Kim Bi was born in 1971 in Gyeonggi-do, South Korea. From a young age, she questioned her gender identity, and in 2000, she was reborn as a woman through sex reassignment surgery. That same year, she shared the process of her surgery in a TV documentary in an effort to break down prejudice against transgender people in Korea.
Her writing career began in 1997, when she published a short story, “His Age, Sixty-Four,” about older gay men, in the LGBT magazine Buddy. In 2007, she won a fiction award from the periodical Women’s Donga for her novel Plastic Woman. Her published works include Kim Bi: The Story of an Ugly Transgender (2000), The Likes of You and Me (2006), and Wear a Flower in Your Hair (2012).
