Anime,Apps,and Hormones: Transgender Adolescents Navigating Identity in Contemporary China

Transgender Youth and Self-Medication

An expanding body of scholarship has documented how transgender youth across diverse contexts navigate medical exclusion through practices of self-medication. Where access to gender-affirming healthcare is constrained by legal restrictions, high costs, or social stigma, adolescents often rely on informal networks, online communities, and unregulated markets to obtain hormones or related substances (Suarez et al., 2021; Torres et al., 2015; Winter et al., 2016). Studies in Latin America have shown that transgender adolescents purchase contraceptive pills or estrogen-based medications directly from pharmacies without prescriptions, improvising regimens that mimic professional treatments but lack medical oversight (Durán-García, 2021; Freitas et al., 2024; López-Harder, 2021; Padilla & Rodríguez-Madera, 2021). These strategies are not simply matters of affordability; they reflect the pervasive discrimination faced by transgender people in clinical settings, which discourages disclosure and deters engagement with formal healthcare systems (Sausa et al., 2007; Velasco et al., 2022).

Comparable patterns are observed in Southeast Asia, particularly in Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines, where transgender youth commonly resort to contraceptives, cosmetic products, or over-the-counter hormones as tools of bodily transformation (Boellstorff, 2011; Gibson et al., 2016; Winter, 2006). While the relative availability of pharmaceuticals facilitates access, the risks remain substantial: uncertain dosage, counterfeit products, and cumulative health consequences are recurrent concerns. Scholars interpret these practices as forms of “embodied agency,” whereby transgender youth assert control over their identities despite systemic neglect (Connell, 2012; Pearce, 2018). At the same time, self-medication embodies structural marginalization: health risks and bodily vulnerability are not incidental but intrinsic to systems that deny recognition and care (Poteat et al., 2013).

Two insights emerge from this literature. First, self-medication occurs at the intersection of youthful experimentation and medical exclusion. Even in relatively supportive jurisdictions, transgender adolescents are frequently deemed too young for formal transition-related care, which propels them toward clandestine alternatives (Clark et al., 2018; Turban et al., 2020). Second, self-medication is not an isolated act but one embedded in broader ecologies of kinship, peer solidarity, and digital networks (Cover, 2016; Gray, 2009). These practices reveal both the precarity and the creativity of transgender youth: health is risked in pursuit of authenticity, but risk is navigated through inventive configurations of available resources.

Digital Media, Fandom, and Gender Identity

Digital media has emerged as a central site where young people negotiate questions of sexuality and gender, especially in contexts where institutional pathways remain absent or hostile. Online spaces provide access to information, opportunities for identity experimentation, and communities of recognition that counteract isolation (boyd, 2014; Gray, 2009). For LGBTQ youth in particular, digital platforms supply anonymity, peer validation, and affective belonging (Craig & McInroy, 2014; DeHaan et al., 2013).

Within this digital terrain, fandom cultures, especially those linked to anime, manga, and other erciyuan forms, offer distinctive resources for reimagining gender and sexuality. Fan fiction, cosplay, and creative online production create what some scholars call “identity playgrounds,” spaces where alternative selves can be rehearsed and tested (Galbraith, 2019; Lavrentyeva et al., 2025; McLelland, 2006). These cultural practices blur boundaries between fantasy and embodiment, enabling explorations of gendered possibilities otherwise stigmatized or foreclosed in offline contexts (Lamerichs, 2018). In East Asia, the prominence of yaoi and boys’ love fandoms has been noted as particularly influential for queer and transgender youth, offering aesthetic vocabularies and community infrastructures (Baudinette, 2021; McLelland et al., 2015). Circulating transnationally through translations and fan subtitling, these works make available narratives of gender fluidity and non-normative desire to audiences in restrictive environments (Ng, 2017).

These engagements are amplified by social media platforms, which mediate fandom participation and facilitate the formation of affective publics (Papacharissi, 2015). For Chinese youth, platforms such as Weibo, Bilibili, and Xiaohongshu have become pivotal not only for fandom-related content but also for semi-anonymous discussions of bodily transformation, desire, and emotional struggle (Tan, 2023). In these spaces, recognition circulates less through rational discourse than through affective gestures, creating forms of digital intimacy that function as vital scaffolding for marginalized identities (Cho, 2018). Importantly, recognition sometimes arises not from intentional outreach but from the “unexpected audiences” of seemingly private posts, transforming records of personal experience into sources of solidarity.

Taken together, these studies underscore that digital media and fandom are not peripheral diversions but central infrastructures for identity formation. They furnish vocabularies, esthetics, and solidarities that substitute for absent institutional supports, while simultaneously producing new vulnerabilities through the normalization of risky practices or the volatility of digital platforms.

The Chinese Context

While global research demonstrates how transgender youth improvise survival in constrained environments, the Chinese context presents a distinctive configuration of systemic barriers and digital openings. Comprehensive sex education remains largely absent in schools, and public discussions of sexuality and gender are stigmatized, leaving young people with minimal access to reliable medical or psychological knowledge (L. Li et al., 2009; Liu et al., 2023). Transgender youth often rely instead on fragmented information acquired through peers, online forums, or subcultural spaces (Engebretsen, 2013). Medical gatekeeping further compounds this absence: access to gender-affirming care typically requires psychiatric certification and parental consent, conditions that render such care nearly unattainable for minors (Bernotaite et al., 2018). Even where specialized clinics exist, such as Beijing’s Peking University Third Hospital or the Anding/Beijing Hui Long Guan Hospital, the scarcity of appointments and concentration in major cities exclude most adolescents.

Public discourse continues to frame non-normative gender and sexual identities as pathological or foreign influences (I. Y. Wang & Chan, 2024), reinforcing cultural silence. At the same time, digital censorship constrains visibility, with LGBTQ-related keywords and discussions frequently removed from mainstream platforms (Ai et al., 2023; Y. Wang & Tan, 2023). Yet these very restrictions have paradoxically intensified the role of alternative digital spaces. Xiaohongshu and fandom-driven ACG (anime, comics, games) subcultures function as surrogate sites of sex education and community for youth excluded from institutional supports (Guo & Evans, 2020). Within these spaces, self-identified transfeminine adolescents exchange practical knowledge about hormones, share personal experiences, and cultivate solidarity (Kong, 2024; E. J. Li, 2024). Many also describe daily fears of parental discovery, hiding pills in drawers or cosmetic containers, worrying about “炸柜” (parents searching their belongings, or parents are aware of their identity or their true gender perception), which underscores how family authority permeates even the most intimate practices of self-care.

These practices are not merely biomedical but also social and political. For many adolescents, clandestine hormone acquisition and online exchanges embody acts of resistance against medical paternalism and cultural erasure (Chiang, 2017; Hildebrandt, 2013), even as they expose youth to misinformation, predation, and health risks. The Chinese case thus exemplifies how global patterns of transgender self-care are refracted through local systems of censorship, stigma, and subcultural creativity. It reveals a configuration in which digital intimacy and embodied experimentation are not secondary phenomena but central mechanisms through which young people negotiate recognition and survival.

Confused Gender Identity in a Restrictive Environment

For participants in this study, confusion surrounding gender identity was not an individual crisis of self-understanding but a collective condition produced by silence and restriction. That silence was enforced simultaneously by parents who framed gender nonconformity as shameful (Engebretsen, 2013), by schools that reduced sexuality to reproduction and treated any discussion of desire as taboo (Liu, 2022), and by a broader political environment where public discourse on LGBTQ issues was tightly censored (Bao, 2018; Shaw & Zhang, 2018). In such a context, what young people lacked was not only professional guidance or medical support, but also the basic cultural vocabulary through which they could make sense of difference. Confusion, therefore, cannot be reduced to adolescent uncertainty; it is a structural condition of growing up in an environment where gender diversity is deliberately erased from everyday language and institutions (Zheng, 2015).

A 17-year-old participant described how this erasure shaped her adolescence:

At school, it’s only grades, grades, grades. Teachers tell us never to ‘think about sex,’ as if it’s shameful. Biology was just about sperm and eggs, no words for people like me. When I realized I didn’t feel like the other boys, I didn’t know what to call it. At home, if I watch anime with girly characters, my father snaps at me: ‘Don’t be disgusting.’ So how could I ever tell them? I secretly bought pills online after reading posts on Xiaohongshu, but half the time I didn’t know the dosage. Sometimes I had to stop because I had no money, and my body just went back to how it was. Online was the only place I dared to admit anything.

Several participants emphasized the precarious tactics they developed to conceal hormone use from parents. Pills were hidden in schoolbags or at the back of drawers, creating constant anxiety that a sudden inspection, what one youth called “the fear of my mom opening the cabinet,” would expose their secret. This highlights how parental authority extended into the material organization of domestic space (Yan, 2009), producing a regime of surveillance that rendered even the act of storing medication precarious.

Such practices were less about experimentation for its own sake than about survival under constraint. One sixteen-year-old recalled her first sense of recognition not through family or school but through a manga character who changed gender. Reading the story gave her a fleeting sense of identification, but also deepened her uncertainty:

I don’t know if I’m really trans or just pretending. Without trying, I feel stuck in a body that isn’t mine.

Recognition thus arrived through fleeting images, only to be immediately undermined by everyday environments that offered no affirmation (Tan, 2016).

Placed in a generational perspective, the experiences of these adolescents diverged sharply from earlier queer cohorts in China who sometimes found recognition through NGOs, activist circles, or university networks (Kam, 2013; Rofel, 2007). For Generation Z, such institutions are absent or inaccessible, and recognition is mediated instead by algorithmic fragments, anime esthetics, comment threads, and online medical tips that appear and disappear within heavily surveilled digital environments (Shi, 2025). One older transfeminine interlocutor reflected that youth today “at least know earlier what they want, but they also face earlier the fear of being caught by parents.” This suggests that precarity itself has been generationally reconfigured: accelerated access to information has not alleviated structural barriers, but rather intensified the contradictions of adolescent embodiment under surveillance.

Ultimately, the yaoniang phenomenon reveals that gender identity is not discovered in isolation but actively produced through the struggle against systemic erasure. Confusion here should not be dismissed as immaturity; it must be understood as an epistemological condition created by restrictive structures, one that nevertheless gives rise to fragile but meaningful forms of selfhood.

The Role of Erciyuan and Fandom Culture

For many participants, erciyuan, the worlds of anime, manga, and related fan practices, was not just a form of entertainment but the first cultural space in which a livable self could be imagined (Galbraith, 2011; McLelland, 2006). Unlike families and schools that reinforced silence, fandom provided vocabularies, esthetics, and practices through which adolescents could begin to articulate desires that otherwise had no name (Lamerichs, 2018; McLelland et al., 2015).

One eighteen-year-old recalled how anime became her first point of recognition:

I didn’t know words like ‘trans’ at first. I only knew that when I watched certain animes I would sit there and think, ‘that’s how I want to be.’ The characters, the way they move, the voices, everything made me feel something I couldn’t feel at school. I started drawing fan art. People liked it and called me pretty. That felt so different. On Xiaohongshu, I saw other kids posting about taking pills to get softer skin. Someone told me which pills worked for them, birth control, estradiol, and I copied. It felt like learning from friends, not doctors.

Here, fandom worked simultaneously as a cultural archive, a rehearsal stage, and an informal pedagogy (Zsila et al., 2018). Characters supplied imaginative blueprints for embodiment; fan art and cosplay enabled rehearsal in practice; and peer networks circulated practical knowledge, ranging from makeup techniques to hormone use (Galbraith, 2011; Lamerichs, 2018). A 16-year-old described cosplay explicitly as training:

Cosplay was like practice. I would put on a wig, do makeup, and for those two hours, I could walk like a girl. People left comments, and I felt accepted for once. The manga taught me how a girl acts on the panel; I tried to do that in front of the mirror. It made the idea of taking hormones make sense—if you want to look like that, you change your body, right? It’s complicated because I know these are fictional things, but they gave me a grammar for wanting and for trying.

These online engagements were not always undertaken as “sharing” in the conventional sense. Some participants described their Xiaohongshu posts as mere “records,” intended as private documentation, yet unexpectedly, these posts attracted comments and followers. This dynamic underscores how recognition in digital spaces often arrives unintentionally, reshaping practices of self-presentation and creating communities of unexpected intimacy (Cho, 2018; Papacharissi, 2015).

Such accounts show how fandom became an alternative infrastructure of recognition. Where schools and families imposed silence, it supplied a grammar of desire; where medical institutions remained inaccessible, it offered makeshift scripts for embodiment (Baudinette, 2021; Craig & McInroy, 2014). In Butler’s (1990) terms, erciyuan provided the citations necessary for gender performativity, enabling participants to rehearse femininity through repetition and re-signification until it became briefly inhabitable.

Yet the same affordances that opened possibilities also imposed constraints. Transnational anime esthetics expanded the field of imaginable embodiments but did so by privileging stylized templates, slender faces, delicate silhouettes, and ethereal femininities that were unattainable for many (Baudinette, 2021; Ng, 2017). These templates encouraged some adolescents to pursue risky shortcuts, such as unsupervised hormone use, revealing how the very scripts that enabled recognition could also translate desire into vulnerability.

The ambivalence of fandom extended into the forms of intimacy it fostered. On Xiaohongshu, peers exchanged tips on wigs, makeup, or pill concealment, creating what resembled surrogate kinship networks (Tan, 2023). In some cases, supportive mothers were drawn into these circuits, described by one participant as forming “mother-daughter” bonds that blurred biological and chosen kinship. At the same time, these exchanges normalized unsupervised hormone use and sometimes opened doors to exploitation, blurring solidarity with risk. Such contradictions resonate with Berlant’s (2011) concept of cruel optimism: the attachments that sustained survival also entangled youth in precarious dependencies, making recognition inseparable from exposure to harm.

Placed within a generational frame, reliance on fandom underscores a broader shift in queer recognition. Earlier cohorts of LGBTQ youth in China often turned to NGOs, activist networks, or campus-based communities (Engebretsen, 2013; Rofel, 2007). By contrast, Gen Z yaoniang encountered transgender possibilities through global anime esthetics and platform-mediated publics, where identity formation was less supported by institutions than shaped by algorithms, censorship, and transnational cultural flows (Shaw & Zhang, 2018; Shi, 2025).

From a Foucauldian perspective, these dynamics reveal power’s paradoxical productivity (Foucault, 1978). By foreclosing formal recognition and restricting access to healthcare, the state indirectly pushed youth into informal circuits where aesthetic scripts substituted for professional guidance. These circuits enabled creativity and survival, but also exposed participants to instability, censorship, and embodied risk (Hildebrandt, 2013).

In sum, erciyuan and fandom culture were not escapist diversions but generative infrastructures through which yaoniang could imagine, rehearse, and temporarily inhabit alternative selves. They functioned as spaces of teaching, staging, and validation, even as they imposed stylized constraints and generated vulnerabilities. For these adolescents, fandom was both possibility and peril—an indispensable yet precarious condition of growing up amid systemic silence.

Digital Intimacy and Community on Xiaohongshu

If erciyuan offered the imaginative grammar of femininity, Xiaohongshu provided a different but equally crucial dimension of recognition: a fragile infrastructure for intimacy and community. For many participants, it was the first space where they felt able to post, record, and be acknowledged in ways entirely absent from family or school. Importantly, some participants emphasized that their posts were not intended as “sharing” but as “recording,” private acts of self-documentation. Yet these records often attracted unexpected attention, generating comments, followers, and unanticipated recognition. A 17-year-old recounted how uploading a simple selfie after experimenting with hormones prompted a comment, “so pretty, your skin is glowing,” that she had never heard offline. At home, she was called “disgusting” by her father; at school, she was derided as a “pervert.” Online, however, that fleeting affirmation allowed her to imagine herself as ordinary, even desirable. What mattered was not institutional validation or long-term acceptance, but the immediacy of affective exchange: likes, short comments, and reposts that briefly suspended the loneliness imposed elsewhere.

This affective circulation, however, was deeply ambivalent. Participants emphasized that the same space that offered solidarity also facilitated risk. Advice on concealing pills from parents, on purchasing contraceptives without prescriptions, or on using makeup to mask bodily transitions circulated alongside emotional support. These exchanges created what several described as “online families,” and in some cases, bonds extended into offline kinship. One participant described her mother as her “closest ally,” explaining that their relationship resembled a “mother-daughter partnership” that gave her confidence to continue hormone use despite school hostility. Yet such supportive figures were rare; more often, intimacy was mediated entirely through peers, leaving youth exposed to manipulation. A 16-year-old explained that after posting about hormones, she was contacted privately by an older stranger who initially offered advice but quickly demanded personal photos. She blocked the account, yet admitted she did not know where else to turn for guidance. In this way, intimacy online oscillated between sustenance and threat.

Beyond interpersonal risks, participants described the instability of the platform itself as a persistent source of anxiety. Posts about hormones or gender expression disappeared without warning, accounts were suspended, and entire threads that once offered crucial advice simply vanished. A 15-year-old reflected on returning to reread a discussion that had helped her, only to find it deleted: “I feel like my history is erased. Like we never existed.” For these youth, the fragility of digital archives was not an abstract problem but a direct negation of their presence. In Foucauldian terms, this points to how power not only prohibits but modulates, allowing certain exchanges to exist briefly, then withdrawing them, producing instability as a governing technique.

Placed in generational perspective, reliance on Xiaohongshu underscores how Gen Z yaoniang navigate recognition under uniquely digital conditions. Earlier cohorts of queer youth in China sometimes accessed solidarity through NGOs, student associations, or activist networks; in contrast, these adolescents build communities within platform-mediated publics that are algorithmically curated and politically fragile. Their intimacy is sustained through ephemeral gestures that can be deleted overnight, their belonging contingent upon moderation policies and shifting platform rules (Kam, 2013; Rofel, 2007). The result is a condition where survival depends on infrastructures that are simultaneously enabling and unstable. For participants, Xiaohongshu was not merely a social media app but a precarious lifeline: it offered the possibility of being seen, yet always under the shadow of disappearance.

Precarity and Survival Strategies

Economic scarcity was a constant undercurrent in participants’ narratives, shaping not only their access to hormones but also their broader sense of continuity in selfhood. A 17-year-old explained that with only 800 yuan a month from her parents, most of which was spent on food and transport, she often had no choice but to rely on contraceptive pills instead of medically prescribed hormones. Interruptions in access meant that her body cycled back and forth, undoing the fragile progress she had made: “It’s very painful, like all my effort disappears.”

Medical precarity was compounded by systemic barriers. Access to regulated transgender care in China remained highly restricted, often requiring psychiatric certification of “gender identity disorder” (yixingzheng) and parental consent. Even in cities like Beijing, only a handful of hospitals, including Peking University Third Hospital and Huilongguan, offered gender-affirming prescriptions, and the major costs were not the hormones themselves but the repeated blood tests and diagnostic evaluations. For adolescents with limited economic independence, these barriers effectively excluded them from formal medical pathways, pushing them further toward self-medication (Zheng, 2015).

The frustration of bodily reversal was compounded by the lure of unsafe alternatives. A few participants admitted to receiving offers of money from strangers online in exchange for companionship or sex, and although not all accepted, the very consideration of these offers reflected the pressure of economic precarity. One participant summarized the dilemma: “At school I feel trapped, at home I can’t talk, so when someone says they can help, even if it’s dangerous, it feels like a door opening.” For these adolescents, survival meant balancing on a knife’s edge where financial dependency and bodily aspiration collided (Engebretsen, 2013).

Precarity was not a backdrop to their lives but the very terrain upon which gender became negotiable. Participants described daily routines organized around concealment and improvisation, stashing pills in hidden containers, timing their intake when family members were asleep, or skipping doses to avoid detection. One 16-year-old, who kept pills hidden inside a shampoo bottle, captured this atmosphere of constant vigilance: “Sometimes I skipped doses because I was scared my parents would hear. It made my body unstable, but what else could I do?” Survival, in this sense, was not the pursuit of stability but the management of instability, a choreography of concealment carried out in bedrooms and bathrooms under the threat of parental discovery.

Within this fragile environment, young people developed what might be called esthetic survival strategies. Makeup, cosplay, and skincare were not treated as trivial hobbies but as protective practices that temporarily stabilized a sense of self. A 15-year-old described makeup as “armor,” explaining that even if classmates mocked her, posting a carefully styled image online proved that she could embody something different, and that proof gave her strength. Here, Butler’s notion of performativity helps to clarify how repetition, the daily application of makeup, the repeated poses before a mirror, and the circulation of selfies, did more than mimic femininity; it constituted gendered possibilities under constraint (Rofel, 2007). Yet the repetition was itself precarious, undermined by economic limits, parental scrutiny, and the risk of online erasure (Kam, 2013).

Berlant’s (2011) concept of “cruel optimism” illuminates the paradox of these attachments. Adolescents clung to fragile strategies, self-administering hormones without guidance, imitating anime heroines, cultivating digital recognition, not because they were naive, but because such attachments were the only ones available to make life feel possible (Bao, 2018). The very objects that sustained them also generated new vulnerabilities: medical risks from unregulated pills, unattainable aesthetic ideals, and exploitative exchanges fostered by financial dependence. Optimism was inseparable from its cruelty, and survival meant inhabiting this contradiction on a daily basis.

Yet even within these precarious conditions, resilience was evident. Improvised tactics, storing pills in secret, sharing knowledge in online threads, and turning cosplay into practice, demonstrated small but significant refusals to disappear. They revealed that yaoniang were not passive victims of neglect but active agents crafting livable selves within hostile environments. Their agency was fragile, constrained, and often risky, but nonetheless real. Viewed in a generational perspective, these strategies also marked a departure from earlier queer cohorts in China who sometimes relied on NGOs or university networks. Today’s adolescents face thinner institutional support and stricter digital governance, forcing them to invent strategies that emerged at the intersection of global cultural flows and local regimes of silence.

In this light, precarity was not simply the condition under which they lived, but the very framework through which survival became imaginable. Their tactics, clandestine, improvised, provisional, testify both to systemic abandonment and to creative endurance. To theorize yaoniang is thus to recognize that precarity is not the opposite of agency but its condition of possibility: survival here is always risky, always unstable, yet insistently enacted.

Precarious Performativity

The findings complicate Butler’s (1990) concept of performativity, which is often understood as the iterative citation of gender norms in social settings where such norms are at least partially intelligible. In this study, however, participants expressed femininity through fragments that were neither institutionally recognized nor socially sanctioned: anime templates, disappearing posts, filtered images, or passing affirmations in comment threads. These gestures did not consolidate a socially legible identity; they rehearsed a possibility whose existence remained structurally disavowed.

Performativity, therefore, operates not as the stabilization of a recognizable norm, but as the production of fleeting and fragile moments of intelligibility. These moments were sustained only within unstable circuits of recognition that could disappear without warning. This dynamic points to what may be termed precarious performativity (Puar, 2007): a mode of citation in which gendered becoming is continuously enacted but never securely grounded. Rather than reproducing dominant scripts, participants assembled femininity from dispersed and ephemeral signs. Their repetition did not reaffirm normativity; it only temporarily interrupted its absence.

Managed Opacity

The case of yaoniang also calls for a reconsideration of Foucault’s biopolitics. Conventional readings emphasize biopower’s role in producing legible subjects through classification, normalization, and surveillance. Yet participants in this study encountered a different modality of power. Instead of being incorporated into systems of recognition, they faced deliberate unintelligibility: the absence of gender vocabulary in schools, limited access to medical classification without psychiatric certification, and erasure in digital spaces.

Here, power operates not through inclusion, but through managed opacity. Adolescents are rendered unnameable within institutional systems and rely instead on clandestine pharmacologies, peer-to-peer exchanges, and fragmented online knowledge. Biopolitics here concerns not only the regulation of visible life, but also the administration of invisibility. The state does not simply refuse recognition; it shapes environments where recognition becomes unspeakable, unrecordable, and unsafe. This marks a shift from a biopolitics of normalization to one of illegibility, where silence and denial themselves function as techniques of governance.

Precarious Mediated Intimacy

The data further extend Baym’s (2010) concept of mediated intimacy. While Baym highlights how closeness and attachment are cultivated through technologically mediated interaction, the yaoniang case shows a more precarious and unstable form of such intimacy. Relational connection did not accumulate through ongoing communication. It emerged instead through brief encounters: a single supportive comment, an anonymous message offering advice, or a momentary validation of one’s femininity.

These interactions were not supplementary to offline relationships. For many participants, they replaced relational infrastructures that were otherwise inaccessible. In this sense, mediated intimacy was not simply digitally shaped; it was structurally necessary. Digital platforms operated as surrogate spaces of recognition and care, compensating for exclusion in familial, educational, and medical settings.

Yet this intimacy was continually threatened. Alongside affirmation, participants encountered misinformation, predatory behavior, and the constant possibility of surveillance or deletion. Each instance of recognition was shadowed by the risk of disappearance. This tension resonates with Berlant’s (2011) notion of cruel optimism, though in a different register: the attachment lay not in a distant fantasy of flourishing but in the fragile possibility of present recognition. What becomes “cruel” is not deferred aspiration but the fact that survival depends on infrastructures that are fundamentally unstable.

Mediated intimacy thus does not stand apart from precarity; it is closely entangled with it. It sustains life while exposing participants to new forms of vulnerability, surveillance, and erasure.

Ephemeral Mediated Publics

Papacharissi’s (2015) concept of affective publics helps explain how Xiaohongshu communities are organized through emotion rather than deliberation. Yet viewed alongside Baym’s emphasis on intimate mediation, these formations are not simply publics animated by affect. They are relations constituted through mediated intimacy.

Participants described belonging formed through shared feelings, mutual recognition, and emotional resonance. At the same time, they encountered vanished posts, suspended accounts, and inaccessible comment chains. These erasures were experienced not merely as technical inconvenience but as the disappearance of social presence and remembered self. Digital space did not function as an archive; it became a terrain where memory could be withdrawn without warning.

This dynamic suggests the emergence of ephemeral mediated publics: collectivities that exist momentarily through intimacy, yet lack durability, continuity, and protection. Unlike traditional publics whose power rests in visibility and accumulation, these formations are defined by fragility and interruption. They produce moments of belonging without the possibility of permanence. For yaoniang, intimacy had to be continually reassembled under conditions of algorithmic unpredictability and political constraint.

Generational Precarity and the Acceleration of Exposure

The study also shows a generational reconfiguration of precarity. Earlier queer cohorts in China often sought recognition through NGOs, student groups, or semi-public activist networks. Gen Z participants, by contrast, encountered transgender vocabularies and imagery at a much earlier age, predominantly online. Yet early exposure coincided with intensified parental control, platform monitoring, and moral regulation.

Greater access to information did not reduce vulnerability. Instead, it accelerated exposure to adult knowledge, risk practices, and social conflict without institutional or familial support. Recognition arrived prematurely and without protection. Temporal acceleration thus becomes a mode of governance: young people are made aware without being enabled, visible without being legitimized, and informed without being cared for. A generational lens is therefore essential to understanding how precarity is reproduced and intensified.

Study Limitations and Implications for Interpretation

While this study provides insight into a marginalized and difficult-to-reach population, several limitations remain. The relatively small sample and reliance on participants able to engage online may underrepresent adolescents who are more isolated, less digitally connected, or more closely monitored. As a result, the data may emphasize mediated forms of connection while understating the extent of isolation for others.

Second, participants were recruited primarily through digital platforms, which foregrounds online experiences and constrains access to offline contexts such as family, school, and community. The study should therefore be read primarily as an account of digitally mediated subjectivity rather than a comprehensive depiction of all dimensions of yaoniang life.

Third, because unsupervised hormone use among minors is sensitive and in some cases illegal, participants may have withheld details. Yet the consistency of patterns across interviews and their resonance with existing research suggest that these dynamics are not isolated anomalies.

These limitations do not undermine the validity of the findings. Rather, they reflect the structural invisibility that forms part of the phenomenon itself. The challenges of access and representation reveal the same zones of illegibility that this study seeks to analyze and are therefore analytically significant rather than fatal flaws. Future research may expand through longer-term ethnographic engagement, the inclusion of participants with limited digital access, and, where ethically feasible, perspectives from parents, educators, and healthcare providers to further triangulate interpretations of risk, care, and recognition.