Ey has actually authored to have 6th Tone, Danger, Overland and you may Today, and fell poetry towards degrees, airwaves, walls, and you will users.
Display that it:
Down load any Chinese lesbian relationships application–Rela, LesPark, or LesDo–and you will have the same encourages so you can input their moniker, photos, and have your title: are you currently T, P, or something else?
At first glance, it appears to be obvious enough: T is inspired by the fresh English term “tomboy” if you are P supposedly comes from “po” (?, the main Chinese phrase to possess wife, ??), however some they state it represents “rather lady.” Immediately, upcoming, T and you will P would seem in order to correspond to butch and you may femme, sexual and you will social positions getting queer women in Chinese-speaking cultures, established when you look at the resistance and you may symbiosis: T was male, P is actually female; T was good looking, P is fairly; T passes, P soles. It is assumed which they go with her, and first off, the T delivers brand new screw and P get they.
Exactly what would be clear isn’t usually so, not. The first occasion We encountered T and you will P in action are in 2010 during the a lesbian club in the Shanghai named Purple Route. I found myself still a girl in the past, and you can prior to We also walked from the door, an effective T told me I was fairly. Following various other T questioned basically are a great P. I happened to be puzzled: Was not it supposed to be obvious?
Brand new T with the Chinese Transmasculinity
T/P indeed occur to help you helps sex. However, if butch and you may femme was indeed born from the 1950s, the brand new T/P outline falls under a queer childhood subculture you to definitely times from the web era, and that their fluidity shows. It is as frequently spoken because artwork, much less rigid. T and P cannot constantly couple up with one another, particularly; additionally there is “TTL” to own T-on-T enjoying, or “PPL” having Ps paired with other Ps. Bisexuals and you can pansexuals is actually omitted in the schema, irrespective of its intercourse demonstration (when you look at the matchmaking apps, “bi” are its own title), if you are an evergrowing proportion out-of Chinese queer girls choose away from it digital completely, labelling themselves V to have “flexible,” H having “half,” or ?? meaning “no difference.” Nevertheless the class includes multiple hues and flavours, in the ?T (“iron T”) or stone butch whose sexual parts of the body try untouchable, towards the ?T (“effeminate T”) whose feminine physical appearance belies an effective T interior.
An excellent T is additionally never a lady: T “blurs the latest difference between butch and transgender identities,” just like the Ana Huang notices, and several Ts use men’s names and you may reference one another as the brothers. When Leslie Feinberg’s legendary Brick Butch Blues is actually translated towards Chinese by Taiwanese queer scholar Joe T from the label, however, “transgender” (???) was a student in this new identity of your own preface.
A far more terrifically boring exemplory case of the fresh term’s fluidity: when looking for chest-flattening binders, I discovered you to “les T” is actually a useful keyword towards the age-trade platform Taobao, but “trans” (???) did not mention any results.
Taobao google search results having chest binders. “’s the binder you will be sporting Flat?” pressures an unit that have one hand more than their eye.
“New borders ranging from butch female, masculine genderqueer some one, and you may trans men are crisper the theory is that compared 