by Yo-Ling Chen

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Photo Courtesy of TAPCPR

OCTOBER WAS ESPECIALLY difficult for Taiwan’s transgender community, as a wave of anti-gender discourse flooded social media as a result of Taiwan Alliance to Promote Civil Partnership Rights’ (TAPCPR) strategic litigation plaintiff Lisbeth Wu finally changing her legal gender without providing proof of sexual organ removal surgery on October 8th. Wu’s case challenging compulsory surgery for legal gender change was initiated on Transgender Day of Remembrance, 2020 and finally received a favorable ruling by the Taipei High Administrative Court (THAC) ruling on August 26th earlier this year. Before this court case, TAPCPR began representing Wu in 2018 for her then lawsuit against Chang Gung University for refusing to house her in women’s dormitories, which she won on June 25, 2021.

Given Wu’s status as TAPCPR’s highest profile strategic litigation plaintiff for transgender rights since 2018, it is unsurprising that the conclusion to her legal battles would receive such immense backlash from anti-gender groups.

Photograph of Lisbeth Wu posing with her old and new National Identification Card. Photo courtesy of TAPCPR

Indeed, multiple factors have contributed to increased tensions and organization amongst Taiwan’s anti-gender movement this year, which came to a head last month. For starters, following the joint mobilization of the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) and Taiwan Women’s Association (TWA) last winter for the 2024 elections, anti-gender groups in Taiwan appear to be more coordinated than before. For instance, the Taiwan Parents Protect Women and Children Association (TPPWCA), TWA, TSU, and No Self ID Taiwan simultaneously mobilized in May and June to voice dissent to the Executive Yuan’s Department of Human Rights and Transitional Justice’s comprehensive anti-discrimination draft legislation, which included “gender identity” under its protections. Around the same time following a visit to the UK in April, a new anti-gender group, LGB Alliance Taiwan, was founded in late June and then was immediately featured on No Self ID Taiwan’s podcast in early July.

2024 also saw tensions building within Taiwan’s anti-gender movement as a total of six court rulings against compulsory surgery were made by the THAC in late May and mid July, by the Kaohsiung High Administrative Court (KHAC) in mid-July, again by the THAC in mid August (though only a partial victory that ultimately defended the necessity of medical intervention and/or psychiatric evaluation) and on Lisbeth Wu’s case in late August, and finally by the KHAC in late September for a less publicized case represented by Shou-Yan Law Firm’s Chih-Yuan Shih (施志遠) and Wei-Chung Shen (申惟中).

Following TAPCPR’s publicization of Lisbeth Wu’s legal gender change on October 8th, social media erupted with public discourse criticizing efforts to abolish the surgery requirement for legal gender change, which included ridiculing transgender people who wish to retain their fertility, a Taiwanese PhD student in Comparative Literature at Purdue University named Ching-Jen Sun (孫慶禎) joining the uproar by recycling reductionist arguments that “gender identity” was the sole invention of John Money’s nefarious experiment on David Reimer, and TWA publishing a Chinese translation of the Cass Review’s abstract in an attempt to discredit the use of puberty blockers for transgender minors.

In addition to expected statements issued by anti-gender movement organizations such as TSU, No Self ID Taiwan, LGB Alliance Taiwan, and TPPWCA, the Taiwan Statebuilding Party (TSP), a self-proclaimed progressive Taiwanese independence party, surprised many by issuing a statement against abolishing compulsory surgery on October 18th. This statement, which argued that “cisgender biological women” should be able to “not have to see male external genitalia” in female-only spaces, came despite TSP politician Hsin-tai Wu (吳欣岱) having previously supported abolishing compulsory surgery for legal gender change in July of 2022. Wu called for “more dialogue” on the eve of TSP’s announcement. Currently, TSU and TSP are the only two political parties that have explicitly made opposition to abolishing compulsory surgery part of their respective party platforms.

Ahead of Germany’s gender self identification law going into effect on November 1st, No Self ID Taiwan issued an open letter to German Institute Taipei (Germany’s unofficial embassy in Taiwan) on October 23rd requesting a response addressing their concerns with the potential impact of gender self-identification. German Institute Taipei did not publicly respond. Following their participation in Taiwan LGBT+ Pride on October 26th, LGB Alliance Taiwan also staged a small-scale protest outside of German Institute Taipei on November 1st against gender self-identification alongside No Self ID Taiwan.

Screenshot of No Self ID Taiwan post of November 1st protest

For now, the rise in anti-gender discourse online this past month has abated. However, with Donald Trump’s recent presidential election victory in the US and the catastrophic likelihood of rollbacks on LGBTQ+ rights, the possibility of impending anti-trans developments in the US having more of an influence on Taiwan’s anti-gender movement opens wider.

In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s election victory, TSU praised the US election results as evidence of the ultimate failure of “progressive values” in the face of “traditional, conservative values,” building off of an earlier statement that lamented abolishing the surgery requirement for legal gender change under the US’s past four-years of “leftist governance.” TPPWCA was more explicit in their election statement, which claimed that one reason for Trump’s victory was his hardline stance on transgender issues and advised political parties in Taiwan to learn from the US election results that people have had enough of “the political correctness of the left.”

Taiwan Solidarity Union press release praising Donald Trump’s election victory

While anti-gender movement personnel in Taiwan span the political spectrum, Trump’s right-wing populism and targeting of “transgender insanity” resonates deeply with the populist affect and rhetorical strategies undergirding Taiwan’s anti-gender movement. The extent to which connections between anti-gender mobilizations in the US and Taiwan will materialize in the near future remains to be seen.

Financial Disclosure

This article was made possible by grant funding from the Transgender Educational Network: Theory in Action for Creativity, Liberation, Empowerment, and Service (TEN:TACLES) Initiative for the Transpacific Taiwan Transgender Studies (3TS) Research Collective.

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