Lesbian Culture in China: How My Definition of Freedom Changed, Part 1

Note: The stories contained here happened over the course of a year in 2017.
“My parents think I’m weird.”

My petite Chinese friend in her thirties sat across from me, her arms and legs like sticks poking out from her baggy black t-shirt and long cargo shorts. Her hair, long and straight, was pulled back into a tight ponytail on the back of her head.

“They think I’m a T,” she rolled her eyes and shrugged.

“What’s a T?” I asked.

“A female homosexual,” she said with a small smile the way people often do when they teach me Chinese slang. “Nvde tongxinglian.”

“Oh,” I said, nodding. I faced my soup bowl and slurped on my noodles.

I was in China conducting field research for my doctoral dissertation. I had been living in China on and off for almost four years already. I am proficient in the language, but at the time of this conversation was not familiar with “T” as a slang term yet.  

“Yeah,” she continued. “Whenever I’m with a female friend who wants to hold my hand, I always slap it away and tell her to stop because people are going to think I’m a T.” She indicated a slapping motion and mimed pulling her hand away quickly as she frowned.

In China, it’s common for straight girls to hold hands when walking together. But for a tomboy like my friend, people probably would assume she was a lesbian. And that concerned her.

My friend’s fear that someone might think she was a lesbian indicated that she had experienced and/or witnessed homophobia and discrimination against queer people in China, just like in the United States.

Based on conversations like this one, I had for many years assumed that Chinese culture was significantly more “backward” than the United States when it came to accepting LGBTQ+ culture.

On that day slurping noodles, however, my friend gave me that simple vocabulary word, “T.” This word allowed me a feeling of possibility: If there was slang for it, there was a culture for it.

I soon found my assumptions about queer culture specifically and freedom more generally were challenged while living in China. I assumed that LGBTQ+ people in China lived lives of secrecy and oppression. I found something much more complex. Culture was not so black-and-white as that limited knowledge of a "freedom" and "oppression" dichotomy. I had put backward and progressive into neat boxes, but it was more complicated than that.

I later learned that Ts are masculine-presenting lesbians (T for Tomboy) and Ps are feminine-presenting lesbians (P for Pretty). Me? I’m an H because, being bi and androgynous, I’m “Half.” (Chinese often incorporates slang from English using the first letter of the English word.)