First China transgender clinic deals with ‘visitors’ as it embraces country’s 4 million people with body dissatisfaction
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For China’s transgender population of four million – and those with empathy for them – they are people whose souls are trapped in the wrong body.
At the country’s first transgender clinic in Beijing, they are not seen as patients.
The term transgender describes people whose internal sense of being male, female, neither, or both, does not match with their assigned sex at birth.
The man behind the country’s first “comprehensive clinic” for such people, which opened in 2017, is plastic surgeon Pan Bailin.
Those who use the facility are referred to as visitors rather than patients because the ethos of the clinic contends that it is not treating an illness.
Approximately 0.3 per cent of adults in the Asia-Pacific region identify as transgender, according to a 2012 United Nations survey.