Transwoman in China's Media Industry：Discrimination，Harassment，and Deliberately Traumatizing

“Have you seen any man with long hair in this office building?”

My former editor at Southern Weekly, Yijiang Yao started to talk about my hair style right after I had handed in the required documents to enroll in the company. Yao is a cishet man in his 50s. Before the conversation, I knew he had some issues with my long hair, as he tried to push me to cut off my hair on several different occasions, but I was petrified when he started with “your hair style was discussed on the editors meeting, and our chief editor was dissatisfied with it. You know, there are many job seekers out there waiting for a job.” His tone is soft, but his words are sharp. This is the very moment when the discrimination I experienced while working with Southern Weekly turned from microaggressions to blatant threatening.

By then, I had just landed in China for 2 months after the 4-year stay in Europe for my master courses, and, of course, for the fact that it was too expensive to come back to China with the Zero-Covid policy. As a transwoman, I do anticipate discrimination in my daily life, especially in a place where there is no specific law protecting the marginalized groups against hate crimes, but I was not familiar with how it would really happen in China as my social transition was mainly in Europe. Growing my hair, trying out female clothes, attending feminist seminars, going out for parades, etc., etc., I would say I was privileged to be around open-minded people while living in Europe, so I was supported warmly by my friends then. However, things started to slide out of my control when I stepped on the land, I used to be familiar with, China.

To those who might not be familiar with Southern Weekly, it is a liberal paper in tightly controlled Chinese media industry, famous for its audacity of criticizing authorities and voicing for the marginalized. It was established in 1984 in Guangzhou, a city in Southern China, close to Hong Kong SAR. It is regarded as the landmark of media liberalization in 1980s in China. It is also a good subject for China Watchers to observe China's political shifts.

I arrived in Guangzhou in January 2023 for a Journalist post at Southern Weekly. I strived for this post for more than three months, with the hope for a post-Covid “normal life”. Yao was my editor. I met him in person for the first time in a Café around the office building of Southern Weekly on the 3rd day I arrived in Guangzhou. He was there with Julie one of his female subordinators I happened to know online several years ago. We talked about some details about the post and a business trip the next day to Beijing. It was when he started to push me to cut off the hair, I had been growing for 5 years. He described my hair style as “artist-like” on that meeting. Unwanted comment, I only got to realize it retrospectively a month later after I finally understood that he won’t stop harassing me for my hair style unless I got it “manly” short.

I saw through the tricks Yao was playing in early February when there was a severe earthquake in the border area between Türkiye and Syria. It was catastrophic. News agencies domestic and overseas alike are turning their cameras to such calamity. Southern Weekly as well, but just a bit later than their competitors. They started to organize almost two days after the whole world knew people were dying in the two countries. Yao lured me with the opportunity of being sent to the border area for news report, but only if I cut off my hair accordingly. I felt pressured for that as a northerner in Guangzhou, I was still getting myself use to the city. So, I decided to stonewall his “kind advice” as I did several times in January. However, he surely got his stamina. He attempted twice with the bait. In his first attempt, he insinuated the condition, hair for the chance to Türkiye. But nothing can be compared with his second attempt. To break my stonewall, he tried out his propagating skills honed for 30 years. Misinformation. He intended to put peer pressure on me by setting an example, Monika, a ciswoman colleague who, according to him, sacrificed her hair for the journalistic mission. His logic is easy and simple: “Even a woman can do it, why can’t you (as a man)?” And, of course, the truth is distorted by replacing “trim” with “cut off”.

Then came to Yao’s Final Solution mentioned at the beginning, “Bread or Hair”. It was in early March 2023 and the due date for haircutting is 8th March, International Women’s Day. The conversation happened in a meeting room; he and me alone; door closed. In the conversation, he made me introduce my experience again, then started to “care about my family’s financial difficulties”, and suddenly, his boss got dissatisfied with my hair style, according to him. I felt I was set to choose from two different infernos, on one side, ruined hope of “normal life”, disarrayed career path, financial difficulties, and on the other side, denied gender identity, tramped dignity, shattered self-cohesion. I felt overwhelmed, and then got strong panic attack, anxiety, and then depression and alcohol problem got back to haunt me in the following months.

My reactions might sound melodramatic to many who are not in that context, but it is the breakdown point for me after nearly two-months torture and torment. Fear is a powerful tool for a dictator to hold the society in his hand. That is the very essence of my “overaction” for the two months working with Yao and Southern Weekly. What could make such fear? Yao’s answer is misinformation again. In fact, misinformation would be your daily life if Yao decided to create fear in you. 23rd February 2023 is the anniversary of Putin’s invasion into Ukraine, and the US president Joe Biden was giving a speech on the day in Warsaw. As Poland played a special role during the war, I intended to write an article about what kind of role Poland was playing, and why Poland took the role. For this purpose, I interviewed with several Polish professors and, also some in Brussels, one of whom was a former foreign minister of Poland. I then was asked to write an exclusive interview with the foreign minister by Yao, even at my reminder that the minister was hawkish and had strong opinions. I handed in the draft to him 1 day before the due date, but I was then asked to rewrite the whole article, as Yao was not a fan of the minister’s hawkish view. Or, let’s say, Yao is an enthusiastic supporter of Putin’s invasion.

Back then, Julie was on her maternal leave for that she was about to give birth to her baby. However, Yao insisted that I should hand my article firstly to Julie and then he would be willing to correct it. This is unusual. I was asked to rewrite the Poland article for 4-5 times and several minor revisions with the reason “your logic is weak”, until it was no longer the proper timing to be published. This almost made it impossible for me to publish anything, for that on one hand, I had had to ask Julie to work while she’s expecting her baby, and on the other, I needed to wait for 1 week or even longer every time to get my article corrected. Yao’s purpose is not hard to understand. This is a part of his “Bread or Hair” tactic, and the flex of his mighty. He was trying to gaslight me until I completely fell into his grab. Besides, I was even not allowed to meet with my interviewees alone and my planned interviews were canceled randomly. This is nothing but humiliation for an established journalist, and extremely traumatizing for a trans person in workplace.

I started to resist Yao overtly in early March by going to the only female deputy chief editor in Southern Weekly, Celine, to complain about his harassment. Since then, I had not been published even once on Southern Weekly. And I was not paid even a single penny for my two-month service by then (they paid later as appeasement in May). What’s worse? Yao’s discrimination and harassment started to impose on me severe anxiety and depression with strong bodily symptoms. I cannot concentrate on anything. Reading became a mission impossible for me even months after I saved myself from Yao’s toxification. I confronted him twice, before and after I withdrew my enrollment documents. The first time was right after my talk with Celine. Yao bragged about Southern Weekly for its history and claimed that my hair style would smear the image of the company in those high-level meetings. The second time was on the 19th April when I went to the office building of Southern Weekly in black dress and with shining silver piercings. He had shunned me for about 3 hours before he dared to talk to me in the office. This time in open office, though he advised to talk in a closed room once, and I refused his “suggestion”. This time, he admitted that it was his duty as a manager to push me to cut my hair. Here, misinformation again, he tried to convince me that my skills were not enough for the post as my articles didn’t attract enough clicks. Lying about the clicks is easy as I don’t have the access to the company’s system. And it is not sufficient to evaluate one’s journalistic skills only by the clicks one’s articles attract. Only tabloids assess their staff writers’ performance with criteria like that.

Celine, unfortunately, was a part of the gender-based violence I had experienced as well. She’s nothing like Yao’s brutality, but strategical and subtle. It is usually the case that bureaucratism is a strong amplifier of gender-based violence when the assaults take place in an organization where there is hardly any established procedures coping with the perpetrators. My case is nothing exceptional in that regard. And Celine was the person who was playing the bureaucratical role but in her own term she was only representing herself not the company. In late March 2023, I was asked to sign a piece of NDA, when I was still hesitating about whether to quit. I am not sure this is Celine or Yao’s idea. But when I started to ask for an official apology from Southern Weekly and Yao or I would go public about the scandal, Celine threatened me in early May with “legal consequences” if I breached the NDA. That was not even the end of her collaboration. She wanted to portray the discrimination and harassment as a part of my “personal conflicts” with Yao rather than a social justice scandal to save Southern Weekly from being held accountable, but in the meanwhile endorsing Yao’s bias and avoiding giving credit to a more inclusive gender narrative. That is a typical strategy for cishet women to survive in public sphere in China. As transgender persons are increasingly restricted to present in public sphere by the authorities and self-censorship of news agencies, and gender issues are increasingly politicized in simplified Chinese world, for cishet women to settle with what is in hand is a smart move indeed. This is also the reason why a part of self-claimed Radical Feminists in China made moves against transwomen on social media. Fear for losing the life they have now as what I experienced while living in Guangzhou.

I left Guangzhou for Berlin, Germany in early June 2023, and warned Celine about making the scandal public in both Chinese and English world. Then came the most dramatic moment in my journey for social justice. When she was playing “stick and carrot” strategy, Celine suggested me in May to file my complain through the “official channel”, as if I was not even aware that it was supposed to be an option. In fact, filing my complain with the HR was my first thought in late March when I decided to withdraw my enrollment documents. However, the HR did not even respond to the message about my complain. Two months later, right after Celine’s “suggestion” in May, the HR finally started to react to my complain, saying: “give me some time to learn the official procedure.” I was astounded, as I didn’t expect the HR should “learn” the official procedure before dealing with my case. There could be only two scenarios here, either the company had got no official procedure dealing with gender-based violence cases, or the official procedure did not really work. I even requested to know the whole picture about the procedure, but the HR refused. Two days later, an official from another department claiming their independence contacted me about the case. Thereafter, I had been pushing them for the entire month for a result until my warning, but what I got was only “your case is under investigation”. But right after my warning to Celine, magically, the official requested evidence from me for the first time after one month, but I only had two days to collect all my evidence. This consumed the last drop of my trust in the “official channel”. And only a few days after I cut off my communication with the official, I got a piece of paper with the official stamp of Southern Weekly on it, stating that I should solve my “personal conflicts” with Yao. As you can see, the claimed independence of the investigation does not even exist, as their strategy is cohesive, and possibly even coordinated.

I have not stopped trying out other channels in the following months, but the efforts were in vain. And finally, in the end of November 2023, I posted the case on Weibo and Twitter in order to put pressure on Southern Weekly. And they responded with a phone call from a police officer in Guangzhou. But don’t take me wrong, the officer was kind to me but seemed not really want to step into the case. However, the only thing is, the justice is not yet to come.

*Celine, Monika and Julie are fake names.