China's transgenders 'step forward' from the shadows

Long pressured to deny their identities, transgender people in China are quietly asserting themselves.

Shanghai (AFP) - Lan spent years trapped between two identities: the male gender assigned to her at birth and the woman she was inside -- a living "torture" in a China not yet ready to fully embrace transgenders.

The Shanghai native, who asked that her full name be withheld, misled friends and family with a macho facade but eventually, depressed by her identity crisis, underwent gender-reassignment surgery in 2015.