she felt the desire to be a woman since childhood, but she had no access to information and resources on transgender. If she had realized that there were places like Gi-Di twenty or thirty years ago, she would have tried to live as a woman.
Kelly’s story reveals that wei-niang is not in the opposite position of transgender in the spectrum of identification. Many transsexuals believe the difference between crossdressers and them is “If one wants to truly become a woman or not”, however, this question assumes that everyone gets to choose their gender identity at will. The historical contexts of personal background and specific conditions of individuals are often neglected. Could wei-niang be considered a part of transgender? Could Kelly be considered transgender? The answer might be no, for she never refers to herself as transgender, nor receives medical treatments such as psychiatric diagnosis or HRT, hormone replacement therapy. On the other hand, the answer might be yes because Kelly does confess that she has wanted to be a woman since childhood. What were the main obstacles for Kelly? Firstly, she mentioned the lack of knowledge and information. She didn’t know how to see herself feeling differently from most other people. She wasn’t comfortable being a man, but she couldn’t find someone to ask for help. Secondly, she needed time. Not only did she crave a twenty or thirty years long period, but she also wish to return to an imaginary youth when she had not been through socialization or a lifetime as a man. Besides more time, Kelly even hoped to make time reversible.
Back to what Kelly wrote about parallel universes, here I try to interpret her words from another perspective. In that sentence, the first borderline Kelly stepped over was not gender roles but the timeline, which is the supposed “parallel universe”. According to Kelly, she suffered from growing up in a repressive environment. She followed the social expectations, she became the son, the father, and the husband who brought home the bacon as a breadwinner. When she was young, she always envied girls who wore skirts and sheer stockings. Just like many other wei-niang little boys, Kelly had been beaten as punishment for trying to put on her mother’s clothes. After getting married, Kelly got the chance to wear her wife’s clothes, and then she was roundly condemned. That made Kelly confused about her gender identity. In her 50s, she finally found Yuri and Gi-Di. Her “girlish heart” beat again. Even though Kelly knew she was living the second half of life, she still managed to gain femininity and go back to the youth that she never really experienced. In this regard, being wei-niang is a kind of reparative regeneration and compensation for the time she lost.
The sayings about parallel universes implied that wei-niang not only challenged the gender norms in society but tried to run away from the given reality, the original timeline, and the old world where gender norms were generated. The story of Kelly indicated that wei-niang sisters were not completely out of touch with reality or indulging in fake fantasy, but applying a practical and pragmatic approach: to rethink their life course from an alternative point of view, relocate themselves to current situations, and then choose to live on in the present. Otherwise, the other way is to commit suicide. Many trans folks ironically state that the best way to become the other gender is to get reincarnation (tou-tai) in the next life, and all the other ways such as medical treatment, beauty products, and skill development cannot compare. By putting on makeup, dressing up, and representing images of themselves on the internet, they are attempting to travel between the given world and parallel universes, returning to the youth they had never experienced in the crossdressing timeline. By practicing dressing skills, taking part in activities, and managing new identities, wei-niang sisters launch a beauty plan for self-transformation, gain vitality for their lifetime as men, and get the opportunities they never had in the new worlds. The border lines they have been crossing or transgressing are not only about gender identity but space and time.
AUTHOR
Panchen Lo (羅盤針) (she/her) is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology and a scholar in the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change at the University of Minnesota, USA. Lo’s work explores fields across feminist, queer, and trans studies, sociocultural anthropology, transnational social movements, and political theory. Lo has published articles based on an ethnographic study of temporality in Taiwanese crossdressing subculture. Her doctoral research project focuses on the transitioning of trans Taiwanese and the changing gender and political categories in trans lives and their practice. Lo currently participates in a collaborative study on transnational anti-trans movement and discourse in Taiwan with Yo-Ling Chen. Lo is also a trans activist engaging in public education and community service in Taiwan, organizing Taiwan Trans March and editing a book The Multiverse of Gender: A Collection of Transgender Lives Stories (2024).
REFERENCES
Galbraith, Patrick W. (2019). Otaku and the Struggle for Imagination in Japan. Durham: Duke University Press.
Ho, Josephine (2002). “The Em(bodi)ment of Identity: Constructing Transgender.” Taiwan: A Radical Quarterly in Social Studies (46):1-43.
Ho, Josephine (2003). Transgender. Taoyuan: Center for the Study of Sexualities.
Valentine, David (2007). Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category. Durham: Duke University Press.
You, Chia-Chuan (2019). https://www.thenewslens.com/feature/crossdresser/110959