Groups opposed to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights have in the past few months been collecting signatures for a referendum proposal against same-sex marriage and education on LGBT issues.
The Central Election Commission on Wednesday last week held a hearing on the proposal against what the groups have called “gay and lesbian education.”
The proposal poses the question: “Do you agree that gay and lesbian education should not be applied to underage children at elementary and junior-high school?”
However, some clarification on what the groups mean by “gay and lesbian education” might be in order.
At a news conference announcing the groups’ referendum proposal, participants held signs saying: “What constitutes age-appropriate education is for the populace as a whole to decide.”
Is the referendum to be about age-appropriate education or outright opposition to education on LGBT issues? The proposal’s question is clearly concerned with the latter, but in the news conference, the groups talked about “age-appropriate education.”
Are people supposed to understand from this that they equate age-appropriate education and the wholesale rejection of education concerning LGBT issues? This is confusing, to say the least, and disingenuously so.
When people talk of age-appropriate education, they refer to how to teach certain subject matter to students of different ages. The “age-appropriate education” the groups were advocating entails the complete removal of any vestige of LGBT issues from the curriculum, as if to tell students that homosexuality and gender issues simply do not exist. This is not just anti-LGBT, it is also anti-knowledge: It certainly has nothing to do with being age-appropriate.
The phrase “gay and lesbian education” cannot be found in the core legislation of the Gender Equity Education Act (性別平等教育法), although Article 2 clearly defines gender equity education as one designed to “generate respect for gender diversity, eliminate gender discrimination and promote substantive gender equality through education.”
Despite the groups insisting that there are only two genders — male and female — the law has long acknowledged the existence of gender diversity and emphasizes social equality with the concept of gender at its core. By extension, those who reject gender diversity are, I am afraid, precisely the kind of people that the aforementioned law is supposed to reform.
However, the phrase “gay and lesbian education” appears in Article 13 of the Enforcement Rules for the Gender Equity Education Act (性別平等教育法施行細則), which states that “the curriculum related to gender equity education ... shall cover courses on affective education, sex education, and gay and lesbian education in order to enhance students’ gender equity consciousness.”
According to this, the goal of gay and lesbian education is to improve students’ awareness of gender equity, by teaching them about the existence and experiences of gay and lesbian people, allowing heterosexual students to understand the difficulties that gay people go through.
This would enable students of a minority sexual persuasion to have a safe school environment and would give them a chance to develop into confident adults.
As to how to teach LGBT issues as part of the gender equity education curriculum, and what the specifics of the materials should be, that can be debated based on academic studies. Current gender equity education might not be perfect, but this does not mean that gay and lesbian issues should be removed from the curriculum.
From the perspective of the educators, it is difficult to imagine how one might go about teaching students to have an awareness of gender equity while refusing to discuss the experiences of gender minorities or what has been discovered through LGBT research, as if there were no such thing as a gay person. Yet this is exactly what the referendum these groups are proposing seeks to do.
It is not just the aforementioned law that acknowledges the existence of homosexuality: The Ministry of Health and Welfare last month officially announced a ban on sexual orientation conversion therapy, and acknowledged that homosexuality is not an illness and that it does not need to be treated.
By extension, what needs to change is the way that society, the government and the law approaches homosexuality; people should not be asking gay and lesbian people to change their sexual orientation, and they certainly should not be opposing debate on LGBT issues in the education system.
Last year, through a constitutional interpretation on marriage equality, the Council of Grand Justices emphasized the equal rights of gay and lesbian people guaranteed in the Constitution. The council presented three comments in the reasoning for the interpretation, citing many rulings, studies and documents from professional bodies, saying that “sexual orientation is an immutable characteristic that is resistant to change.”
Still, due to long-standing structural and systemic inequality for sexual minorities, LGBT people have become politically repressed.
The council also advocated that any differential treatment based upon sexual orientation should be subject to the most stringent review, to ensure that is does not violate equal rights as guaranteed in the Constitution. Given this, any demand by the anti-LGBT rights groups that gay and lesbian issues be excluded from the national curriculum are in clear violation of constitutionally guaranteed equal rights.
The election commission should act in accordance with the council’s constitutional interpretation and carry out a stringent review to protect constitutionally guaranteed equal rights and, in line with the stipulations of the Referendum Act (公民投票法), reject discriminatory and anti-constitutional referendum proposals.
Jiang Ho-ching is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at American University in Washington.
Translated by Lin Lee-kai and Paul Cooper
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