Kuan Shih Yin means one who hears the cries of the world - the living expression of loving compassion; the one who will come to your aid' the one who offers a caring aspect to the otherwise somewhat remote world with its scales of merit and demerit, its hells and rebirths, its retributions and consequences in life and beyond. He will break the cycle of rebirth, of punishment and of retribution.
As early as the fifth century, Kuan Shih Yin was always depicted as a man, albeit one very slight and graceful of form and visage. Many of the forms of Kuan Yin were clearly male, though somewhat androgynous. In all the early translations of the Lotus Sutra, Kuan Shih Yin is indisputably male. While it is recognized within the text that he is capable of taking a female form, this is not considered his main form. His is clearly male in the prodigious records of Hsuan Tsang (c596-664) throughout China and India and in such texts as the Cheng Ming Ching, which dates to the end of the seventh century. He is also clearly male in the Surangama Sutra which was first produced in AD 705 in Chinese. By the mid to late ninth century, Kuan Yin was now usually considered and depicted as female.
So, something happened during that time to turn Kuan Yin from a male into a female figure. The female Kuan Yin's roots lie not in the heartlands of historic China, but on the northwest frontier, on the Silk Road. This is where numerous cultures met and interacted. The male cult of Kuan Yin had already penetrated as a result of the dissemination of the Lotus Sutra, but the distinctive female forms only began to fan out extensively from the northwest in the ninth to tenth centuries.
Our humble guess is that the warrior cults could not deal with the feminine image for any man so man took it upon themselves to change Kuan Yin from a male to female form - probably due to an early case of homophobia. We choose to recognize Kuan Yin in his original form, before men became afraid of holding the feminine aspects of themselves as equal to the masculine aspects. All of the aspects that were within Kuan Yin are aspects every man is born with. Whether they allow those aspects to show depends on the cultural decisions that value or devalue all inherent aspects of an individual, and the individual's determination not to devalue themselves but subscribing to culturally accepted ways of being.
We believe that homophobia has been around for a long, long time, and this is an example from some 15 centuries ago.