Who is afraid of Hong's gender? Locating the unintelligible in post-#MeToo China

In mid-2025, a high-profile scandal involving a 38-year-old male figure who reportedly cross-dressed and lured over hundreds of men into recorded sexual encounters under the self-given moniker ‘Sister Hong’ has set off a wave of heated discussions on Chinese social media. Drawing from comparative discourse analysis of Sinophone manosphere (Baidu Tieba) and feminist network (RedNote), we identify two divergent yet entangled interpretive currents: first, feminist readings fixate on Hong's maleness (as ‘Uncle’) to call out the ways systemic gender hierarchies lay the groundwork for such deception to be institutionally produced and culturally excused; second, manosphere communities, in turn, seize on the scandal to amplify anti-feminist grievance while simultaneously valorising Hong's ‘transfeminine’ performance (as ‘Sister’) as a temporary stand-in for unfulfilled heterosexual expectations. Grounded in Butlerian scholarship, we argue that the Hong scandal gives rise to a volatile discursive battleground through which both camps despite articulating competing visions of gender politics at times produce moments of overlap in rhetoric and effect around their interpretations of Hong's gender performativity that, unintentionally or otherwise, resonate with state cisheteropatriarchy. Hong, as a result, is made a phantasmic scapegoat onto whom the patriarchal order offloads its anxieties and contradictions: as a non-woman seducer who lures men away from their proper destiny of wife, child, and ‘nation-building’ on one hand and as a non-man caricature of ironic consumption whose existence is to delegitimize femininity and queerhood on the other. In tracing ‘who's afraid of [Hong's] gender’, this research engages critically with the contested (re)articulations of gender epistemologies across intersecting power structures and stakeholders within the Sino-mediasphere.