by Rachel Kronick
Being transgender is tough, but being transgender in Taiwan, where I am, is even harder. Taiwan has a culture which gives little room for self-expression or even self-respect, and allows even less to transgender people.
Taiwan is not really Chinese, though it does share a lot of the cultural mores of China. Some of these include a very strong sense of the division between male and female, and a very different type of moral system than we usually see in the West.
In the US, a person is worth something regardless of their relationship to you. Even if you don’t know someone, you owe them respect as a person. Of course, people don’t always accomplish this, but this is the ideal. In Taiwan, though, the ideal is quite different. In Taiwan, the degree of respect you owe to a person is almost entirely dependent upon the person’s relationship to you. If they’re your grandfather, you owe them more respect than just about anyone else. If they’re a friend, you owe them an entirely different kind of respect, and a different amount. If they’re someone you don’t know, you don’t owe them respect at all, at least not necessarily.
I’m always amused by government ads in Taiwan which try to promote such things as traffic laws or obeying building codes. They often try to show people that doing so will benefit others, and they’re always at pains to demonstrate that doing so will benefit our own selves. However, the proof always seems strained, and I get the feeling that they are struggling uphill. Taiwanese people in general do not feel a need to take strangers into consideration, so much so that I sometimes wonder if they understand other people as people at all.
Another example which comes to mind is the simple example of walking on the sidewalk. Due to the vast amounts of motorscooters, streetside vendors and poorly constructed buildings, the sidewalks are severely limited in size – often only a foot or two wide, even on major streets. To make matters worse, Taiwanese people walking on the sidewalk simply do not take other pedestrians into mind while walking. They meander, hold bags across the entire sidewalk, hold hands and walk abreast with their four-person family even when the sidewalk is narrow, etc. etc. This kind of behavior in New York, for example, would result in either being forced out of the way or a fight or something else. However, Taiwanese people take this as normal, which it is in their culture, and accept it.
In the West, training oneself not to care about others is a pragmatic necessity, but it is not an ideal in any way, at least not in my experience. If you say, “Group X is the object of violence, but they always will be because they are inherently weird and different from the rest of us,” people will label you Machiavellian. This kind of thinking goes on all the time, of course, and is necessary in a world with limited resources and limited time to think about others. However, this kind of thinking is not idealized in the West.
In Taiwan, though, this kind of thinking is the cultural norm. To put someone off to the side of one’s thinking because they are not closely related – in order to pay more attention to the closest relations in one’s life – is the Confucian ideal. Though many Taiwanese people would say that Confucius was a humorless blowhard, they are in fact laboring under his systems and even supporting them.
One of the best examples of how people are pushed off to the side is transgender folks. There is a common myth in the West that Asia is a land of mystery where transgendered people are accepted far more than they are in the West. Many people in the US, for example, seem to imagine some sort of enlightened Shangri-La where transgendered people are seen through enlightened eyes. This is far, far from the truth, though.
Transgender people in Taiwan are accepted in one small way: when they keep to their socially-prescribed niche, and do not try to break out of it in any way – in other words, when they allow themselves to be the objects of disrespect from the culture at large. They are allowed to be club performers or hostesses, but if they try to gain true acceptance or equality, the culture at large quickly labels them freaks and walks away.
Of course, this is not purely a problem experienced by Taiwanese people. Handicapped people, non-Chinese citizens (did you even know there are aborigines in Taiwan?), gay and lesbian folks, women – there are so many groups in Taiwan who are so far from any kind of equality.
But the kind of oppression experienced by transgender people in specific is so strong, so massive, it’s hard to even express it. In Taiwan, it is of course completely legal to fire someone for such things as being transgender or being gay. Even protecting the rights of pregnant women is still far away. Naturally enough, the consciousness of the society at large is far from focused on the harms visited upon TG folks. . . .
Robert Kosilek, en route to the county jail following his arraignment on drunken driving charges in New Rochelle, N.Y., 1990. Right: Robert J. Kosilek, now known as Michelle, is seen in this file photo taken in a New Bedford, Mass. courthouse, 1993. (CBS/AP)
