Original Text
In the town of Mudu in Suzhou, there was a family with a daughter who sat in the courtyard one night when suddenly a falling star descended and struck her on the head, causing her to collapse dead. Her parents, elderly and without sons, having only this daughter, wept and cried out as they tried to revive her. After a short while, the girl revived and said with a smile, "I have now become a man!" Upon examination, it was indeed so. Her parents did not consider this strange but instead secretly rejoiced at suddenly gaining a son. How truly extraordinary this was. This also occurred during the year of Dinghai.
Commentary
In ancient times, there were no sex-change surgeries, and what was referred to as men transforming into women or women into men likely involved the gender reassignment of so-called hermaphrodites. In ancient China, due to the preference for males over females, tales of women turning into men were far more common than those of men turning into women. Wang Yuyang, a contemporary of Pu Songling, also recorded an instance of a woman turning into a man in his work "Chibei Outan: Tan Yi Wu," stating, "In the autumn of the Ding Si year, there was also a fifteen-year-old girl from Zhuanglang who transformed into a man."
Judging from the phrase "also an event of the Dinghai year," this piece and the preceding tale "Summer Snow" should have been composed around the same time.