A historical study of clinical, media, administrative, and community vocabularies for transgender and gender-diverse lives in mainland China, using a vocabulary-stratigraphy model to explain how terms such as yixingzheng, bianxing ren, gender reassignment, transgender, and kuar coexist across institutions.

Using hospital records, media narratives, administrative rules, community hotlines, litigation and surveys, and digital archives, this study reconstructs mainland China’s transgender public history through six documentary regimes and a reproducible source-card method.