LGBT communities on both sides of the Taiwan Strait are facing similar challenges, said a Taiwanese volunteer who went to China to campaign against “sexual orientation therapies.”
The volunteer, a Kaohsiung graduate student nicknamed “GT,” went to Shanghai earlier this month to participate in Lovers, a performance art project headed by Chinese artist Wu Laobai (武老白) that opposes so-called therapies in China that attempt to change the sexual orientation of gay men and lesbians to heterosexuality.
In China, homosexuality stopped being defined as a disease with the 2001 third edition of the Chinese Classification of Mental Disorders (CCMD), an official publication of the Chinese Medical Association.
Screengrab from Chinese artist Wu Laobai’s Weibo account
However, the publication retained a purported illness called “the disorder of sexual orientation,” and medical institutes in China still perform so-called “sexual orientation conversion therapies,” GT said.
To call the public’s attention to the problem, Lovers rented three cargo trucks with slogans emblazoned on the sides — “You’re curing an illness that does not exist,” “The CCMD still has sexual orientation disorder,” and “It has been 19 years: why?” — and drove them by medical institutes in eight cities that continue the “therapies,” said GT, who was in Shanghai when the project was launched on Jan. 11 and 12.
China’s LGBT community has little freedom to speak up for itself in a conservative society, and public ignorance about gender diversity has led to discrimination against LGBT people, GT said, adding that discrimination against homosexuality is also widespread in Taiwan.
“We are just helping each other move on the same path toward gender equality,” he said, adding that he believes the Lovers campaign has started to raise public awareness in China.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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