TBG and Po: Discourses on authentic desire in 2010s lesbian subcultures in Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan.

Across lesbian communities in Hong Kong, China (PRC), and Taiwan (ROC), a group of masculine-presenting, assigned-female-at-birth individuals have come to be known as tomboys. Their partners are often normatively-feminine women who are labeled po (wife) in the mandarin-speaking China and Taiwan and TBG ("TomBoy's Girl") in the former colony. Throughout the late twentieth century and the 2000s, po and TBG had been conceptualized as latent heterosexuals whose heterosexuality was "falsely" displaced onto the tomboy lover, and it was also widely suspected that these women would eventually return to their "true" heteronormative lives. On the other hand, the 2010s era also sees queer women in the three Chinese societies increasingly leaning towards doing away with tomboy, TBG, po and all kinds of sexual identity categories altogether. How has the decades-old image of the "falsely-desiring" TBG/po evolved in this context of postidentity politics? In what ways is TBG/po desire imagined to be "real" or "fake"? And how has the true/false framework itself been transformed by postcategory yearnings? This article traces the shifting discourses on "authentic desire" ascribed to TBG and po women by first examining two media texts popular in the three lesbian circles—Yes or No and Girls Love—and second by looking into how women in these circles interpret these texts.

Keywords: TBG; Po; tomboy; ueer femininity; ueer Asia; Chinese; esbian; dentity; ubjectivity; Hong Kong; China; Taiwan

At a tomboy bar in Taipei in the early 1990s, researcher Antonia Y. Chao ([4]) was interviewing a tomboy bar-goer. Chao soon learnt that tomboys were "said to be congenitally ch'uan-nei (literally "within-the-circle)," but their po partners were thought to be the opposite and needed to be "brought into" the circle through their relationships with tomboys (p. 48–49). About a decade later on the other side of the strait, Franco Lai ([15]) was observing the local lesbian scene in Hong Kong. "The identity formation of tomboy's girl depends on tomboy," Lai wrote in 2003, "if tomboy does not exist, the concept of tomboy's girl cannot be formed" (p. 2). Tomboys occupied a central and constitutional role in lesbian circles, as both researchers remarked, and the feminine partner was thought to be only an extension, an outsider who ought to be brought in through and defined by her tomboy partner.

TBG and po[1]—understood to be equivalents of one another in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China (where queer women have adopted the tomboy-po vernacular later on)—have long been conceptualized as figures who were only part of the community on a short-term basis. These women have been "seen as essentially heterosexual" by virtue of their femininity (Zheng, [32], p. 132 translation mine), and they were often imagined to be women destined to leave their tomboy lovers to reenter a heteronormative life trajectory (Martin, [20]). This image of a TBG/po leaving a tomboy for men remains powerful today, as indicated by twenty-five year old Miu, a recent college graduate from Guangzhou whom I interviewed in 2018. Miu explained that "there are many public WeChat posts, forum posts, group chats, and online articles where people talked about how pos would inevitably leave their tomboy lovers to marry men. [...] This is a very widespread belief." In addition to this decade-old narrative of TBG/po leaving tomboys for men, Miu added, "[People believe this] because there is a real chance that po is not accepting her identity as a sexual minority, or maybe she's ashamed." It appears that this discourse on TBG/po hinges not only on whether her relationship with the tomboy can stand the test of time, but also on whether she has come to accept her own desire through a process of self-identity formation.

Paradoxically, this decades-old narrative of "TBG/po leaving tomboys for men" also converges with a new trend. Since around 2010, queer women across the three Chinese circles have increasingly rejected tomboy and TBG/po labels altogether, with many now opting for a rejection of identity categories (sometimes including the word "lesbian" itself) in pursuit of what they seem as the most authentic expression of their sexual desire. At this conjunction between the short-term-and-falsely lesbian model and postidentity yearnings, how is TBG/po desire understood by members of the three Chinese lesbian circles as real or as false? I want to assure my readers that I am not suggesting that desire must either be true or false, and I am aware that this conceptual binary can be very reductive. Yet despite my own reservations, this in/authentic framework continues to underpin the discourses on TBG/po desire within my fieldwork; it is therefore imperative that I trace these shifting narratives of in/authentic TBG/po desire.

This article draws on three related methods to trace the discourses ascribed to the TBG/po figure: the first method uses a historical approach to better understand the discursive production of the TBG/po figure throughout the twentieth century; the second method examines themes and discourses emerging from two screen texts; and the third method discusses the multiple discourses arising from audience interpretations of the screen texts.

The two screen texts are (a) the Chinese web drama Girls Love (dir. Jackie Lee, [16]), which was streamed on the dating app LESDO in China and watched by Hongkongese and Taiwanese viewers on YouTube; and (b) Thai independent romantic comedy Yes or No (dir. Sarasawadee Wongsompetch, [28]), which was streamed on YouTube and Netflix in Hong Kong, YouTube and GagaOOLala in Taiwan, and on Bilibili in China. Despite the difference in genres and origins, the two were frequently referenced and discussed side-by-side by interviewees who were asked to give examples of fictional representations of TBG/po.[2] The two texts are selected for this article for this reason. At the same time, this cross-regional consumption of media texts is clearly reminiscent of the intra-regional Asian networks of sexual discourses and cultural products described in intra-regional queer Asian scholarship (Boellstorff, [3]; Johnson, Jackson, & Herdt, [12]; Martin, Jackson, McLelland, & Yue, [21]; Wilson, [27]; Yue, [30]).

For the third method, the data used were collected for a larger project, for which I have conducted individual and small group interviews with 40 non-heterosexual, assigned-female-at-birth informants from Hong Kong, Taipei, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou between July and November in 2018 (See Table 1 for participant characteristics). Ninety percent of the interviewees are university-educated and middle-class. Since it is impossible to collect data from all areas of China and Taiwan, Taipei and Shanghai were chosen for their thriving lesbian scenes, and Shenzhen and Guangzhou for their geographical proximities to Hong Kong. Respondents were recruited on dating app Butterfly (Hong Kong), PTT bulletin board (Taiwan), WeChat (China), and snowball sampling.

Table 1. Participants' characteristics.

Interviews were conducted face-to-face, audio-recorded and semi-structured. Respondents were given a list of prompts, in which they were asked to comment broadly on TBG/po and other identity labels by drawing on both fictional representations and real-life experiences. A plain-language statement explaining the purpose and procedures was also given ahead of the interview, and the project was approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee of the University of Melbourne.

In terms of coding and analysis, data were first transcribed and analyzed through provisional coding (in which anticipated categories generated from the historical overview and textual analysis were employed); a second cycle of pattern-coding was then applied to identify emergent theme or configuration. Baxter's ([2]) feminist poststructuralist discourse analysis was employed as the main analytical strategy. This approach conceptualizes discourses as performative social practices and this article likewise sees discourses about TBG/po as (a) iconographies that have real, material impacts and (b) as formulations of subject positions that are performed and enacted by the speakers (Baxter, [2]). Baxter also suggests that discursive data are polyphonic, and similarly this article considers the different discourses on TBG/po as competing and intertwining voices. In addition, this article also draws from research on queer Asian audiences (Baudinette, [1]; Li, [18]; Zhao, [31]).

To trace the discourses on TBG/po desire and queer authenticity, I refer back to the early-twentieth century Republic of China (1911–1949). During this era, Chinese intellectual elites began to read and translate European sexology into the Chinese language, and they subsequently adapted European sexologists' view that same-sex sexual behaviors are indicative of an inner sexuality (Chou, [6]; Hinsch, [10]; Xiaomingxiong, [29]). Xiaomingxiong and Hinsch in particular argued that indigenous Chinese society has historically held a tolerant attitude towards same-sex sex acts, and that this tolerance was tainted by Westernization in the process. Although I remain skeptical of their insistence on an indigenous tolerance, their research does show that during that period, homosexuality[3] came to be conceptualized in distinctively modern terms that were previously unavailable. And as I will show below, this was the period in which the notion of a real, ingrained, long-term lesbian sexuality was formed.

In the early-twentieth century, Havelock Ellis ([7]) was expanding on Richard von Krafft-Ebing ([14])'s theory of sexual inversion and applied it specifically to adolescent female homosexuality in The Psychology of Sex, which—as Tze-lan D. Sang would later find out—became extremely popular among Chinese intellectuals (Sang, [23], p. 99–126). According to Ellis and his Chinese translators (as cited in Sang), there are two kinds of lesbian desires that can be mapped onto two different life trajectories: the first kind is a situational homosexuality that normatively-feminine girls may fall prey to but will eventually "recover" from; the second kind is a real and congenital homosexuality, a permanent sexual deviance embodied by masculine-presenting, assigned-female-at-birth individuals. These two models were predecessors to TBG/po and tomboy (Martin, [20]).

The origins of po and tomboy can be traced back to 1960s Taipei. Because of Taipei's then status as a Rest-and-Recreation destination during the Second Indochina War, U.S.-style bars were opened all across the city and frequented by U.S. soldiers and locals alike. Among them were emergent gay bars that soon became the main sociocultural sites for masculine-presenting, assigned-female-at-birth locals. Having learnt the English word tomboy from U.S. soldiers, they soon started calling themselves tomboys, and their normative-feminine partner became known as their wives (po) (Chao, [4]; Zheng, [32]). A tomboy-bar scene later emerged throughout the 1980s and 1990s (Chao, [4]; Martin, [19]; Zheng, [32]), of which po were known as short-term members, as I noted at the beginning of the article. On the other side, Hong Kong's tomboy and TBG can be traced back to 1960s-1970s single-sex schools (Lai, [15]) and 1980s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) organizations (Chou, [6]), and it was similarly assumed that TBG occupied a subordinate position (Lai, [15]). Exactly how po and TBG crossed path and came to be understood as identical is unclear, but the similarity was identified by Taiwanese and Hongkongese lesbian activists themselves at a conference in 1999 (Wang, [26]). As of 1999, however, tomboy and po lexicons had yet to take root in China (Wang, [26]). Because of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and PRC's sanction of "masculinized" or androgynous femininity in the pre-Reform era, many mainland Chinese woman dressed similarly to Hongkongese and Taiwanese tomboys (Wang). This was soon changed with the introduction of the Internet in the early 2000s, which made Hongkongese and Taiwanese discourses on lesbianism accessible to mainland Chinese women who soon took up tomboy and po labels (Engebretsen, [8]; Kam, [13]).

The Republican-era narrative of the feminine women leaving tomboys for men can be identified in ethnographic accounts from 1980s Taipei (Chao, [5]), in popular Sinophone representations throughout the late twentieth century (Martin, [20]), and most recently in my 2018 interviews with respondents from Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan. Yet, there is something new in my data. Recall my interviewee Miu's claim that: "[Po leaving tomboy lovers for men] is a very widespread belief [...] because there is a real chance that po is not accepting her identity as a sexual minority, or maybe she's ashamed (emphasis mine)." What underpins both the temporal discourse (i.e. the idea that TBG/po desire for tomboy will not last) and the new emphasis on self-acceptance is a search for the truth of desire, the authenticity of desire. One can understand this new emphasis on self-acceptance (from Miu and my other respondents, as I will show in the final section) as an application of the coming-out model described in Ken Plummer's ([22]) Telling Sexual Stories. Plummer suggests that queer individuals generally adopt a form of narrative that sees the self "coming to terms" with one's own sexuality and subsequently coming out to others. In Miu's conceptualization, TBG/po has "failed" the very first stage of becoming a "real" queerly desiring subject.

Crucially, this non-affirmative-ness also coincides with, as I have noted, emergent postidentity politics. Though critiques of tomboy and TBG/po practices were already underway in 1990s Taiwan and Hong Kong (Gian, [9]; Wang, [26]; Zheng, [32]), my data suggest that rejection of and departure from tomboy and TBG/po only became widely popular across lesbian circles in the late 2000s and 2010s. In practice, this takes the form of the label H ("half-tomboy and half-po") or an outright refusal to use any label in China, as can be seen in Table 1 above. Similarly, in Hong Kong, the word pure now describes feminine woman who only date each other (rather than tomboys) exclusively, and the term no label is used by those who wish to reject all registers of sexual categories. Similar developments took place in Taiwan. In the 1990s, Taiwanese women adopted bufen ("undifferentiated") as a label to reject tomboy/po differentiation, and more recently the term has morphed into a rejection of all sexual categories (Hu, [11]).

Given these developments, I argue that within the three lesbian circles, feminine women who desire tomboys are now on one end conceptualized as (a) temporarily-homosexual and latently heterosexual, and (b) self-denying and/or failing to fully-accept their sexuality, and on the other end, they also become part of this new postidentity conversation. My main argument in this article is that these two sides actually converge into a singular discourse that is widely cited by the communities I have interviewed: the woman in question must prove that she is not the latently-heterosexual/self-denying figure for her to be seen as "authentic"—though the identity that she is supposedly embodying "authentically" is left open ended.

To explain my argument, I must first turn to the fictional characters my respondents cited as exemplary of real-life TBG/po. Both Girls Love and Yes or No are stories about normatively-feminine protagonists falling in love with tomboys. Though they are not explicitly referred to as TBG or po in the stories,[4] respondents often use these characters as archetypes to illustrate their ideas of "authentic" and "inauthentic" TBG/po desire. Before I can investigate these ideas further, I will first consider the texts themselves. My analysis of the film texts in this section follows two of the strands laid out in the historical overview above: the first deals with the temporality of TBG/po desire (i.e. reading the texts against the "TBG/po leaving tomboy for men" narrative), and the second strand is about the idea of self-acceptance (i.e. readings the manners in which the character "recognizes" her own desire). I will extend the second strand to postidentity readings at the end of this section and in subsequent sections.

The temporality of desire has long been a subject of investigation in studies on Sinophone lesbian-themed representations. In Backward Glances, Fran Martin ([20]) writes that the majority of female-female romances in fiction are presented as past loves. Often these stories begin by showing a normatively-feminine woman in her adulthood, and viewer soon learns that she has been unhappily married to her husband and is now reminiscing about a same-sex partner she loved in her youth (Martin). The romance is then told entirely in flashbacks (ibid). In the films where this former lover was a tomboy, the tomboy character would either fade out from the narrative or is made to disappear through an early death (Martin). Similarly, Helen Hok-Sze Leung ([17]) also notes in her analysis of same-sex love in adolescent schoolgirl films from Hong Kong that heterosexuality is often suggested to be the girls' inevitable destination. Though Leung did not explicitly link this "inevitably-heterosexual" narrative conclusion to self-acceptance of one's desire, both her and Yau Ching pointed out that filmic representations of lesbianism in Hong Kong have been characterized by "a failure in lesbian subject formations" (as cited in Leung, [17]). Here I argue that temporality and self-identity formation are intrinsically linked in the two texts cited by the viewers. Certainly, lesbian viewers from the three Chinese regions are familiar with the films Martin and Leung wrote about, and their choice in referencing Yes or No and Girls Love was itself an interesting development. Unlike the narrative structure identified in Martin's and Leung's researches, both Girls Love and Yes or No tell their love story entirely in the present. Heterosexual marriage is presented in these films not as an inevitable future but as one of several obstacles that the character will overcome in a journey of self-acceptance.

This journey of self-identity formation begins with the protagonist experiencing an intense attraction to the tomboy. Her sexual awakening is foregrounded at the start of both stories through the use of mise-en-scène. In Yes or No, the protagonist and university freshman Pie walks into her new dorm room and meets tomboy roommate Kim. Pie stops in her tracks and the film stills into slow motion. The viewer experiences—through the eyes of Pie—the feelings of love at first sight as Kim smiles towards Pie-the camera-the viewer (Figures 1–3). In a similar but noticeably more erotic fashion, Girls Love opens with an assortment of close-up shots of Mi Le (i.e. the tomboy character) in the shower (Figures 4–6), which are later revealed to be the voyeuristic gaze of the protagonist Xiao Rou—who also shares a dorm room with Mi Le. Xiao Rou soon experiences a sex dream with Mi Le (Figures 7 and 8). The filmic language here differs rather significantly from the po gaze identified in Martin's analysis of two earlier Sinophone lesbian films[5] (Martin, [20]). In those films, po's desire for tomboy is represented through a deviation from the shot-reverse-shot standard: when the po looks lovingly at the tomboy, the camera focuses on the po character only and barely shows the tomboy character herself. By contrast, Yes or No and Girls Love clearly encourage our identification with the TBG/po in her desire for the tomboy. Xiao Rou's near-euphoric reaction in the latter also creates a marked difference against the less-seductive tone of the former, and this is a difference I will come back to in the next section.

PHOTO (COLOR): Figure 1. Pie meets Kim in Yes or No.

PHOTO (COLOR): Figure 2. Kim turns to Pie in Yes or No.

PHOTO (COLOR): Figure 3. Pie stares at Kim in Yes or No.

PHOTO (COLOR): Figure 4. Close up of Mi Le in Girls Love.

PHOTO (COLOR): Figure 5. Close up of Mi Le in Girls Love.

PHOTO (COLOR): Figure 6. Xiao Rou observes Mi Le in the shower in Girls Love.

PHOTO (COLOR): Figure 7. Xiao Rou's sex dream in Girls Love.

PHOTO (COLOR): Figure 8. Xiao Rou's sex dream in Girls Love.

As the journey progresses, the protagonist is shown to be struggling to admit to herself her attraction to the tomboy. Each denies being drawn to the tomboy when confronted by schoolmates, and their interactions with the tomboy roommates are marked with both infatuation and hesitation. When Mi Le first kisses Xiao Rou, Xiao Rou is initially shocked and physically inert, but she eventually reciprocates (Figures 9 and 10). On the other end, Pie and Kim's first kiss is characterized by indecisions and pauses. In the preceding moments before the kiss, Pie makes several attempts to look away—before she eventually gives in (Figures 11 and 12).

PHOTO (COLOR): Figure 9. Mi Le kisses Xiao Rou in Girls Love.

PHOTO (COLOR): Figure 10. Mi Le kisses Xiao Rou in Girls Love.

PHOTO (COLOR): Figure 11. Pie looks away from Kim in Yes or No.

PHOTO (COLOR): Figure 12. Pie and Kim kiss in Yes or No.

This marks the first act of the journey of subject formation. Once the TBG/po has overcome the initial obstacle of her own hesitation, she is challenged with a second obstacle: both protagonists' families soon learn of the relationships (a malicious male suitor exposes Xiao Rou to her parents while a misunderstanding between Pie and Kim reveals their romance to Pie's mother). In both cases and in the films Martin analyzed, objection to the relationship from the TBG/po family come hand-in-hand with her family's attempt to pressure her into "returning" to heterosexuality (Martin). Yet, heterosexuality is not presented as an inevitable future in Girls Love and Yes or No (because of the present-day storytelling-mode) but as a family-sanctioned version of the future that the central character can defy. This is the second obstacle that the po character must overcome to prove the sincerity of her desire. Girls Love unfortunately ends at a cliffhanger without Xiao Rou confronting her family (though one can reasonably expect this confrontation should the series return). In Yes or No, Pie initially lets her own mother end her relationship with Kim but eventually professes her love to Kim in the film's final moments. As the two reunite, we hear a voiceover of Pie calling her mother to ask her for "a chance to prove that this love is real."

This TBG/po journey follows a familiar pattern of progression (i.e. from the initial experience of desire, to overcoming internal resistance and consummating that desire, to making that desire—and oneself—known). Indeed, this is exactly the coming out narrative sketched out by Plummer ([22]) I referenced earlier in this article. Yet, the TBG/po journey differs from the conventions of a coming out story in one significant way: neither Xiao Rou nor Pie comes out verbally to their families, nor is their "exact" sexuality stated to the viewers. As I will show next, this coming-out-without-a-sexual-identity story is where the three discourses (latent heterosexuality, self-acceptance, and the postidentity self) on TBG/po desire converge.

In 2018, I met with twenty-eight year old fundraising professional Hannah in Hong Kong. Hannah self-identifies as a tomboy, and much of our conversation revolved around how her TBG ex-girlfriend's parents objected to their relationship and forced their own daughter to leave Hannah. Her TBG ex-partner has soon started dating a male colleague to appease her own parents. "Because of what has happened with my ex's family," Hannah told me, "when I re-watched Yes or No recently [...] I was very upset." As Hannah continued her story, she had this sudden realization:

I just realized this as we were talking about stories with tomboy characters. In Yes or No [...] the tomboy characters all have their families' support. And I was like, huh! But it really is true [...] The TBG's family would think—and even I'd think this myself—that the TBG can still be saved. Because she is still someone who falls for a masculine person. But if you dress tomboy-like, you are falling for women with the mindset of a man, then you are much, much further away from possibly falling for a guy.

What is intriguing here is not only the obvious parallel Hannah draws between the film and her own experience, but also the association she draws between parental pressure and TBG/po's supposed latent heterosexuality. The underlying logic goes: the TBG/po has to be by nature prone to heterosexuality, and when her relationship with the tomboy is met with condemnation from her own family, she might give in and let herself be "saved" and return back to heterosexual life.

The same logic is spelt out more explicitly in the following quotation from thirty-two year old Leslie, who works as an administrative officer in Hong Kong and has recently taken up the no label identifier in place of TBG to describe herself:

For a lot of women—let's call them TBGs for simplicity's sake—if they are still gay after they've gone through their late twenties, then they are the real deal! It's all set in stone for them by then! Because there's so many temptations in your late twenties, you are more mature, all your friends are getting married [to men] and giving birth. If you can resist and survive those, you are a real deal! [...] You can really say that you are [one] for real.

Here again, TBG/po is imagined to have a "naturally" strong inclination towards heterosexual marriage, and it is through a self-mandated rejection of heterosexual marriage (that is presumed to be encouraged by one's own parents) that enables her to make a claim of authenticity ("You can really say that you are [one] for real"). From the same conversation, Leslie said this about Xiao Rou and Pie:

Mi Le [...] uses her most attractive side to grab your attention. And it makes it easier for you to accept it [...] [because] Mi Le's whole appearance is just like a guy! [...] So I don't think the TBG character is actually gay, most women like this are not. But I think, by the end, even though you can see that both Pie and Xiao Rou struggled, it's obvious that they are different. I think Pie really did genuinely fall for Kim. Because Kim wasn't using her looks, so Pie was in a lot of pain in the end [...] Because Pie was reminded of the fact that this person was in fact a girl. But Mi Le, I think sometimes she herself forgets that she is a woman, so Xiao Rou really just fell for an attractive, masculine looking person.

In the previous section I argued that the two texts are about the TBG/po women's coming-out journey through overcoming internal resistance and parental rejection. It is clear that Leslie recognizes the same self-affirming progression but sees Xiao Rou as failing the journey while Pie succeeded. What seems to distinguish the two is the overtly seductive tone in Girls Love: according to Leslie, the "desirability" of Mi Le (as highlighted in my analysis of the opening scene) actually "belies" Xiao Rou's "true" latent heterosexuality, while Pie's desire for Kim was true on account of her prolonged struggle.

Pain and suffering is a persistent theme among my respondents' description of the true desiring subject, even for those who did not enjoy the films. Thirty-four year old Jerry, a Shanghainese woman who occasionally socializes as a tomboy but says that she does not personally identify with any label, tells me that Yes or No "failed to deal with [serious] issues such as coming out and homophobia." This statement struck me as odd at the time as Pie did face homophobia (from schoolmates) and her relationship did become known. However, it later dawned on me that, for these viewers, the adversity of the scenario was not enough to warrant the character a "real" status as a queerly-desiring woman. Kit, a thirty-four year old Hongkongese retailer who replaced her tomboy identification with pure, said this about the films:

Yes or No, Girls Love [...] it's always a girl who is put in a single-sex dorm, and this girl will soon discover that she's sharing a room with a masculine [in English] lesbian! And the girl would be like, I can't accept this. And then, all of a sudden, she falls for her! There's like no internal struggle! [...] [Xiao Rou's journey] is more like a heterosexual girl getting curious [about lesbianism], it's not actually about her facing her own identity.

Though Kit's readings obviously diverge from Leslie's, their interpretations actually hinge on the same logic: the TBG/po must suffer when she comes to terms with her sexual feelings, and it is this painful internal journey that functions as the cornerstone of "real" subject formation, and without which she would be "merely" a temporarily-deviant, latent heterosexual.

It is now possible to see that the old latently-heterosexual TBG/po figure actually becomes the mirror-image of a woman whose desire for tomboy is imagined to be sincere, who has undergo an agonizing period of self-reflection before finally coming to accept her own desire. Most crucially, this "self-accepting" figure also coincides—and is actually consistent—with the emergent postidentity imagination of the self. Huang, a twenty-two year old college student from Taipei who uses bufen to reject all identity labels (including that of women and lesbian), said this about Pie:

Actually none of these [identity labels] really matter [...] To categorize people into men and women, tomboy and po, I'm getting sick of that [...] Pie, actually she never said that she was attracted to girls, or that she was attracted to guys, but she's very certain in just being like, I am in love with the person [Kim].

In this formulation, the absence of self-identity is precisely what transforms Pie into the "most authentic" agent of her feelings. Though not necessarily dependent on pain and suffering as the supposed markers of internal recognition, this reading also sees self-knowledge ("she's very certain in ...") as key to developing authentic sexual desires. Rather than being read as self-denying, this coming-out-without-a-sexual-identity story is celebrated here as the truest manner with which one shall come to embrace her sexual desires.

This article traces the ways in which discourses on queer authenticity within lesbian circles in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China have evolved over the post2000 era. Prior to this point in time, discourses on female homosexuality tended to presume a strong correlation between gender performance and the congenital-ness of queer desire. Under this framework, the normatively-feminine TBG/po was conceptualized as a woman who could only experience short-term attraction to tomboys before her inevitable return to conjugal heterosexuality. Over the last two decades, this conceptualization of TBG/po have been modified—but not erased—by emergent postidentity trends as well as discourses on self-knowledge. The new TBG/po imagination sees her as a woman who must actively come to terms with her same-sex desire and push against parental objections. Failing such a process would expose her "true" latent heterosexuality, according to this new conceptualization. This new discourse actually shares a fundamental assumption with its predecessor, that is, that some sexual desires are ingrained, unchanging, and truthful, while others are situational, short-term, and deceptive.

Along this line of thought that continues to privilege authentic/permanent sexuality over its supposed opposite (in a way that obviously fails to grasp other possibilities outside of such a binary), the new discourse does diverge from its precursor in one significant way. According to this new imagination, a TBG/po must suffer to know her true desire. The idea that one can only become an authentic sexual subject through gaining self-knowledge is actually in line with the concurrent direction towards postcategory self-identification. At the crossroad where these two discourses coincide, one is encouraged to know one's "true" sexual feelings and to not assign these feelings a "concrete" sexual label.

This idea that the true sexual self lies beyond the "restrictive" boundary of sexual categories was also identified in Ritch Savin-Williams' (2005) work on U.S. teen's sexual identifications in the 2000s. It seems reasonable then to speculate that this yearning is itself a globalized discourse, though this connection would have to be confirmed by further research. At the same time, the new Sinophone discourse identified in this article is undoubtedly conditioned by intra-regional flows. The comparative readings on the Thai film Yes or No and the Mandarin-speaking Girls Love—itself situated within overlapping lesbian networks in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China—speak to the need to theorize local sexualities not as isolated objects of study but as experiences that continuously draw upon intra-regional media representations and discourses.