Vulnerable and afraid, a 16-year-old boy sat on the floor of his home in rural eastern China and tried to hack off his genitals with a scalpel, an act of desperation against a body he did not want.

Too scared to talk to family in a society that still classifies transgender people as having a “mental illness”, instead he attempted surgery on himself after watching online tutorials of the procedure. He wasn’t able to go through with it and stopped after the first painful cut – but he didn’t go to the hospital or tell anyone what he had done.

Now aged 23, that boy identifies as Alice, and concedes it was a dangerous, potentially fatal, move.

“I was desperate and scared,” Alice said, adding: “It was this feeling in my stomach that I had to get it over and done with.”

In China, where no official numbers of transgender people exist, there are few medical facilities that offer gender reassignment surgery and little professional information on hormone treatment, forcing people to turn to the black market or online.

People are unable to have gender-reassignment surgery without the legal consent of their families, and many are reluctant to discuss the issue with their family – for fear of being ostracised or disowned. Read more via South China Morning Post