This book is a groundbreaking study of transgender lives and practices in late imperial China. Through close readings of court cases, as well as Ming and Qing fiction and nineteenth-century newspaper accounts, Matthew H. Sommer examines the social, legal, and cultural histories of gender crossing.

Matthew H. Sommer is the Bowman Family Professor of History at Stanford University. He is the author of Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China (2000) and Polyandry and Wife-Selling in Qing Dynasty China: Survival Strategies and Judicial Interventions (2015).

Andrea S. Goldman, author of Opera and the City: The Politics of Culture in Beijing, 1770-1900:
In equal measure theoretically informed and richly documented, Matthew Sommer’s newest book centers around six cases of male-to-female cross-dressers or intersex commoners in Qing China who eventually get caught up in legal altercations. Sommer’s definition of transgender is broad—essentially anyone living outside Confucian familial norms—comprising a continuum from monks who “left the family,” to eunuchs, cross-dressing actors, intersex brides, and those who “passed” male for female (until they were outed), many of whom met a violent end. Charting the fear that those who engaged in trans practices must have harbored nefarious motives, all the while suggesting that such lifestyles were much more common and accepted in everyday life than we might imagine, this provocative historicization of transgendering in late imperial China is at once both universal and deeply particular. Its lucid prose should make this study accessible well beyond the China field.

Susan Stryker, author of Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution:
Matthew Sommer makes splendid use of contemporary transgender theory to shed light upon, and gain new insight into, late imperial Chinese society. Far from anachronistically imposing a presentist category on the radical difference of the past, Sommer examines a variety of individual cases in which manifold practices of gender-crossing allow previously underappreciated aspects of law, religion, literature, and social order to click into focus with startling clarity.