November 2024

See More Short Films!: New Voices in Taiwanese Short Film at the Women Make Waves International Film Festival

Michelle Chow
Last month, Taipei’s SPOT-Huashan theater was home to the Women Make Waves International Film Festival. First held in 1993, the Women Make Waves festival has now completed its 31st edition–about the same age as Lumi. Over the course of ten days, the festival showed more than a hundred screenings, organized by the Taiwan Women’s Film Association around the theme of “Spacing.” Interpreted by the festival’s chairperson Joyce Tang as 缝隙 (gap, or fissure), this theme was explored with breadth and nuance through the curatorial team’s selection of films, which sounded the complex terrains of war, work, sex, gender, and national identity...
Arts and CultureEnglishFilm and TelevisionNovember 202411 min read

Taiwan Sees Rise in Anti-Gender Discourse Online

Yo-Ling Chen
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’ 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 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...
EnglishGender/SexualityNovember 2024Social Movements12 min read