39-year-old man arrested after pretending to be a woman for 20 years

A 39-year-old man in Ningbo city in Zhejiang province has been detained for abusing drugs and giving police false information by pretending to be a woman for 20 years, the Qiangjiang Evening News reported.

Local policemen raided an apartment on Thursday and detained two people, one of whom told them he was female.

But policemen learned after examing the person’s identification card that he was a man from Zhoushan, another city in Zhejiang province, who had pretended to be a woman and working at a local factory for two decades, fooling his boss and co-workers about his sex.

According to the man’s boss, the person surnamed Jiang appeared to be a shy and quiet teenage girl when he came to apply for a job 20 years ago. The boss said that everyone at the factory assumed the man was a woman as she said she was, because she looked and sounded like one.

He said he always thought the person might be hiding his true identity, but did not want to pry as that was a private matter. “But she’s hard-working, gentle and quiet. So I never ask for her [identification card],” the boss was quoted as saying.

The man told the police he had wanted to be a woman since he was a child and had a strong fascination with the female characters of local Yueju Opera.