Hong Kong gender identity disorder sufferers are a forgotten minority
Individuals who feel trapped between male and female identities lack help in a city experts say is ill-equipped to treat patients who need not only medical and social assistance, but understanding of their plight
Bo Bo* (who did not wish to be photographed for the story) has been the odd one out in his family since he was born. As a girl when he was growing up, Bo Bo refused to wear dresses or school uniform, or use public toilets.
“My parents kept hitting me, but I still refused to do it. Having no idea that there is a condition called gender dysphoria, they just thought I was an unruly child,” she says.
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Born in Dongguan, she came to Hong Kong for primary school in 1996 and completed secondary school in the city. After she moved out on her own at the age of 23 to shake free of parental control, she started looking online for information about her condition.
“I first went to China to see a plastic surgeon. He told me there was no need for any surgery as I already looked male in appearance. I came back to Hong Kong dejected. In 2009, a friend recommended me to seek treatment at Kwun Tong Yung Fung Shee psychiatric clinic. The government psychiatrist there didn’t know how to handle my case. It seemed that he never treated patients with gender dysphoria before. He just kept asking me to try to be a girl. I saw him for a year and I was frustrated.”
Bo Bo’s plight is a common story in the local transgender community who seek treatment for gender dysphoria in a public hospital. Also known as gender identity disorder, gender dysphoria sufferers experience discomfort or distress because there is a mismatch between their biological sex and gender identity.
Patients suffering from gender dysphoria include intersex people (people born with indistinct or ambiguous sexual anatomy or with traits of both sexes, making it incorrect to define them as either male or female) and transsexuals (people who do not identify with their biological sex at birth and wish to realign their gender and their sex through medical procedures including hormone treatment and surgery).