Taiwan Women’s Association

Li Kotomi Comes Out as Transgender After Being Outed by Taiwan’s Anti-Gender Movement

Yesterday evening on Transgender Day of Remembrance, 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. Shortly after, Taiwan Tongzhi Hotline Association issued a statement in support of Li. 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...

Taiwan Sees Rise in Anti-Gender Discourse Online

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...

Taiwan’s Anti-Gender Movement Engages in Research Misconduct, Mistranslation, and Misinformation

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. ...