A substitute teacher in Tainan said she was investigated by the city’s Bureau of Education for going topless during a parade in support of gay marriage in Kaohsiung last month.
The teacher, Cheng Min (鄭敏), said on Facebook that it was Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Tainan City Councilor Wang Chia-chen (王家貞) who pressed the bureau to launch the investigation.
Cheng, 24, who works at the Tainan Municipal Dongshan Junior High School, said that she felt stressed by the investigation.
The probe could infringe on teachers’ rights to take part in social movements when they are off-duty, and it could affect schools’ willingness to hire teachers known to have participated in social movements, she wrote on Facebook on Monday.
“As a substitute teacher and a citizen, I was fulfilling my duty to care about society by engaging in social movements in my off-hours,” she wrote.
“I sometimes use my experience in social movements as teaching materials, so my students can grasp the pulse of society,” she said.
Cheng, a supporter of the global Free the Nipple movement, said that she was topless at the parade because she wanted society to stop judging women’s bodies and stop treating female breasts as erotic symbols.
“From comments made by Internet users to the female form portrayed by the media, one can tell that Taiwanese society has a narrow view on the aesthetics of the human body,” she said.
“Students’ questions are answered in my classes… I also encourage them to think about whether the remarks they had made about their peers’ bodies have hurt them or were discriminatory,” Cheng said.
“Some people told me that teenage boys can be sexually aroused by women’s breasts, so it is inappropriate to expose them, but we must consider why we always assume that teenage boys become aroused by women’s breasts. Are breasts only good for satisfying people’s sexual fantasies?” she wrote.
Netizens took to Wang’s Facebook page to criticize her shortly after Cheng posted the statement.
Wang issued a statement saying that she had asked the Tainan Bureau of Education to investigate whether Cheng had actually gone topless, because some constituency voters had taken issue with Cheng’s behavior.
Wang said that the information gathered would be used to question Tainan officials at the city council, accusing netizens criticizing her of “cyberbullying.”
Bureau chief secretary Chiang Ming-chuan (蔣銘娟) said that her agency contacted the school to gather information about Cheng at the request of a city councilor, to ascertain whether Cheng works in Tainan.
The bureau was not planning to take further action against Cheng, she said.
TAIWAN IS TAIWAN: US Representative Tom Tiffany said the amendment was not controversial, as ‘Taiwan is not — nor has it ever been — part of Communist China’ The US House of Representatives on Friday passed an amendment banning the US Department of Defense from creating, buying or displaying any map that shows Taiwan as part of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The “Honest Maps” amendment was approved in a voice vote on Friday as part of the Department of Defense Appropriations Act for the 2026 fiscal year. The amendment prohibits using any funds from the act to create, buy or display maps that show Taiwan, Kinmen, Matsu, Penghu, Wuciou (烏坵), Green Island (綠島) or Orchid Island (Lanyu, 蘭嶼) as part of the PRC. The act includes US$831.5 billion in
The paramount chief of a volcanic island in Vanuatu yesterday said that he was “very impressed” by a UN court’s declaration that countries must tackle climate change. Vanuatu spearheaded the legal case at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, which on Wednesday ruled that countries have a duty to protect against the threat of a warming planet. “I’m very impressed,” George Bumseng, the top chief of the Pacific archipelago’s island of Ambrym, told reporters in the capital, Port Vila. “We have been waiting for this decision for a long time because we have been victims of this climate change for
Taiwan is hosting the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL) for the first time, welcoming more than 400 young linguists from 43 nations to National Taiwan University (NTU). Deputy Minister of Education Chu Chun-chang (朱俊彰) said at the opening ceremony yesterday that language passes down knowledge and culture, and influences the way humankind thinks and understands the world. Taiwan is a multicultural and multilingual nation, with Mandarin Chinese, Taiwanese, Hakka, 16 indigenous languages and Taiwan Sign Language all used, Chu said. In addition, Taiwan promotes multilingual education, emphasizes the cultural significance of languages and supports the international mother language movement, he said. Taiwan has long participated
Taiwan must invest in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics to keep abreast of the next technological leap toward automation, Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) said at the luanch ceremony of Taiwan AI and Robots Alliance yesterday. The world is on the cusp of a new industrial revolution centered on AI and robotics, which would likely lead to a thorough transformation of human society, she told an event marking the establishment of a national AI and robotics alliance in Taipei. The arrival of the next industrial revolution could be a matter of years, she said. The pace of automation in the global economy can
RSS