"Sorry, wrong alcove."

From a review of Wang Shuo's Please Don't Call Me Human:

The novel is replete with elements of political farce. Sometimes the mocking of Party culture, biting references to the Beijing literary scene and Chinese history come so thick and fast that it is nearly impossible to disentangle them all. One particularly pointed incident occurs, for example, when the Central Competition Committee decides Yuanbao needs to undergo political indoctrination. Their hopes are soon frustrated when they discover there are no study groups left in the city—this is a reference to the decay of the Maoist-style study sessions during the 1980s. Finally, a covert underground Party cell—the last group of bona fide Communists to be found in the city—is discovered and Yuanbao is duly sent along. But as the cell members discuss the corruption of the bureaucracy, the need for workers' rights and another revolution becomes evident that they are Trotskyites. The episode concludes with them all being dragged off by men in white coats who claim the politicos are actually lunatics who have escaped from an asylum.

. . . Another one of the main themes of the story is the eventual castration of the hero. This happens when the leadership learns that changes to the competition rules mean that only women can go to Sapporo. Having been declared to be the nation's Number One He-man, Yuanbo is now put under the knife, a cruel irony for a man who, through his victory at an international competition, was supposed to bear witness to the virility of his motherland. Readers of the novel would have immediately appreciated the reference to popular self-mocking critiques of China an emasculated land full of impotent individuals.

He'd never get past Olympic officials, not even with a Faulknerian story like that. Of course, the whole trick of the NYT coverage of Olympic gender testing is in this paragraph on Hermann "Dora" Ratjen, S/He of the Munich Games:

A quick look at the reality of an athlete’s life ought to settle the question. Ratjen was male not because of what was in his genes, but because of who he was. He returned to his life as Hermann after the Berlin Games. “For three years I lived the life of a girl,” he said in 1957. “It was most dull.”

Of course a man would think so.