 Taipei, Hong Kong, I'm sitting in, Traus here, and Jen sitting in Singapore, and we've got Flats sitting in Tokyo. So that, thank you very much for your time. Audrey talking to us today on many, many topics, or sharing on some sort of the identity issues. Just perhaps you have read of the Canadian actress or actor, Ellen Page and Elliot Page. We're so happy for someone who really like going out to be the real Kim Sao or herself. Yeah, I'm aware of the news, yes. Before we really kicked off. On the Polar, what would be the best in terms of in the Chinese community, or even in international communications, which Polar you would suggest us to use, like the day or, it doesn't matter at all. Yeah, my Twitter profile actually writes star slash star, which is the kind of internet protocol for whatever. And so you can't offend me, just literally whatever. Just for Audrey, lovely Audrey. So in the internet world, in Japan, you're really popular even though across the Chinese community, including ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia, Singapore, Malaysia, or the internet community, internet generation. We do admire you, even though the manga or the comic, the portrait in Japan is like a crazy show most of the time. So how do you say it? Do you like it in terms of that kind of character? Yeah, I offer myself including this recording. I mean, I usually publish under Creative Commons for the video. All the recordings including this one is going to be published under Creative Commons attribution, so long as the source is attributed. I'm happy to get remixed, and I do get remixed. So there's a rap band in Japan called Dos Monos just took one of those interviews and then made a rap song about the kind of civics and the civics sector, the social sector. I enroll in the interview not knowing at all that it will be made into a rap song, but it happened anyway. So it is, I guess, my pleasure that I get to witness. So many remixes, but it's just like the work is called Mona Lisa, but the artist is certainly not Mona Lisa. So I'm more like the title or the tagline of the work, but I do not identify as the author of the work, but I'm happy to be exposed to so many remixes. Yeah, it's been so nice seeing just like the Mona Lisa. I mean, at our work, we can see the smile at every single angle, 30 degrees, a flawless smile from you or people in our sector. Yeah, that's right. Another like some quick, ice-cream question. What is your favorite Japanese band since we've got like Japanese representatives here? What's your favorite music in Japan, the band, the mentoring? Sure, yeah, the favorite Japanese band. I guess I just mentioned Dos Monos. And they, I think, are very experimental, and I saw the MV of their remix of the civil rap song, and these are generated through AI, through what we call a generated adversary network on the visual field. And so I think this is pretty nice. And as for other cultural products, I guess I grew up reading the manga about the Doraemon, and still nowadays that is actually my kind of dominant model to think about AI. It's assistive intelligence to assist the protagonist instead of the terminator, which fortunately, I did not watch as a child, which is a more authoritarian intelligence. Yeah, I'm sure everyone at our generation loved Doraemon a lot. Even in Singapore, I'm sure I've seen it, huh? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, yeah. Yeah, I even cosplayed Doraemon in one of the clips like this, yeah. Yeah, yeah, the superb. So, yeah, not much I expected here, but final one. Yeah, we did a little bit research. You mentioned that we've been doing twice, probably. That's right. But I know, how did it come through to your mind at that point? Sure. So when I went through my first puberty around 13 years old, I noticed that I don't quite develop all the way, and that has been kind of a mystery. I attributed to my, I guess, the heart disease that's been with me since I was born until the surgery at 12, so maybe I told myself I'm still recovering from the surgery, but later on, in my early twins, I will get a test, and the doctor said to me that my testosterone level is naturally very low, similar to like a man of 80 years old or something, and that's even when I was just 20. And so that means that the development of hormonal development is somewhere between the kind of normal, whatever that means, of the two binary sexes. And so it got me interested in this whole hormonal business. And so at a time, I also understood that there's the hormonal replacement therapy options going on, and so I did some research and started HRT, which took place when I was 24, 25. And the second puberty, I did not have to take a lot of anti-testestinal, mostly just estrogen, and it did have an effect of the second development of the body, and again, it only went for a couple years, I guess, but it really enabled my brain to, I guess, feel the body in a very different lens, and so that's the two puberties. You're a biohacker. Uh-huh, I am, I am. Very much so, yeah. I'm so glad we are all staying in the choice here at the time, so unprecedented, 2020, and get to the second day of December, getting a new chance, talking to you all here, so that that's just it for the icebreaker and the positive estrogen or fat, or we can really kick off. Okay. I think, let's kick off with Fred. I think we've got... Sure, sure, I get the chunky part of the talk here. Can I ask, you lived in the East and the West, both. You spent some time in California, is that right? And I wonder about your views of how LGBTQ issues are in the East versus the West. Are there big differences? And if there are, do they, how do they affect the kind of approach we might wanna take here for activism? Well, even in Taiwan, which is a very transcultural republic of citizens, which is our official name of the state, by the way. And there is more than 20 languages and therefore more than 20 cultures. And on the East of Taiwan, which is mostly indigenous culture, we have the Amis, which is a matriarchy. We have, for example, the Taiwan, which doesn't really care about gender stereotypes when choosing leaders and so on. And of course, we have the Western part of Taiwan, which is more Western. And so I guess even within Taiwan itself, we have different stereotypes. So when somebody says that acting like a boy or like a girl, that totally depends on which of the 20 national languages that you're saying these words to. And so I guess that shows the diversity and the need of inclusiveness as part of Taiwanese democratization. So, but with that said, I think around our corner of earth, the main issue when we talk about LGBTQA plus rights is a generational perspective. For example, when we legalized marriage equality, the main dividing point in the society was that people who were married before 2007, many of them still think marriage is something between families. And the people, the two individuals, merely act as representatives of the two families. So it's the families that wed and we have special terms to refer, like there's literally eight different terms for uncles and aunts. And that reflects the family to family relationship. And many of them are legitimately worried that the marriage equality law will hijack this social definition of marriage as between two families. On the other hand, people who married after 2008 when we switched to a exclusively marriage by registration system, understood this more as a rise in duties between two individuals. And their families may or may not know each other. And this is actually quite a new perspective on marriage. Before it was the two families as long as they threw out a large banquet and so on, then the marriage is done. And whether they registered after the fact, that's quite beside the point. This is like when a child is born, the child is born. Whether you register the birth certificate, it's quite beside the point. But after 2008, it just happens only on the day of registration. So this is why when we legalize marriage equality, we have to innovate socially on how to make those two different views on marriage work with each other. And we don't have a lot of so-called Western that's to say American-European examples to follow. And at the end, we legalize the bylaws but not the in-laws. We made a act for marriage equality which hyperlinks to all parts in the law that talks about individual to individual relationships bylaw, but it does not hyperlink to the family to family part. So there's no in-law relationship. And so this social innovation managed to convince people of all different generations that this is something worth having, protecting the rights and duties of individuals. But we don't have to invent another eight words for outside uncles and things like that. And that, I think, is a genuine social innovation that we do not see in other coaches. So can you unpack that a little bit for... I mean, one of the things that we'd like to do is show this to our colleagues. Some of them have no real knowledge or understanding of what some of the systems are in Asia. And even I, I mean, I know Japan best, which has a very strong family system and family registration. And what you're describing sounds similar, but a little different. So if you could explain a little bit for people who know nothing about this, that would be helpful. Sure. So actually a lot like Japan because Taiwan was under Japanese colonial rule for a long time before the World War II, right? So a lot of the customs are part of the Japanese culture. For example, the family having a family name. And for women after wedding to kind of give up her maiden family name and things like that. On the other hand, I think the feminist movement in Taiwan really gained a lot more ground than their counterparts in other jurisdictions in East Asia. So that quite a while ago, like more than 12 years ago, we already have gender mainstreaming as part of the gender equality committee in our public service. So that all the ministerial work, it could be draft bills, it could be budget items, any project that extends to more than one year long have to go through what we call a gender impact assessment or the GIA. And the GIA is done primarily through this equality committee that has 17 civil society organizers and 16 ministers. So the CSOs always have one more vote than the ministers and they very systematically get ideas of gender equality through and each and every measure and budget need to measure its actual impact. Not only for example, the ratio of women in parliament, which is now over 40%, now if you keep measuring it and doesn't accept any like rolling back, but also all the different levels in the society, all the different sectors long after the like four year project is gone, the GIA assessment in the gender dashboard, they just keep measuring it. So that's why we have a, I would say evidence-based platform that we can then evaluate each and every project to make sure that the government public service understand how to measure the gender equality impact. So it become kind of ingrained in the public service. So I think that is one of the details that lead to the kind of social innovation of legalizing the bylaws, but not the in-laws. And this is almost all due to the public service readily understanding the gender impact for each and every budget items and each and every legislation. So that when the two referenda and one constitutional rule ruling came, the public service reacted very quickly and was able to find a solution, a very confined solution space. So when you say legalized bylaw, one more time with what that is. Yeah, it means that when two homosexual individuals wed, they enjoy exactly the same rights and duties as heterosexual couples, except their families do not form kinship relationships. And so in a sense, it is essentially a state-sponsored arrangement between the two people and which in Mandarin we call Jie Hun like the marriage part, the wedding part, but it's not Jie Yin, it's not the kinship part. So Jie Hun Bu Jie in marrying the bylaws, but not the in-laws is kind of the moniker for this arrangement. I see, okay. So it's legal, but it keeps you out of the social mess that you might have. That's right, exactly. Okay. Any other reasons or any other things that you think of that let Taiwan advance farther than many other countries in the region in LGBTQ rights so far? Because so far Taiwan, I think is still the only country in the region where marriage equality has passed. Yeah. So in addition to the public service innovations and to the gender equality committee which is a direct result of the feminist movement already on and one of the prominent feminist leaders was also our vice president. And now, of course, with Dr. Tsai Ing-wen as our president, we can say even if it's just 42%, women in the parliament is 100% in the president office, I guess. And so all these are great beginnings for the LGBTQA plus movements to not only model itself on the earlier wave feminist movement, but also learn from the feminist movement activists who didn't rest on their laurels, but just started then working through intersectionality and so on on the later part of the movement. So this intergenerational sort of, even within the social sector itself, I think plays a large part. What else do you think needs to happen in Taiwan now? So I think, well, go ahead, please. What else needs to happen in order for full equality? Sure. So many people who held a permanent residence certificate or a gold card, which is getting very popular because of this year, because of Taiwan, right? Because of COVID. I mean, people can actually still migrate to Taiwan if they apply for something at www.TaiwanGoldCard.com. You can learn that, which we learn from Singapore, by the way. Thank you, Singapore. The point is that for many people, they quickly learn that as a resident, it's a sort of inequality just by the national ID number because the foreign people, even if they have a permanent residency, have a different formatted resident number compared to the national ID, which is for citizens. So one can very easily, even in online registration, like buying train tickets or movie tickets and so on, gets mistakenly rejected by the system simply because their residential numbers doesn't look like a national ID number. And that's we're going to fix in the next quarter or so by issuing essentially a new number that is numeric on the second digit instead of a letter for people who were holding residential certificates. And sorry, let me finish. So, and we understand that our second digit is currently binary. It is one for male and two for female. And similarly, we're going to hand out like eight and nine for the binary sexes. But the difference now, of course, is that some of the foreign people who become residents were in their passport non-binary, like if they come from Australia and so on. So we probably have to invent the new digit, maybe seven, for the non-binary foreign people to get a national ID like numbering. And that will then necessitate the change in our household registration system, all the different systems to allow for non-binary genders as we did for the quarantine system when people apply for quarantine when they visit Taiwan. And that will then probably lead away to the zero, which is the digit that we're brainstorming that will then apply to also citizens who identify as non-binary. And I'll probably change my ID number then. Huh, so that sounds like it will, the change will start with the non-Taiwanese residents. That's right. The non-Taiwanese non-binary. And it will sort of see through into Taiwanese. That's right. Registry. When you say that the household registration will be affected as well, does that bring up the problems that you mentioned before about families versus legality? Yeah. In Lawson. Yeah, sure. There's two parts of this, right? The first part is the part about code and it's not legal code, it's just computer code. And in all the registration system, like the quarantine system, we have to provide a non-binary as a choice. Otherwise, no matter what the law says, the computer will not admit it. So that part needs to change. And then, of course, there are also parts where the two different genders were enjoying different responsibilities and different, like for example, like right until now, people can apply for a wedding, for a heterosexual wedding. If they are 18 years old, however women can apply for it when they're 16 years old. However, if there's two women who want to marry as a homosexual couple, then both must be 18 years old. It makes no sense. It doesn't make any sense to me either. It only made sense, I guess, because a 16 year old girl may act as a representative of her family in a family to family marriage, right? But if you throw non-binary into the mix, it doesn't work before, but it wouldn't even work. If you think about the underlying reasons. So nowadays, we do have a law amendment currently in the parliament awaiting deliberation and hopefully to be passed soon, that would just say 18 years out for all people involved, regardless of their gender. Unless that happens, of course, non-binary if you add it to the mix, it will create even more confusion. So this is a segue to my next question, which is you're a digital hacktivist and you have a lot of innovative solutions for trying to rally consensus and direct policy that's informed by your digital hacktivist views. Is there an intersection between that and the LGBTQ changes and activism that you're trying to bring about? Is there something that you learn from your work with the digital hacktivism part that's applicable to LGBTQ issues as well? Sure. So yeah, when I underwent my second puberty, I wrote a blog post explaining it to my fellow computer scientists and hacktivists and I used the term runtime typecasting, which is a term that will make sense to a computer programmer, right? Because like runtime is by nurture and compile time, that is to say before the program run, but after you write the program down, it's like by nature, that's the DNA expression part. And typecasting simply means that I interface with the world from a different way, a different type. And so these two words taken together means that it's mostly about kind of what Judas Butler referred to as gender performance, like this is a new performance and a new interface that I'm developing in runtime, that is to say after I'm born, and this very neatly decouples the gender part from the sex part, which is kind of difficult actually. If you know Japanese kanji, you will understand that for the gender and sex, still they use probably the same word for it. And that word, however, has two parts, the runtime part and the compile time part. The kanji itself is composed of two components and the components dance for the mind and for the biology. And so the biology part is by nature and the mind part is by nurture. And just by using computer language metaphors, I was able then to kind of express this concept much more clearly. For your computer friends. Yes, but it also applies to everyday life. Like when I just explained it, like the two components of the kanji, if you know that kanji, that would also make sense to you. I see, I see. I guess we're heading into the final minutes here. So all three of us, we work at a big media organization and we think about our roles as people who work there and what we can and should be doing as LGBTQ people and allies. What do you think media people should be doing? We're also in a big multinational company. Do we have particular responsibilities or do you have a wish list for people who are in our situation? Yeah, so back when I think in April, in our daily central epidemic months, life press conference, there was a day, I think around mid-April, where a young boy or his family called to the hotline 1922 to say, basically complain that we were rationing out masks, all they get was pink medical masks and a young boy doesn't want to wear it to school. And the very next day in the livestream press conference, all the medical offices, regardless of gender, wore pink medical masks and the commander, Minister Chen Shizhong, even said that pink panther was his childhood hero. And so the boy become the most hit boy, right? So for only he in the class has the color that the heroes wear, but also the color that heroes wear, I guess, is. But anyway, and that prompted a lot of actions from the largest companies and especially in media. They just changed their avatars on social media, pink. For a while, pink was the most trendy color in the entire town. And everybody become a little bit more transgender because of it. And I think this is great. And then of course came the two pride parades, one in Taipei and one in Kaohsiung and now the rainbow is the most fashionable mask. And so there's a lot of things one can do to get what I just referred to as gender performance as something that's hip, that's cool, that's entirely fine for people to be a little bit more transgender. And I think that is the message I want to send. Gender performance. Do you have a particular, do you have a particular favorite of your own gender performance? Other examples that you can give since you're a role model for that, for us? Yeah, so or for example, when I usually sign off my conversations with international counterparts this year saying live long and prosper. So that's not particularly transgender, it's maybe trans species. Except of course this Star Trek is not a actual alien species but it does kind of convey this sort of performance like I identify with you not because you happen to be in some ethnicity and so on but because we both identify as I guess homo-sabians. And it takes a Vulcan salute to say that, right? So this is a little bit performative but it also reminds us that as especially non-binary people we don't have it in our mind that half of the population is somehow different from me. We like each other and we enjoy each other's companies without sorting each other into binary categories and that is applicable not only on the gender lens but also a cultural lens and also a species lens I guess. So you're a cabinet minister and you deal with all kinds of people at all levels, corporate, government, et cetera. When you are doing your gender performative things we're just as you, just as you, do you not encounter resistance or shock or from, you know, I imagine just from dealing with people in Japan that a lot of people in government and business are pretty conservative. So how do you not encounter resistance and how do you deal with it? What resistance? We are the resistance. Yeah, but that's actually true. We are the resistance. In many senses, I think the society really welcomes diversity and inclusion when I very empathetically take all the sides. That's my whole message. This is what this rainbow represents to me which has a really nice gradient by the way. So this is not like strictly categorized and so like a real rainbow, right? And so in a sense the border between the colors is a little bit blurred and it shows the capacity of the human mind to simultaneously take all the sides which is a good message, not just around gender but transculturalism and intergenerational solidarity and things like that. And that's my core message that people with different positions in life experience nevertheless share common values and it's my job as a politician to somehow, you know, resonate with people so that we find our common values. And that is I think a message that people probably agree on. And you've been successful in doing that even with, even across business, across politics, generational. I mean, who would be against sustainability, right? That's something that's evolved long ago away. If people, there are strains of civilization that are against sustainability they probably have erased themselves long before. Okay. Well, it looks like it's time. It is. But it's been a lot of fun talking. Indeed. So, given that we are a little bit over on final like sharing, perhaps, what you could help. I've been watching, reading the news about the military, the same as reading. It's like, I'm sure it's the very, very first one. Oh yeah. I cannot imagine in the Korean army, Japanese army, the South defense, script, single armies, that could happen. It's been like a tremendous remorse regarding the equality, right? But have you been engaged in any role in the military or the quality fighting? Yeah. And I mean, back in just 10 years ago, it would be unimaginable for Taiwanese people too. So I guess what it takes really is good examples and a good conversation, even for people in different generations or different positions, managed to find the kind of innovation. I'm not saying that you should, carbon copy this marrying individuals, but not families. But it's a beginning, it's a starting point to get people thinking about not left wing, not right wing, but up wing, right? Not falling to this side or that side, but grow, grow up. And I think this is something that you can apply to pretty much everywhere. Whenever you, like Lena Cohen who said, wherever you see a crack, right? There's a crack in everything. And that's how the light gets in. And that's where we should focus our energy. Thank you. Very good. Thank you. Excellent. All right. So we all do this. Yes. Yes. That's right. Yeah, I did my part. Live long and prosper. Live long and prosper. Cheers. Bye. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Audrey.