Chuanyue novels, or time-travel fantasies, have been popular in China for years.

In that time, the genre has explored a number of scenarios, from a modern girl who is transported into the body of a beautiful woman in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) and gets involved in palace politics, in the end becoming a queen, to a man from the past who time-travels to the present and becomes a major playboy, romancing a string of women.

A very niche sub-genre of time-travel stories that has become popular is gender switching, in which a woman is beamed into a man's body or a man into a woman's. The most popular TV drama of this ilk at the moment is Go Princess Go (2015), in which a man from the present is sent back in time and finds himself in the body of a prince's wife.

This recently got me thinking - what must it be like to experience the world in the opposite gender's body?

Talking about it with my girlfriends, I discovered that peeing standing up, sex and masturbation were the things they were most curious about. Later, a male friend told me he wanted to put on dresses and makeup and see how it felt.

In addition to exploring a different body, I would also like to help my female friends, who are both pretty and successful, figure out why the hell they are still single. I would share everything on my mind with them and we would work out why some men are such puzzling creatures.

Though gender-switching time-travel offers an interesting thought experiment, it can be dangerous as well in terms of how we think about gender and sexuality.

It might seem like harmless daydreaming, but let's explore the implications of these stories. For example, when a novel forces a straight man into a woman's body and makes him somehow fall in love with his "husband," that sends the message that sexuality is defined by biology… not to mention the fact that it's a totally creepy way of catering to readers' twisted voyeuristic tendencies. I don't have a problem with the messed-up, fake history in these novels, but I do think we should be aware of what the popularity of this sub-genre says about us as consumers, and of what it implies about gender and sexuality, especially as we think about breaking down discrimination against the LGBT community.

This article was published on the Global Times Metropolitan section Two Cents page, a space for reader submissions, including opinion, humor and satire. The ideas expressed are those of the author alone, and do not represent the position of the Global Times.