A source-critical guide that decomposes “first” claims in mainland China’s transgender medical history into procedure scope, geography, institution, publicity, administrative effect, event time, and source role, comparing the 1983 Zhang Kesha surgery, regional surgery histories of the 1990s, marriage registration in 2003, Geng Zi’s public identity in 2005–2006, and national technical rules from 2009 to 2022.

A historical case study tracing Liu Ting from national attention for caring for her ill mother in 2005, through recognition as a National Moral Model for filial devotion in 2007, public transition in 2014–2015, a 2015 pageant, and the university’s continuing filial-piety fund in 2016. It proposes public-credential carryover and archival inertia as two tools for reading continuity across changes in name and gender framing.

A research encyclopedia entry treating the 2017 Chinese Transgender Population General Survey as knowledge infrastructure, tracing its online recruitment, the path from 5,677 submissions to 2,060 valid questionnaires, later academic reanalysis, and comparison with the 2021 survey, with an evidence-infrastructure chain and number-provenance ledger.

This research map organizes public transgender history in mainland China into seven intersecting paths—medicine, identity documents, work and courts, community infrastructure, public language, documentary regimes, and digital preservation—and introduces a historical conversion chain plus a source-switch method for reproducible reading.

A research encyclopedia entry tracing legal gender recognition in mainland China through household registration, resident identity cards, gender appraisal, local public-security procedures, and downstream institutional records, with an original document-cascade model.

A historical map of organizational carriers, service networks, medical referral, community knowledge, and digital preservation in mainland Chinese transgender advocacy from 1995 to 2025.

Using hospital records, media narratives, administrative rules, community hotlines, litigation and surveys, and digital archives, this study reconstructs mainland China’s transgender public history through six documentary regimes and a reproducible source-card method.