White-Necked Crow: the 10th century polyamorous transmasc commander of a bandit army

Xe was not trying to pass as cis, and the Liao dynasty appointed xem General of Huaihua

Hey readers, you’ve already met the transmasc general White-Necked Crow briefly in last year’s post Records of trans masculine people in the 10th c. Taiping Guangji. This year, we delve deeper into the biography of this fascinating character.

The following passage about White-Necked Crow (Baixiangya) appears in “Conversations in the Jade Hall” (Yutang Xianhua), a widely circulated collection of anecdotes compiled by Wang Renyu[i] (880-956), a civil servant whose career spanned 4 decades. Most of the histories and rumors recorded in “Conversations in the Jade Hall” were drawn from the personal experiences of the author or came from eyewitness accounts recorded by the author. Wang Renyu and White-Necked Crow (Baixiangya) were contemporaries.