Yo-Ling Chenby Yo-Ling Chen
語言:
English
Photo Credit: Li Kotomi/Facebook
YESTERDAY EVENING ON Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR), critically acclaimed Taiwanese fiction writer Li Kotomi reluctantly issued a public statement disclosing her transgender status after years of being outed, harassed, and doxxed online by anti-gender accounts in Taiwan. In addition to her personal TDOR statement, Li also co-organized a “Statement by Authors in Japan Opposing LGBTQ+ Discrimination,” which was signed by 51 novelists in Japan and was released earlier in the day. Li’s public response to her outing comes in the wake of yet another surge in anti-gender discourse online and draws attention to the increasingly transnational character of anti-gender mobilizations in Taiwan.
Born in Taiwan speaking Chinese as her first language, Li moved to Japan in 2013 at the age of 23 and began writing fiction in Japanese, her second language, a few years later. In 2017, Li published her award-winning debut novel, Solo Dance (独り舞), a semi-autobiographical lesbian coming of age story that Li herself translated into Chinese in 2019. In 2021, Li was the first Taiwanese writer to win the Akutagawa Prize (芥川龍之介賞), one of Japan’s highest literary awards, for her novel The Island Where Red Spider Lilies Bloom (彼岸花が咲く島).
Photo of Li Kotomi (second from the left) from Li’s Facebook.
Li gained a high degree of publicity in Taiwan after winning the Akutagawa Prize, which coincided with the emergence of Taiwan’s anti-gender movement after an historic ruling by the Taipei High Administrative Court (THAC) in favor of a transgender plaintiff appealing to change her legal gender from male to female without providing proof of sexual organ removal surgery. As Li writes in her TDOR statement: “With the sudden rise in recognition from winning the Akutagawa Prize, I became an easy target. A group of anti-trans bullies began outing me on multiple social media platforms (violating my privacy) and engaging in verbal sexual harassment, slander, and defamation.” [1]
Li names one such harasser in her TDOR statement: an agender nonbinary woman who goes by the pseudonym Xiang Xiang (翔翔) online. According to Li, for over two years, Xiang Xiang has continuously posted on social media that Li is “the shame of Taiwanese people” (台灣人之恥), “a man disguising himself as a woman” (假扮成女人的男人) who “mansplains” (男性說教) and “enjoys harassing women” (喜歡騷擾女人). Li also writes that Xiang Xiang has baselessly accused her of being a “pro-PRC Taiwanese person” (親中共台灣人) who “licks the shoe of the PRC” (舔中共鞋子).
According to Genevieve Gluck, co-founder of independent anti-gender news platform Reduxx, Xiang Xiang wrote in a now-deleted tweet from March of 2022 that “Li … writes lesbian literature as a woman … He is clearly a man … Since he is a man, entering a girls’ high school would have been impossible, so how did he create a semi-autobiographical novel [with this theme]?.” Gluck writes that Xiang Xiang’s comments centered on Li’s debut novel, Solo Dance, since it is rumored that Li did not attend a girls’ high school. Gluck also asserts that “Li has filed defamation claims against at least nine individuals within the past two years for making comments and social media posts referring to him as a male.” According to Xiang Xiang, Li began pursuing legal action against her in 2021.
Li shares that she originally pressed criminal charges against Xiang Xiang; however the prosecutor declared Xiang Xiang’s misgendering of Li, violation of her privacy, and insults and slander towards her to be “free speech.” Li went on to pursue a civil lawsuit against Xiang Xiang for damages incurred through “defamation and breach of personal data protection” in the amount of $2,280,000 NTD (~$70,000 USD).
Li had been completely stealth for over a decade since moving to Japan in 2013. In her TDOR statement, Li laments that as a result of the online harassment and being outed, she has suffered from insomnia, vomiting, dizziness, depression, heart palpitations, tremors, loss of appetite, and anxiety. When the Chinese translation of her Akutagawa Prize winning novel was published with much acclaim in 2022, Li did not return to Taiwan to promote her book due to her deteriorating mental health.
Product photo of the Chinese self-translation of Li Kotomi’s novel, The Island Where Red Spider Lilies Bloom. Photo from Fembooks.
Citing the cases of a Hitotsubashi University student killing himself in 2015 due to being outed as gay and the suicide of Hana Kimura after being bullied online, Li writes: “These two incidents provoked enormous public uproar and caused Japan’s judicial system to take more seriously the harms of online bullying. I have thought more than once: Is it because Taiwan has not had a celebrity suicide due to being outed or bullied online that Taiwan’s judicial system fails to take the harm of these actions seriously? Shall I be the first case?”
Multiple anti-gender groups in Taiwan have rallied behind the defendants that Li has taken to court for defamation, slander, harassment, and violations of privacy. On July 1st of this year, Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) party chair Chou Ni-an (周倪安) accompanied an anonymous defendant in one of Li’s civil lawsuits for a court hearing at the Taiwan New Taipei District Court as a way of expressing dissent towards what Chou described as the “ideology of ‘gender freedom identification’” (「性別自由認定」意識型態). TSU was the first political party in Taiwan to (unsuccessfully) run on an anti-gender platform in the 2024 legislative elections. When Xiang Xiang began fundraising for Li’s lawsuit against her in October of this year, Taiwan’s most active anti-gender movement organization, No Self ID Taiwan, as well as the newer anti-gender organization, Taiwan Women’s Association, both boosted her fundraising efforts.
Photo of Chou Ni-an (right) accompanying an anonymous defendant (left) to court. Source: TSU’s Facebook.
In her TDOR statement, Li correctly claims that Xiang Xiang has the support of “conservative, political party (through TSU’s Chou Ni-an), and foreign powers” vis a vis Genevieve Gluck’s contributions to Li’s outing and online harassment by publishing a Reduxx exclusive on Li’s lawsuits that discloses without consent all of Li’s former and current legal names and pen names. In the immediate aftermath of Li’s statement yesterday, TSU retweeted their July 1st press release, suggesting that the anonymous defendant they accompanied was indeed Xiang Xiang. Taiwan’s anti-gender organizations, as well as anti-gender movement platforms abroad such as Reduxx, have converged on Li’s lawsuits in an attempt to frame her as an aggressor who is, in the words of Xiang Xiang, “attempting to silence women protesting injustice.”
“If I continue persisting in protecting my secret and never come out,” Li writes, “I will be unable to speak for myself and fight back against these bullies.” “Either I die early with my secret,” she continues, “or I can publicly come out and explain everything to the public.”
Li repeatedly emphasizes in her TDOR statement that she never wanted to publicly come out. It is only in the face of repeated outing and online harassment by anti-gender personnel in Taiwan that she has been forced to disclose her transgender status. Immediately after Li released her statement, Taiwan Tongzhi Hotline Association also released a statement in support of Li emphasizing the serious harm that violating one’s privacy through outing entails. Other LGBTQIA+ organizations in Taiwan are expected to release statements in support of Li as well in the coming days.
Towards the end of the English version of her TDOR statement, Li discloses that she has already spent the equivalent of $22,800 USD on litigation against transphobic harassment and requests financial support, as “[m]ore expenses will undoubtedly follow.” Given Li’s high profile in both Japan and Taiwan, it is likely that anti-gender groups across these two locations will continue to harass her. Since releasing her statement, Li has already been subject to further insults and even death messages. Readers can donate to Li’s PayPal here.
[1] While Li released a ChatGPT English translation of the Japanese version of her TDOR statement, all direct quotes (unless otherwise specified) are the author’s own translations from the Chinese version of Li’s TDOR statement.