Living with a transgender, sexologist Li Yinhe denies she is lesbian  

性学家李银河回应“拉拉”身份曝光：这不是出柜

Well-known Chinese sexologist Li Yinhe. (File photo: Chinanews.com)

(ECNS) -- Well-known Chinese sexologist Li Yinhe has said via her blog that she is indeed heterosexual and that the partner she has been living with for 17 years is transgender, Beijing News reported.

This statement refutes an article called "Li Yinhe is a Lesbian", which claimed the widow of Wang Xiaobo, a famous Chinese author, has been living with a middle-aged woman for more than 10 years.

The article also claimed that Li deceives Chinese lesbians by standing up for sexual minority rights while deliberately keeping her homosexual identity from the public.

Li explains that "Lesbians are physiologically women who self-identify as women and love lesbian women, while transgender persons who are physiologically women, identify as men and love heterosexual women."

She added that her emphasis in describing herself as heterosexual simply states a fact and doesn't imply that she, as a heterosexual person, is in any way more normal or morally better than homosexual people.

"Love is never about social class, age, wealth or poverty, beauty or ugliness or even sex," argues Li.

She and her partner now live with their adopted son, Zhuangzhuang, a mentally disabled child who was abandoned by his biological parents.