Yo-Ling Chen

In recent months, Taiwan’s anti-gender movement has engaged in a research misconduct and misinformation campaign to push specious claims about “general population attitudes” towards transgender rights through the facade of academic objectivity. In the wake of the Taipei High Administrative Court’s second ruling against compulsory surgery for changing one’s legal gender on May 30th, anti-gender movement actors such as No-Self ID Taiwan, Twitter account @memetranspolicy, and US expat co-founder of Taiwan Women’s Association Jaclynn Joyce all published or shared articles referencing “an online questionnaire survey” conducted by “scholars working at various universities across Taiwan” that “sought to understand the general public’s views on self-identification, meaning surgery-free change of legal sex,” which was “published in the academic journal Archives of Sexual Behavior.” Citations to this research article were made to argue that “more than 90% of Taiwanese people strongly oppose changing someone’s legal sex without so-called sex reassignment surgery.” Further investigation into this research article revealed a plethora of research misconduct, mistranslation, and misinformation issues, which begs into question how such an article was published in a peer-reviewed academic journal in the first place. ...