The morally responsible transgender citizen: mediated self-representation and gender co-production on Chinese social media

This article examines how transgender organizations in China use WeChat life stories as organizationally mediated storytelling to render transgender and gender-diverse lives publicly recognizable amid censorship, platform uncertainty, and moralized scrutiny. Drawing on a thematic analysis of 135 life stories published between 2021 and 2025 by three prominent transgender organizations, it argues that these stories co-produce the figure of the morally responsible transgender citizen through two narrative strategies: (1) gendered moral conformity, and (2) moral coalition building. The article shows that this repeated construction is not merely strategic, but a condition of survival in a media environment shaped by censorship, social backlash, commercial misrecognition, family morality, and contested feminist publics. It contributes to transgender media studies and movement storytelling scholarship by showing how transgender self-representation in China operates through risk-managed moral recognition. This article complicates Western-centred accounts of transgender visibility and storytelling under global anti-trans backlash. It shows that constrained advocacy can sustain community legitimacy and counter stigma, but only by narrowing the terms through which transgender lives become publicly narratable.