 Often, Term 3 is our most active period of events. This week we have three events. We have today's one, and then tomorrow we have two in-person events. With the speaker, Christina Chironska, who's going to talk about Myanmar-Taiwan relations and also the struggle for an asylum law in Taiwan. Many of the events that we organize at the SOA Centre of Taiwan Studies are designed to link into things that we cover in our teaching program. I think today is a really good example of this, with today's focus on LGBT families in Taiwan. Over the last, I would say, five or six years we've seen really growing student interest in gender topics on Taiwan. So that was one of the motivations for inviting Rita Jung to give today's talk. So we're really delighted today to welcome Dr. Rita Jung to discuss her work that comes out of her award-winning PhD dissertation. Rita got her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in Communication Studies, and currently is an assistant professor in the Global Health Programme at National Taiwan University. Like many of the speakers we'd love to invite to SOAS, she's someone who somehow manages to combine her academic life with social activism. And sometimes when I'm kind of looking at Rita, I just, in awe of the way that she manages to kind of combine so many different projects together with being a well-respected academic. So for example, she's, in recent years, she's been one of the key organizers of the North American Taiwan Studies Association, one of the key players in the Taiwan Studies field over the last three decades. And an organization that had a huge influence on myself and my own research. And currently she's the president of the North American Taiwan Studies Association. She's also been involved in election and party politics in Taiwan. In 2020, she was a legislative candidate for the Green Party Taiwan. And between 2020 and 2021, she was the party's secretary general following the election. And that's one of the reasons why she features in Taiwan's Green Parties, particularly Chapter 14 and 15. And subsequently she worked with me on the Chinese version of the book. Another one of her areas of social activism, more closely related to today's talk, is that she's had over a decade of experience as a volunteer at Taiwan Tongzhi Hotline. One of the key LGBT rights associations that we've heard a lot about, both in talks and also activist talks. And if that wasn't enough, she's also been involved in Taiwan's media. She's a host of one of the Ghost Island media podcasts. We've heard about Ghost Island media from Emily Wu in last year's summer school. Her podcast, Zed Green Party, is a really interesting one that really focuses on gender issues in Taiwanese society, being nominated for the best new podcast in the 2020 KK Box Awards. So we're really delighted to welcome someone who has such an amazing profile both academically and in terms of social activism. So let me now head over to Rita to hear about your award-winning research. Thanks for coming too, so hopefully next time we can bring you here in person. Yeah, I hope that too. Thank you Dr. Fel for such an amazing introduction. You make me sound like a wonderful, you know, experienced person. And I really need that, a confidence boost. Everything has been very difficult lately. So let me first share my, so I think now you can see my slides. Can you see my slides now? Okay, thank you very much. Yeah, so my topic today is scaffolding family conflict reconciliation model from Taiwan Tongzhi, which roughly translates to LGBTQ plus, not entirely equivalent. So for the rest of the talk, I will use Tongzhi instead of LGBTQ and their parents. And like Dr. Fel said, I got my PhD from UP Austin. Feels like a long time ago. So just a little bit more about myself. And I'll do it counter chronologically. There's some highlights of what I've been doing. Right now I am a project assistant professor in College of Public Health, National Taiwan University, which is actually not a field that I have ever been trained in. So it's actually quite an interesting transition for me and people been asking, what are you doing in public health? When I was in communication studies, people were like, what is communication studies? When I was an applied linguist, people were like, what is applied linguistics? And now in public health, people are like, what is public health? So just everywhere you have to explain what you're doing. Basically, I am teaching classes and doing research about health and equality, public health advocacy, and health communication in some other courses like academic writing or representation, clinical thinking, and qualitative research methods. So these are classes I teach and also related to the research that I'm doing now. And meanwhile, I also teach at a different university. Yangming Jiao Tong University is an action assistant professor in Institute of Communication Studies. So over there, I teach interpersonal communication, feminism, and gender studies. And I am the president of North American Taiwan Studies Association. For those of you who study in the UK, you probably have heard of the European Association of Taiwan Studies. So in North American Taiwan Studies Association, abbreviated as NACA. So NACA and EATS are two organizations that work a lot together. And this year, our NACA conference is going to take place in July 8th to 10th in Washington, DC with the theme of Taiwan Studies and Application. And part of the reason is myself and the key people on the team now are really, we have experiences with, you know, the applied practical side of academic research, and we think it would be a very wonderful time to start talking about how, you know, people in academia could go across the border and then could apply to other fields. And before that, yes, ever since I got back from the U.S., so I graduated in the end of August 2019, and then I flew back to Taiwan, had one night of sleep, woke up the next morning, and then I just started campaigning for the Legislative Yuan. And so I was a failed candidate, tried to run, way too difficult, couldn't make it work. For details, please read Dr. Phil's book. He has documented all the failures of Green Party Taiwan. Mostly because of the, you know, the political system is really, make it very difficult for small parties to survive. And after we lose the election, I say to be the Secretary General, that means to run the party, to make sure, you know, to plan for the upcoming election, which is happening in this November, so you have to think about. So the Legislative Yuan election is a national level one. So every four years we have national level, and in between every four years we also have local elections. So now local elections coming, when I was the Secretary General, I have to think about, okay, who's going to run in what district? And if this district show, you know, high support for Green Party Taiwan, but we don't have a candidate now, then I have to go and search for a potential candidate. That's mostly what I did. And I also get to be the Taiwan representative. They call it Taiwan Councilor in Global Greens and Asian Pacific Greens, because Green Party is an international party. There are more than 100 Green Parties in the world. So a fun thing. And then, so from year 2013 to 2019 was when I was doing my PhD in the University of Texas Austin in Communication Studies. And before that, I really cannot remember when I started, but I know I started when I was pretty young as a volunteer in Taiwan Tongzhi Hala Association. And this is a place where I spend most of my time. Going for my dissertation, a lot of the data comes from my involvement with the association. This association was established in 1998. And it is the biggest LGBTQ organizations in not just Taiwan, but also in Asia. So it, you know, it does a lot of important work, not just for this group of people in Taiwan, but also, you know, in Korea, Japan and a lot of other countries, they will come to Taiwan and kind of collaborate with Hotline because Hotline does have a lot of experiences. And it was also during my time in Taiwan Tongzhi Hala Association, I quickly picked up a thing, like a very important thing that people always talked about, right? I started when I was just like in my early 20s. And so, like, you know, I went to the events and I volunteered, I just, I was there all the time. And very quickly, I started to realize that people are always talking about coming out. Coming out is so important, right? You have to come out. And when I'm talking about coming out, how to come out, have you come out, did you come out to that person? I went, oh, I came out and blah, blah, blah. So it became a very, very common subject that people talked about. But before I dive into, you know, the conversation that I had with people that I met in Hotline, I wanted to ask, you know, the audience here, how would you define coming out? What is coming out? Feel free to just turn on your mic and shout the answers or type in the chat. I think I can access the chat. Oh, maybe I can't, never mind. So how would you define coming out? I'm going to turn to Dr. Phil for help. How would you define coming out to parents or coming out to friends? Yeah. So when you hear the term, what is the first thing that pops up in your head? Okay. So be on chat, accepting who you are. I mean, for me, my first thought was about kind of telling the parents or telling friends. And we've got another one coming out in chat as well. Can you see the chat? No, I cannot see the chat. So we probably have, yeah, help me with that. Okay. Hello, Rita. Can you hear me? Yeah. Go ahead, David. I think there's probably three parts to this, but I think that the first part of coming out is actually an acceptance of yourself, almost coming out to yourself and accepting that you are homosexual or gay or lesbian. And then secondly, to your immediate close circle, which could be your family and your close friends, and then to a wider community, maybe your work colleagues and things like that. So that's what it would mean to me, I think. Thank you very much. The answers now we have touched on very important development of the theory of coming out of four or five decades. So when I started as an activist in this movement, I am now in my late 30s. So the theories about coming out, actually, the official theory that first came out was in the 1960s, and then mostly in the 1970s and the 80s, and it started to see some different trend in the theorizing of coming out. So I'm going to start by how I experienced coming out, and then we'll go to a little bit of a theoretical background of coming out. So probably because I have been in this social movement, the discourse of coming out, a lot of time is about that the personal is political. So you have to come out. Coming out is so important, right? If you're an activist, you have to be out there, you have to show people who you are because the more people that come out, we're going to sway the society, we're going to change the policy and stuff like that. And that's how I picked up this message, that it's that I have to come out. And even to this day, this is an earlier poll from 1992, all lesbian and gay men must come out of the closet if any of us is to be free. So coming out is not just about yourself, right? You have to do it for the rest of the community, however you define it. And then in 2016, Manning said those who do not come out might be labeled self-hating, immature, secretive, and foolish. So that is the message that I grew up with, is that you have to come out, you just have to. And especially difficult actually, earlier that we said, right, you have to first accept yourself and maybe come out to your closed circle and then come out to your wider community. But our experiences was actually kind of reversed. It was actually easier to come out to people who, you know, for the lack of a better term, doesn't matter, don't matter that much, right? So you may, maybe you could come out to your friends, maybe your colleagues, maybe people online, but coming out to family is actually the most difficult for Taiwanese tonsi. So coming out to family quickly became my focus of my academic work and also my activist work, partly because I also had trouble with my family. So I thought, you know, I would spend most of my time here and see if I can figure out how to deal with this problem while I also do my research. So coming out to family has been one of the most difficult things for a tonsi to do, especially in Taiwan. It is difficult across a lot of different cultures, but in Taiwan it is very difficult. And coming out to family has mostly been identified as something like what I told them. That means it's a discrete event of disclosure. And the evidence comes from as early as 1982 and go all the way to 2021 and there are many, many more. So all of these research define coming out as disclosure. So coming out and disclosure have been used almost interchangeably. I sometimes, some of these research, they didn't even define or conceptualize or operationalize coming out. They simply use coming out and disclosure as if these are the two, these are the same things. These are just some, there are really, really a lot of research about coming out that operationalized coming out as disclosure. This research could be grouped into sort of four categories. With the center idea is that coming out is disclosure. So there are a lot of research on the predictors of disclosure, right, in what condition under what circumstances or what kind of people in what kind of country, what kind of culture family are more likely to come out. And then there are research that study the actual content of disclosure. So that event where people sit down and tell their significant people in their life, mostly their family, about their Tongzi or non-heterosexual identity. So the content of the disclosure is another thing. The third thing is the parents immediate the action to that disclosure that had happened. And then there is another big group of research that focus on the implication of disclosure. So the health implication, the relational implication, even the social implication of disclosure. So all of these, so these are four main areas of study about coming out, which is defined as disclosure. So you can really see that there is a coming out imperative. It becomes almost like a moral, like, you know, it's like a moral imperative. You just have to do it, right? Like many say, if you don't do it, people may think that you are self-having and in secretive and immature and stuff like that. But, you know, for all the time that I devoted into this movement with people who are more likely to come out, even though sometimes not to their family, but, you know, they're willing to go on the street, go out on the street and talk to strangers maybe online about their non-heterosexual identity. But I also have a lot of friends who are not involved in these movements who cannot come out, don't want to come out, meaning they don't want to disclose, don't want to come out, they don't, they just don't seem necessary or just for any kind of reason, they don't do that. So my first research when I was in U.P. Austin, right, this is my first year as a Ph.D. student. I was like, okay. And before I started my Ph.D. in communication studies, I was a literature major in applied linguistics. I actually have never done communication studies with research. So even to this day, I had no idea how I got in UT. I had no idea how I got out. But I had my degree, so I'm just going to take it around with it. So in early 2014, I was thinking about my research topic. And then I started to think about all of my friends, right, who are not, who are not coming out, who decide not to or still don't know how to or for any kind of reason. So I thought, okay, I'm going to talk to them, because all these people still have to live, right, even though we have this coming out imperative. But these people, they still have to carry on their lives without following the imperative. And particularly, I'm interested in their family relationship. So I focus on people who are of my age at the time about, like late 20s, like early 30s, because this was the time when your parents would start to ask you about, are you going to get married? Are you going to have kids? So I thought, okay, I want to see how these people, while maintaining their closeted status, maintain their family relationship when they deal with these difficult topics, like difficult conversations. So how do they attend to both goals? What kind of communicative strategies do they use to do that? So that was my interest. So I put out, I first of all went through IRB. I don't know whether in the UK you have to do that, but just IRB. So you have to prove to the people that this is a good research, you're not going to hurt people and blah, blah, blah. So I got my IRB and then I put out the recruitment message that, oh, I want to talk to people who are in this age range in whom have not come out to their parents, and at least one of the parents does not know of your non-heterosexual identity. So I ended up talking to about 30 people. But then when I started to interview my participants, I started to realize one thing, that was very confusing to me, which is that actually most of my participants had already disclosed to their parents, or they know for sure that their parents actually know of their Tongzi identity. Either they know that their parents saw their diary, their web browsing history, or stuff like that, and they have fights about it. And then I was like, wait, I thought I wanted to talk to people who have not come out, but then most of you have already disclosed. I was, what is going on there? And I even went back to my recruitment and I was like, did I not make myself clear? I was like, what is wrong? Like, what is going on there? Then I asked one of my participants. I was like, okay, you said that you don't think yourself is out. You still think of yourself as closeted, but you indeed have disclosed to your parents. And your parents let you know that they knew and they disapproved of it, right? You have fights about it. Then why did you still think that you're closeted? And then she said, yeah, they know, but I just don't feel that I'm out. And then I was like, okay, something interesting happening there. And then later she started talking about her girlfriend, whose situation is very similar to this participant. So I said, oh, sounds like she could be my participant as well. And then she said, no, she doesn't qualify. She has already disclosed. And then that was the beginning of this entire inquiry about what is going on. Basically question of what does it mean to be closeted? And what does it mean to be out? If this participant that I'm talking to considered herself as closeted, but her girlfriend is out, while their objective situation was very similar, then what does that mean? And fast forward to 2017. An important event happened in 2017 in Taiwan, which was the Supreme Court, the judicial court interpretation of our constitution that the unrecognition of sense sex marriage in Taiwan is unconstitutional. In the Supreme Court ordered the measures that lay the view that you have two years from this date that I announced the unconstitutional nature of the civil code. You have two years to fix this problem. So you either amend the civil code, so sensex couple could get married like any heterosexual couple, or you can pass a special law for sensex couple to get married, just do whatever, but you have to do it. If nothing is done in two years time, civil code would just be amended automatically. So it was shortly after the interpretation of constitution came out. And during one of the parents support group meeting. So this is a picture kind of similar to the support group. You cannot really see the people there, but it's kind of like that. So we have parents support group meeting every couple of weeks. And it was during this one meeting right after the constitutional court's ruling that there was a new mother, like a newcomer, a mother that joined the group for the first time. So the mother introduced herself and said that, oh, I'm here because my daughter is lesbian. And then she said, I never used to accept her, but now that there is a chance for her to get married, I want to know, right? And she said, because now the country, the state approves of my daughter, then I need to like catch up and learn how to be supportive of her. And then, you know, people are like, wow, they're retouching, this mother is willing to come and support her daughter. And then one of the other, so one other mother asked her, so when did your daughter come out to you? And the new coming mother replied, did you mean when did she tell me or when did I accept her? So as smart as you are, you can probably now guess that there are at least two elements in when Taiwan needs to say come out, there are at least two meanings, one is disclosure, one is acceptance. So I started to, I just want to figure out what is going on there. And the thing is, when I started to notice that there is a discrepancy, there's like something just not working in how we use coming out, I started to recall all the conversations that I have with my friends in the group and other friends about coming out. Actually, people usually will ask you first, what do you mean by coming out, right? There is really not a straightforward answer or what you mean by coming out is entirely different from someone else's use of coming out. So I thought, okay, I just want to figure out what's going on. So that brings us to the several research that I did on this topic. So the question is, okay, so this question is from my dissertation. So it has been, it has evolved through years of research, but the actual question is, what does coming out mean to Taiwanese Tongzi? And I used constructivist grounded theory as the guiding principle of data collection, data analysis. And grounded theory is, I think the right approach to use because at the time there really wasn't much data on Taiwan and there wasn't much data to really tease out the nature of coming out. So there was two ways of interview data. So the first was done in 2014 and then I interviewed the same group of people in 2017. So there were 28 of them and their age group is from 22 to 38. And I chose this age group again because this is the age group where people are more likely to get questions about marriage and children and your life plans and stuff like that. And I did a third round of interview from 2018 to 2019 with 38 Taiwanese Tongzi. Some of them are the same from my previous two waves of data collection, but most of them are new participants. And I also interviewed 14 parents. One of them is actually an aunt. So an aunt that has a gay nephew, but she was very close to the nephew. That's why she also identified as some kind of parent. So I interviewed 14 parents. And I also did a year of field observation in Taiwan Tongzi Highlight Association, mostly in those parents support group. So those were my data. And I used constructive grounded theory to analyze the data that I had. It was a lot of data. What came out of it was my first publication, my first major publication in 2018, Infamory Relations, about this model that I found. It's called the scaffolding model. But then later, right, so in 2019, for my dissertation I was at, because for the 2018 and the 2014 study, I only interviewed the Tongzi themselves. But if it's about them coming out or they trying to build this relationship with their parents, I got to talk to the parents as well. That's why I interviewed the parents and I also attended their support group meetings. And that was my dissertation in 2019. And it did win the National Communication Association, which is the American National Communication Association, Streamly Communication Division Best Dissertation Award. So good thing for me because you wrote, you put your heart and soul into research and you published it, and you don't know whether people read it. So at least I know some people read these words. So what is it really? So of all the data that I have, of all the stories that I collected, and I try to answer that question, the answer that I found, put very simply is that I built a model called the scaffolding family conflict reconciliation model. Mouthful, I know it's just a lot of fancy words. And some of you might be wondering what is scaffolding? So scaffoldings are the things, like the things you put outside of building when you're building this building, because you can't just go to like 20 floors at the, oh, in British, in UK you call it differently. I don't know how you call it, but if you're building a tall building, right, you have to start from a level one and then you have to put the scaffolding on the outside so that you can go up to your goal. And after you reach the goal, right, you take out the scaffolding. So the key is what is the goal, right? So you start from the ground and then there is a goal and then you scaffold your way through that. So this is a picture of scaffolding, but when it's applied to a family conflict reconciliation situation, what does it look like? So I'm going to present to you the model with parts of the construct that I found. So first of all, the important thing is to remember that this entire process happened under broader social, cultural and political context. So it's very important to remember none of this happening in the vacuum, right? With all the things that people do in this relationship that they have is informed by the broader social context. And also what they do would in turn inform this context. So it's a reciprocal relationship. So this model starts with that, the offspring. The reason I didn't use the word child is because when people see the word child, they usually think of people underage, underage kids. And also because most of the study that you can find now about parent-child relationship, about coming out, mostly are about teenagers, adolescents or younger kids. But I'm like, people don't just magically learn how to do parent-child relationship when they become an adult, right? I think this relationship last entire life and it's a little bit weird that most of the research about the parent-child relationship focus on only the underage kids. That's why I chose the word offspring just to kind of signal that this is not about a younger child. So the offspring will have some expectations about their lives, about what they wanna do for their future and what they want out of their parents. A caveat before we go on is that the people that I interview are people who want to have this relationship with their parents because there are some people who don't want this relationship. Their relationship was bumpy or there was no relationship to begin with where they decided to cut ties. And that happens and that is not uncommon. But the group that I, so the people that I interview are people who care about their family relationship. They wanna maintain this relationship and that's why they go into this process of scaffolding. So they have expectations about themselves about their future, about their parents. And their parents also have expectations about themselves, about their own future and also about their offspring's future. There are things that they want their offspring to do. And this process starts because there is a discrepancy between the two sets of expectations, right? What I want and what you want are different. So there is a gap. And remember the building, right? When we build a building, we start zero, like ground zero is a discrepancy and their goal is to finish whatever 20 floors of a building. And in this relationship, the goal is to have a mutually intelligible acceptance. So what the kids want, what the parent want, ideally there is some kind of overlap that they can reach so that their relationship could be reconciled. And how do they reach the mutually intelligible acceptance? The first process they go through is something that I call a constant comparison of relaying. I will explain later what those means. One thing I learned from academia is to use fancy words so that you sound smart. So I'm sorry if some of things are confusing. But anyways, people go through a process called constant comparison of relaying. And then that's a psychological process. And after that, they decide the scaffolding efforts that they decide to do in order for the gap to close so that they could reach this zone of the overlap acceptance. But later I will talk about why this process actually could go on indefinitely for some people. So to put it in simple terms, is a child want something, the parents want something, what they want is different. So they would assess their different situation and consider different resources that I have, gauge their own emotion and decide the things that they do in order for the other side to probably listen to me and stuff like that and eventually reach a zone where both feel okay about their relationship. And again, this process for some people goes on and on. So I'm going to break into the next part, I'm going to break into three parts. The first is how this process begin. And then I'll focus on the middle part, the things that people do in a constant comparison of relaying that they go through. And eventually to the right hand side of this diagram, which is the both are okay part in the ongoing process. So firstly, how all these begin. When coming out is defined as disclosure. This process of coming out starts and ends with the disclosure. But my academic data and also my experiences with Taiwanese Tongzhi just indicates a very different process, right? So this discrepancy, okay, the sense of discrepancy, the sense that something is off, something is different, something is wrong, it's actually the beginning point of a person's journey through this reconciliation. So for the child, it could be noticing that you have feeling for a same sex friend and then you realize that okay, I might be different from other people. And for a parent, it could be noticing that something is different about your child. Maybe your son acts a little bit groly. Or for parents, it could be very interestingly, for a lot of gay participants for my study and a lot of friends that I have from the movement is that a lot of them was outed, they're exposed because the parents saw their web browsing history and they've been on some porn, gay porn sites. And this is historically important because when I grew up in the, I was born in 1985, so I grew up during that time when internet was just a new thing and most families in Taiwan would have maybe just one computer that's shared by the family. So everyone uses the same computer. And that is also why a lot of the parents discovered the gay son's gayness through the web browsing history. And that was actually not a common thing for lesbians or bisexual women, but it is usually very common for gay men. And I said it's very important historically, there's historical importance to that is because right now in this generation that we have now, everyone has their own computer, everyone has their own phone, the change for a gay person, web browsing history of gay porn to be discovered by parents has significantly decreased. So anyways, the child and the parents sense something different and that's when the discrepancy kicks in, that's where the story begins. So something like, I might be different and my parents won't accept me. Therefore, there's a long journey ahead of me. And parents could be suspicious, they can make an advent or purpose for discovery or they could be informed by third party. In Taiwan, well, this was a debate. This has been a debate of whether a parent is allowed to go through the parents of the child's belongings. Belongings, like can you read their diaries, can you go through their stuff? Right now they are competing discourses about whether a parent is allowed to do that. But when I grew up in the 90s, that was actually very common for parents to go through your own stuff and then there basically is no privacy and teachers can go through your personal things as well. So it's actually not uncommon for parents to make the discovery where they are suspicious, therefore they go and look for proof that their child is different. Okay, so for atonement could be that, for parent could be that, but the key thing is that this process does not start with disclosure, rather it starts with a sense of discrepancy. And the very important thing is that when either side started to have this suspicion, have this sense of discrepancy, they may make evaluation of the other side, but a lot of time they can make mistakes. Therefore, their projection of this process is also wrong. When I started recruiting for my dissertation, and I made sure that at least half of the participants that I talked to are not from the organization or from people that know the organization, just I just wanna make sure, I talked to people who are engaged in activism and people who are not, because I think their experiences are very different. So I was referred to a person, like a friend's friend, like it's a multiple degree of connection, therefore I'm sure that I don't know this person in person, like in real life. And that person got in contact with me and he said, yeah, I can be your participant. That person's a 30-year-old-ish gay man. And then he said, oh, my father is also very supportive of me, so I think my father can be your participant as well. And then he gave me his father's contact information. And he said, well, just text my dad and I already told him and he's okay, just text him and figure out time for you to talk to him. So I did, I text the father, I was left on red and then I text again and then I was left on red again and the father didn't get back to me. So after a week or two, I went back to that person and I would say, could you let your father know that I left a message trying to figure out time to talk to him? And then he apologized to me and said that, you know, apparently I was wrong. I thought that my dad was okay and then he just very open about it. But then when I checked with him again, again he said he doesn't wanna be interviewed. He doesn't wanna talk about it. And then this participant was actually very sad and he was like, wait, I thought, you know, I thought my father is okay with me. Why is he not okay being interviewed? So there is a lot of misjudgment at the beginning and other different cases when a Tongji offspring could, you know, because of some clues that have flooded away, decided that I think my parents will never accept me. Therefore I need to do this, this and that in order for them to accept me. So when they finally reached that point, then they realized, oh, my parents are actually okay with me all along or my parents actually knew for a very long time. So the reason I'm talking about this because this process for everyone is different for every parent is different. And it depends on how they evaluate their initial situation kind of decides the length and the level of complexity of this practice. So the middle part, the process, what is it like? How do people bring in, you know, like close the gap? The first part of the middle, the process is what I call a constant comparison of relating in a scaffolding efforts. So constant comparison is actually very commonly used analytical techniques for qualitative data. And so if you've ever done qualitative research, you may know a constant comparison is when you have all your texts and you started to find themes and codes and you compare to see, oh, are there any similarities? If there are and then put them together, become a higher level code and category, and that's how you find themes in your data. But constant comparison of relating for personal relationship is a very different process. And there are different types of comparison. The first type, I call it personal experience is the base for comparison. So remember now, at least a parent and a child is trying to find a way for their relationship to go on. And then, you know, they need to know what's going on in the identity side, what to do. So for some parents, they will use their own experience as the baseline to evaluate the situation between the parents and the child. For example, one of my participants, she is a pansexual woman. That means, so she has dated men and she has dated women. So for the mother, so for this participant's mother, the mother always just see her as a heterosexual person who sometimes dates girls. So now you can see, you know, it's a very different thing. So for the Tongzi offspring, she's like, no, I am a pansexual. She only told the mother that she's bisexual because she thinks pansexuals are a little bit too complicated. She's a bisexual, I date, men and I date women. And the mother is like, no, you're just a heterosexual person who sometimes dates a girl. So the mother, even though the mother has known about her daughter's sexuality, the mother has for more than a decade trying to push the daughter to get married to a man. And the daughter would say, I can't just marry someone I don't love. I can't do that. Like, how can I marry someone I don't love just because it makes you happy? And the mother would say that love is overrated. It doesn't matter. Just find a man who's got money and just get married because when you're old, love will fade and it's the financial stability that matters. And the reason the mother believes in that is because that's the story that she went through. The mother fell in love with her husband, which is the father, when they were really about like 20 years old. They fell in love madly. They got married within a year. Then they had three babies. And 30 years later, she was like, okay, I don't feel love toward my husband anymore. And it doesn't matter. So she always told her daughter that, okay? She would tell her daughter her story and said that because it happens for me, then it has to be the truth. The truth, right? Because it happened for me. Therefore, don't insist on love. Just find a man and get married. And the same goes for the tons of options. Sometimes they'll use their own one experience of the baseline for everyone else. And in that case, it's actually difficult for them to talk to one another because they only use their own example, their experience of the standard. And a second type of comparison, social comparison, which is actually a long-established theory in 1954 by Fastinger and a lot of theorists after that. So social comparison can be roughly divided into two kinds. Upward comparison is when you compare to someone similar to your situation, but are doing better. So you're looking at people who are doing better and therefore you feel bad for yourself. And there's downward comparison. When you compare to someone in a similar situation but doing worse so that you could feel better about yourself. So in the process of trying to close the gap, sometimes the parents or the child will use this kind of social comparison to understand their situation and to decide what to do. So one of the participants, he was texting. So because in Taiwan, people use line as like a chat group, it's like WhatsApp or like Messenger. And usually a family will have a chat group. So this participant sometimes will share information about Tongzhi movement in Taiwan in the family chat group. And then one time his mother responded in the chat group that, okay, I'm okay for you to be gay, but can you not talk about this so much in the family chat group? And then she said, your cousin is also gay. Why can you be like your cousin who's very quiet, right? He's gay, but he doesn't bother anyone. So the mother did some kind of comparisons like my son gay, his cousin also gay, but the cousin is a better version of gay because he's quieter, right? He's not trying to make a scene or like trying to fly for his ride or something like that. And because of the comparison that the mother did, she decided to stop her son from sharing those information and that causes the relationship to kind of drift even further apart. And the third kind is called measuring against the norms. So when my participant talked about all the society is like this or everyone does that or people are supposed to do this and that. So they are kind of invoking some kind of social norm and that's when they're measuring against the norm. And common norms are heteronormativity, which is the idea that people are heterosexual and people should behave heterosexuality. And heterosexuality is the standard and should be the only thing that exists. And homonormativity, if we have time, we'll come back to that. And but there's other type of norms that are often referred to in their stories. For example, patriarchy and compulsory marriage. So compulsory marriage is idea that even if you're Tongzhi, you're still expected to get married because marriage is one of the most important things in life. And there are other types of marriage that people could go through. One type is called formality marriage, which is more common in China than it is in Taiwan, but in Taiwan sometimes people do that too. So formality marriage is when a gay man and a lesbian woman get married so that they could fulfill their responsibility if somebody's off-screen and sometimes they would even have a baby together. But they know from the beginning that, okay, this is just a formality, we get married. And for there's some study that shows sometimes the parents are aware of the fact that this is formality only. These two are, there's a lesbian and a gay and they're okay with it because the important thing is that they get married. And there are other types of marriage. One very interesting type is called ghost marriage or called spirit marriage, which was very common in Taiwan in the past, but even to this day people still practice ghost marriage or called spirit marriage. And a very important reason for people to do that is because if a woman when a woman marries a man and enters the man's family, then the woman, this is a Taoism tradition, but Taoism is the most common type of folk religion in Taiwan. So the idea is that a woman has to be married in order for her spirit after she dies to enter the husband's family's spirit temple like shrine. So a woman has to get married because if you don't do that, after you die, your spirit will just wander. You cannot be in your NATO family, which is a family of origins, because the rules just doesn't like. So the rule is just you have to get married and become part of your husband's family. So what happens when a woman dies before she got married? So that happens especially in the past in people's mortality rates higher. So if a woman died before she gets married, then the family will still need to marry the daughter out so that her spirit could enter a certain family shrine. So a common story, even though it's so common knowledge is that the family will sometimes leave out red envelope with money in it or some valuables just under row. So if a man walks by and pick up the red envelope, then that man has to marry the dead daughter. And it's okay if the man is already married and sometimes the dead girl's family will find a family with a dead son and they will get married both as ghosts, but that would feel worse for the women's spirit to go into the husband's family shrine. So all these different stories just tell you how important it is for people that people think of marriage in Taiwan. And the fourth kind is called measuring against authority. So any kind of authority, a doctor, a PhD, what are the kinds of authority? Just any kind of authority. So sometimes the parents would think of authorities' opinions as the baseline for them to understand their situation is beside what to do. One of the most fascinating stories is comes from the mother that I interviewed. So the mother has a lesbian daughter. And the mother said, when my daughter was very young, when she was just like eight years old and one day the mother went to work. So she went to the office, sat down, started doing her own stuff. And one of her colleagues just walked to her and said, God, so one of the gods from a Taoism, so Taoism God, there are thousands of them. So one of the gods wanted me to tell you that your daughter is a boy spirit in a girl's body and the God wants you to accept your daughter. And then the college just turned around and walked away. And the mother wasn't even a very religious person. But the mother was like, okay, if that's a message from God, then I probably should follow it. And the thing is, at the time, the mother has never brought her daughter to the workplace. So there's no way for her colleagues to know about her daughter or to even know her daughter. So for the mother, she was like, I'm not religious, but this is very weird situation, so I better follow it. So somehow, even before the daughter realizes that she is a lesbian, the mother has already decided to accept her. So the mother told the daughter the story about like 10, 20 years after that, when the daughter decided to talk about this with her mom, and the mom was like, well, this actually happened. And the daughter was like, how did this happen? Well, but it worked out for the best. And the last type that I identified from my data is what I call putting things in perspective. This is like an idiom. But when negative, like really bad negative thing happens, then people usually adjusted how they evaluate their relationship. One of my participants, very sadly, her sister committed suicide a couple of years ago because, well, she was going through a breakup and was too much for her. So she killed herself. So my participant's mother, of course, was devastated. So after that, before that, the mother was not very supportive of her daughter being a lesbian, but after that, the mother told them, okay, now I just want all of you to be happy as long as you're alive. You can say whoever you want, marry whoever you want. I just want you to be alive. And that became a really important change in their relationship. And sometimes these different kinds of comparison come from different kinds of discourses. And when there are competing discourses, people could go back and forth between how to feel and what to do. Because there are proximal discourses that happen within their relationship. There are distal discourses, right? The social culture and legal discourses. So one of the mothers, she thought she was very close to her daughter, and then she was kind of okay with her daughter's sexuality. But a couple years ago, after the judicial court interpretation of the civil court, there was a huge wave of opposition that there's organized opposition to Tongzhi rights. And their discourses became very, very powerful, especially to parents. They're saying that if we allow gay, we allow same sex people to get married, then all of these bad things would happen. HIV would rise and then birth rate would fall. And just like, they would tear down the fabric of society and stuff like that. So the mother, she was very supportive of her daughter, but now she also listened to these kind of different discourses, and then she started to not know what to do about their relationship. And another very interesting phenomenon that I found is called polystymy. Polystymy is a linguistic idea that means one word has multiple meanings at the same time. So the idea, so the words such as marriage, love, responsibility, happiness meant drastically different things to different generations of people, or just to different people. And when there's polystymy in a relationship, people may feel like they're talking to each other because they use the same word, but they're actually talking past one another. So a mother that I interviewed, her own mother actually came with mother's, so her mother, who has already passed away, if she was alive, she would be 110 now, 100 years old. So the mother that I interviewed talked about her own mother, and then she said that her mother actually came from China to Taiwan during the 1949 retreat. And the mother only came because the mother met the father because the father was a K&T soldier who was, you know, fleeting to Taiwan after they lost a civil war to communist party. So on the way that he was going, coming to Taiwan, he was passing through a village, and then a two-order person saw the father, saw that man and said, could you marry my daughter and take my daughter to Taiwan with you? Because we don't want her to suffer here. And they were like, well, if you go to Taiwan, most likely you're not gonna get a wife, but so if you marry my daughter, guarantee a wife in this new land. So the mother actually married this person who was just passing through the village as part of the retreat. So they got married, they moved to Taiwan. So I asked this mother who was in her early 70s, and I was like, so for your mother, marriage means survival. And I asked her, do you think you're able to do that, to marry someone just to survive? And then she said, was actually difficult for me to imagine that. And I asked her, what does it mean? You know, what does marriage mean to you? So she said for her, marriage means responsibility. You have to do it because that is what you do as a person. And then this is one of the rare pair that I also interviewed a daughter. So I have a daughter, mother pair. So I asked the daughter about what her mother said. And then she said, for her marriage means love. So you can see the same word marriage means survival, responsibility, and love and self-actualization. But if they're not aware of polysemy in their relationship, it would become very difficult for them to move toward reconciliation. And I also wanna highlight some feminist intersectionality that I found in my study. The first is a feminist intersectionality of the Tongzi offspring. Remember at the beginning I said, I'm not gonna use LGBTQ, rather I will use Tongzi. And the reason is the label LGBTQ plus in the context of parent-child relationship and parent-child relationship reconciliation actually is not very helpful for a lot of, for the parents, what they care about are three things. First of all is my Tongzi child, a son or a daughter because the son and the daughter comes with different expectations and there are different things you want them to do. And the second level is, is my child acting normal? Or can people tell just by looking at my child that my child is different, right? So that's the second level, are they behaving normally? I'm just using the word that the parents use. And the third level is does my child love just one sex? That means does my child, is my child gay or lesbian? Or does my child like both sexes or more than both sexes? Because if it's the first situation, it's actually easier for the parents to accept because they would think that there is no choice, right? My child likes the same sex. I better find a way to be okay with that. But if a child could also date or like the opposite sex, then sometimes it becomes very difficult for the parents to let it go because they'll always hold on to the hope. And another intersectionality is of the parents. I did find in my research that people of different class, I hire social economic class and lower social economic class, their power dynamics, the parent child power dynamics could be quite different. And also one very interesting thing that I found is called resistance by practicing. Some of the mothers of that interview, they said when they found out that their daughter is lesbian or bisexual woman, they were actually pretty relieved because they were like, okay, because they themselves suffer a lot in this patriarchal system as somebody's daughter-in-law because daughter-in-law is the lowest possible rank in the patriarchal system. And these mothers, they suffer so much as the daughter-in-law. But because it's the responsibility to also make sure all her children married well, the daughters marry well and sons marry well heterosexually. And some of the mother told me that they actually, they sometimes encouraged their lesbian or bisexual daughter to not marry a man because they don't want their daughter to go through the patriarchal system. So by foregoing their responsibility as a mother to make sure the daughter may marry as well, they actually resist this structure by practice, by the practice of their daughter. Okay, so I'm going to go through the final part. Go to the final part, I hope to end real quick. So the final part, important things to remember is that, remember, okay. So the parents, the kids want something. The parents could want something and hopefully there is some overlap. But sometimes there could be no overlap. And the key term to pay attention to is the mutually intelligible, because actually what people think of acceptance could actually differ a lot. So for the parents, they could give out what I call compartmentalized acceptance. So it could be compartmentalized along a way of emotion, attitude, behavior, and cognition. So a parent could be behaviorally accepting, but not understand what's going on. Or a parent could be very, very sad about it, but still decide to show up at some kind of gay event or for a gay son. So for the parents, what they give is still acceptance. Just that is one part of acceptance. So there are different kinds of situations. I'm not going to go into details, but for the offspring, sometimes the compartmentalized acceptance feels like discounted acceptance to them. A lot of the tons of offspring would, you know, hope their parents could be like this, could be like that. So when the parents do not, you know, display that kind of acceptance a tons of offspring want, they will feel like, okay, this is not really acceptance. And there are different, also different stories about how they deal with this kind of situation. And actually the situation could reverse sometimes for the parents will want a tons of child to do something and a tons of child would feel like, I already do what you asked me to do. Why is it that's still not enough for you? So the important lesson is that, you know, acceptance can come in different shapes and forms. And it's very important for people to understand, you know, which type or which compartment am I experiencing that? Or am I expressing that for the other person to know? Okay. So I'm going to jump through this other page and go to the final page is the, I think the contribution of this model. So remember this model is built against the backdrop that first of all, there is very little research on this topic outside the so-called US and West Europe context. Most of the study that you can find is done in that social context. So very little done in this part of the world, very little done in Taiwan. And another important background to remember is that coming out has been defined as disclosure for so long, it's like, it's how people see it in the academia and it's harder for them to kind of jump through that. But my study highlights the fact that, you know, coming out is not an event, but rather it's a process. Okay. So, yes, first contribution is that my research redefined coming out, it's not an individual event, but it's a processional iterative and relational undertaking. And then it challenges this assumption and it builds a model using Taiwan's data. And it emphasized on the adult childcare relationship rather than most of the study that focused on underage child. And very importantly, it legitimized parents' agency because in current literature, most of the time it's the child's disclosure that kind of set up this entire thing, right? So if the child doesn't disclose, then parents' story cannot come in a picture. But actually parents' agency is very important in this process as well. And also the idea of relational selfhood, as opposed to the individualistic understanding of self is that at least for the participants that I interviewed, their self-identity a lot of time is built upon their relationship with the parent and the parent's relationship with the child. So sometimes it's very difficult to tease them apart. It's important to see them in a relational sense. And then showcased the importance of a communicative approach. So in this event or in this behavior, there's a lot of nuances in it that's worth attention. And finally, the theoretical, methodological and practical implication of the study, I wanna focus on the methodological. This is not just an attempt to reconceptualize coming out, but rather methodological is also very important because a lot of the study, their recruitment criteria is you have to experience the disclosure already, right? So you have to say like experience disclosure within five years, then you can participate in my study. But a lot of time there is no disclosure, right? Where a lot of time the parents already know but the child isn't disclosed. We're just for any kind of reason, if we use disclosure as a recruitment standard, we're actually leaving out a lot of different things going on. And this is not just for Taiwanese, actually in the 1960 in American study by Ponce, they already identify the idea called like sweeping under the rock, right? And then in the 80s and the 90s, there are actually studies done in America that kind of recognize this fact that sometimes there is no disclosure. Sometimes people just know or they suspect but because they operationalize coming out of disclosure and their method has to exclude a lot of people. And therefore this study, even though it uses Taiwanese data, I think it invites conversation, it invites rethinking how we do research in other context as well. So just going to go through the last point is some limitations that I think needs attention. The first is that the cohort difference, the cohort effect is quite apparent in Taiwanese Tongzi generations. So for my generation, again, I am now in my late 30s, I grew up with a lot of information because I grew up, I was born, I was born into the martial law era. So when I was born, Taiwan still under martial law, right? But then soon after that, the martial law was lifted and we were able to receive a lot of new information. That's when the discourse of coming out came into Taiwan. So I grew up with idea of coming out, but Amy Brenner's ethnography of Taiwan Tongzi and a lot of other study realized that, for example, an older generation, an older cohort actually doesn't see coming out as necessary or even a thing. And a younger cohort will now experience a whole new different situation. So just to pay attention to that when you apply the finding of this study. And that will be all, thank you so much. Fantastic, Rita, that was a really fascinating talk. You brought a really different angle. We've had a lot of talks on Tongzi issues over the last decade or so, but this was a really, very different angle that we hadn't really kind of covered before. And I really loved the way you kind of took us through that kind of the personal journey about how you got there, how you dealt with the various challenges and how you linked the really rich fieldwork data to the theories, because you're dealing with quite a lot of theoretical kind of concepts there. So for me, that was really fascinating. I think because of time, we're going to have to extend this one a little bit. So we've got enough time for questions. So let me out on with a kind of a combination of the first question that BU has raised and maybe something that I was one of my kind of numerous questions. So BU's question asks about, I mean, to BU, did you want to kind of come in with your question? Thank you very much. It's fascinating. And I can see the research is really solid. Thank you so much for sharing with us. I'm just fascinated by your fieldwork because you talk so much about mother's reaction and response. And of course you did touch upon a little bit on father's, but I'm just interested to know what's the difference between two parents and what's the characteristics? Is it really gender based? Thank you. This is actually a known phenomenon that mostly it's mothers that will show up in support group meetings. It's mothers that will become vocal about that. And then most of the time, the children, when they do disclose, they usually disclose to the mother first or only to the mothers. So I did have three fathers that I interviewed. But one thing that I found is also like a very gendered nature of labor, of this parental labor is that mothers usually carry on their shoulder a lot of the burdens. Sometimes is there imagined burden that if my child is gay, there's something wrong with my, there's something wrong with me. There must be something that I did wrong. And Taiwan Tongs and Holland Association published all the questions that the parents ever asked in their 20 years of service, the top five. The first one of all the 20 years of question is, can my child become normal again? And then the second by mother is, what did I do wrong? Yeah, and then some of them would even go so far back to when they were pregnant, they're like, there must be something I did wrong when I was pregnant that made my child like that. There are actually more than one mother that said, it must be because I was pregnant with a daughter, but I wanted a son, right? Because under the patriarchal pressure, they have to have sons, right? If you don't produce a son, you're actually useless in this family. And they were under so much pressure to give birth to a son. They were hoping for a son, but they were carrying a daughter and they blame themselves for wanting that. They think that it must be that, that kind of transformed my baby in the uterus or something and then my son, my daughter is like that. And some of them, they're rational. They will try to rationalize this phenomena. And it's usually the mother because they see the child's failure as part of their failure, right? Because this idea of relational self-hood, right? If my, me as a mother, I only completed my journey or my responsibility if my child did all the things that they have to do. So it's the mother that usually goes out of their way to try to rationalize this thing that happened. One of the mother believed that it was because of the Chinese medicine that she was taking and she was pregnant, right? She was like, there must be some kind of chemical in the Chinese medicine and then, but somehow she was like, okay, then it's not my fault, right? It's the Chinese medicine fault. Even though I shouldn't be taking the Chinese medicine, but at least it's an external factor. So mother, because of the pregnancy and because they're role as a mother in the Patriarchal Society, the mothers usually take on more responsibly and more guilt in this process. Of the three fathers that I interviewed, yeah, I would say that they are really rare in the 20 years of work that Hotline has done that we have very few fathers that came to the meeting, that came for help or stayed to provide service. One of the, you know, one time there was this, you know, a couple, so husband and wife, and they were from the South. So it was actually difficult for them to come to Taipei, so they had to take them off. So the father worked in agriculture, I think. So they found out that their son is gay again through web browsing history. So that tells you a lot. Just clear your web browsing history. So, but during the interaction, it was just very painful to see because the father was like, so the father actually said, I'm always busy working, trying to provide for the family. It is your responsibility to raise the kids right and then you didn't do it right. And that's why our son is gay now. And then so he was blaming the mother. And then the mother was of course very sad, but the mother also blames herself. And then we were there like trying to listen to their story but also try to intervene. But I think that was actually a very classic power dynamics between husband and wife in my study. So, Liana, did you want to come in with your question? I think your mic's not on. Yes, Liana, raise your hand. Yeah. Okay, in that case you can, Liana's going to type her question. So while she's typing, let me come in with my question. Because one of the things I found really interesting was you mentioned the impact of the constitutional court ruling on one of the parents. So I was kind of curious about, because you talked about your project being ongoing and the legalization occurs in May. So almost like the time you graduate. So did you see a big impact in all of that legalization? Because I think one of the things we see is parents joining wedding ceremonies. And I was kind of just curious about even though this is kind of can we post dissertation, what was the effect of this on the parents? Yeah, that's why I am collecting more data now because I do want to see how the change of law impact their relationship. So from what we can see, so right now in Taiwan, there are, I think up to last month, there are actually 6,000 pairs of same sex couple that got married, about 4,000 of them. More than 4,000 are lesbian couples. So somehow lesbians love marriage more than gay men, I guess. So if there are 6,000 pairs of people that get married, then at least there are 6,000 households, like parents who are aware of that. And it's actually, especially for younger, younger, or those who still live in their parents' house, because in Taiwan, it's still a norm that you don't, you actually stay with your parents until you get married. You're not considered an actual adult until you get married. So in some, you know, during Chinese New Year, you can still get red envelope, no matter how old you are. As long as you're not married, you can see the child and you can receive the red envelope. So for those, for those Tongzhi who live in the parents' household, they actually, because in Taiwan, we have something called the household registration system. So each house actually has an actual booklet that shows who belongs to this family. And then you need that piece of paper to get married so that you can be either added to a certain family's household or be removed from it. That's why if a younger Tongzhi who still is in the same household wants to get married, there is simply no way that the parents don't know. And divorce rate for the first month was actually pretty high. People got married and then they got divorced. But after two years now, the divorce rate has decreased, but marriage rate has risen. Yeah, so I am curious as to, you know, how those parents are dealing with it. But a prominent discourse that we observe, because after the same marriage law was passed, we still do a lot of the talks and, you know, we go to different schools and talk to parents and stuff like that. Yeah, what we did with this, the change of law for a lot of parents were a powerful way for them to understand what's going on. So it's like, if the country says it's okay, then it's okay for me to be okay with it, right? Because for some parents are like, even if I'm okay with it, the law says it's not okay. Therefore, I shouldn't feel okay about it, so they're conflicted. So now they have kind of like they have the law behind them to want to accept their child. So for those parents, it's a useful way for them to navigate their relationship. And for some parents actually, like I said, because they compartmentalize their acceptance, for a lot of parents, they have no idea what is going on with their child, especially if a child insists to use a label like I'm a queer person or I'm non-binary. For the parents it's like, I have no idea what that means, but if the law says it's okay, then it's okay. And sometimes they will use that to kind of defend their child in front of other relatives. Relatives are saying something like, nope, the law says it's okay. So I think somehow, I don't know, do we believe in our government more? Is that why people kind of just like, okay, if the government says good, then it's good. So yeah, definitely I would collect more data for that. Leona, did you want to try again with your mic? Yeah, yes, can you hear me now? Yes, go ahead. All right. So thank you so much, Rita. I am the director of GW's TURB, so we're looking forward to actually seeing you in person. But my interest, my research interests is in the well-being of transgender people in Taiwan and their family members' reactions and acceptance. And I know that the Tongzhi Hotline Association, they also host peer support groups for transgender and gender non-conforming people. And a recent interview that I had with the trans men in Taiwan indicate that they actually have, they form line groups through which they share strategies of coming out and strategizing the way to disclose their identity to their parents. So I'm very interested in knowing whether, and since the sharing of coming out strategies among gay and lesbian folks may have had a longer history. So I don't know if there is a certain kind of borrowing or mutual support or informing among the different groups of gender and sexual and minority groups. Yeah, oh, that's great. I'm gonna see you this summer. So I'm very grateful. Yeah. Yeah, actually transgender right after, so right now it's what people call post-Semsex marriage era. And the post-Semsex marriage era, one of the most important topics is the transgender right. And the other one being the gender education, gender quality education. So transgender right is one that is kind of like under heated debate because the first case that one, so basically in Taiwan now a transgender person, if you wanna change your gender marker on your official documents, you have to go through the entire set of operation. From head to toe, everything has to be changed in order for you to get your marker changed. But the end of last year or earlier this year, one person that filed for, I think anyways, she's a transgender woman. She wants to change her gender marker, but she hasn't gone through the surgery. So she kind of, I think she's through the government side. You can't make me do that. And then she won, she won the case. So now people are like, okay, are we on the way to change this law entirely? Are people now able to change your gender marker without a surgery? So now it's that heated debate. But from my research and also related research about transgender right and also LGBTQ, is that actually sometimes it's easier for people to accept transgender person than homosexual. Because if you're transgender, okay, it falls under something called the discourse of choice. Transgender issue is kind of shaped under this discourse to be they don't have a choice, right? They're born into the wrong body. This is the very common discourse. They're born into the wrong body like a soul in the wrong body and they don't have a choice. So people actually would sympathize with person without a choice much more than you choose to do this. And also if you transition to the entirely opposite sex then somehow you're still following the binary discourse. You're still following the binary rule, right? You're just kind of flipped to the other side but you're not trying to dismantle this entire system. So non-binary person, harder to understand, harder to justify, but transgender person, especially those who've gone through surgeries and have their marker change officially, sometimes are easier for people to accept. And that's also why for gay and lesbian, so single direction sexual attraction sometimes are easier for people to accept because again, they don't have a choice. You were born this way, right? The discourse of born this way is so powerful. So they don't have a choice, right? So they're already going through a lot of different difficulties which you support them. But for bisexual person, it's like you have a choice. Then why are you choosing to do the wrong thing? So under these different influences, I think transgender person, and within transgender community, I use the word community very loosely because every movement, every group of people, there's just so much within group variation. But in Taiwan, Hotline is now devoting a lot of their time for transgender advocacy this year, starting this year. So for this year and next year, they actually formed a whole new group just to promote transgender rights. But outside Hotline, there are different kinds of transgender community. And also in the past year, I think the past five years, there are several influencers who are transgender and they're transgender women. And they are what we would call, you know, past successful. So when you look at them, there's no way for you to tell that they're not biologically, they're not assigned this sex at birth. So they are, they pass, they cross that border completely. And also they are really, really pretty. And so this population, I think this community has now an increased visibility, just that representation matters. So those transgender who don't look like that will sometimes feel like, okay, and I'm not pretty enough or they try very hard to look that way. So I think my short answer is, there are different groups of people who are working on this matter and they take different approaches and sometimes their opinions conflict. So, you know, just like same-sex marriage, there actually, there was actually a lot of debate about the strategy or even whether we should do it or not, starting from like early 20s. And there are different groups that just like, okay, we should not push same-sex marriage, we should push for the demolition of marriage as an institution. And sometimes we should just push for, you know, partnership and blah, blah, blah. So, yeah, a lot of debate within the groups. Thank you. A few more questions coming in. David, do you wanna come in? Yes, Rita, thank you very much. It was excellent. Can you hear me? Yes, thank you so much. Yeah, really, really interesting. I wanted to ask, in your research or in your opinion, is there such thing as silent disclosure when in the terms of coming out to parents or does, for your research, did it have to include verbal dialogue? You talk about leaving the website browser open. A lot of people, when I used to live in Taiwan, parents would look at their diaries, but sometimes that diary was intentionally left open on a certain page. And my friend would know, for example, that their parent would read it, but then there was no ongoing conversation from that. Yet there was a recognition in some way, an unspoken recognition, that both parties knew that that had happened, if you know what I mean. Yeah, definitely. That is actually one of my key arguments is that a lot of time there is no disclosure at all. And people might reach that overlap acceptance without ever talking about it, without explicitly acknowledging anything, right? A lot of time the child would just bring home the girlfriend, bring home a boyfriend, and the parents would know what's going on, and they don't talk about it. And they would kind of sense each other out. And yeah, in, I think 15 years ago, Hotline published their first book, it's called Dear Mommy and Dad, I Am Gay, I'm Tong Jin. And then that actually became the tool for secretly coming out or silently coming out for a lot of Tong Jin my age. We'll buy the book, put it somewhere obvious, right? Hoping that the parents would see. And actually very interestingly, one of the modern interview, because she actually found out about the son, some being gay when the son was very young, and then she was like, I'm ready for him to come out to meet. But the son was so nervous about it. So the mother actually went by those books, put it everywhere in the house, hoping the son will pick up the hint that mama knows and mama's okay with it. But the son was still so afraid. So about 10 years after that, the mom finally convinced the son to go to the support group together to Hotline. And then that's when they finally talk about it. And the mom was like, did you not see all the signs that led you? Did you not see all the rainbow flags I put everywhere? And then the books and everything in the son still burst out crying because he was still so scared of being kicked out of the house because that was the discourse that he was receiving. So actually for the majority of my participants, there was no explicit discussion where this explicit discussion only came after they both feel that their relationship is in the place where they feel okay with each other. I really love this term mutually intelligible acceptance. It's one of those things that in our relationship, we've always referred to it in a long form. It's like, you know your mom knows, mom knows you know that she knows but there is never a conversation about it. And yet that process of acceptance has definitely grown. Definitely grown. And you can see that in a demonstrated in many ways, it might be just a hug at the airport or them even treating you like a son-in-law but the conversation has never happened. So that process of mutually intelligible acceptance increases without a conversation almost. Yeah. Thank you. Anyway, it's been really good. Yeah, I can't tell whether it's like a Western Eastern kind of you know differences. I don't think the binary works really well when we put people's lived experiences but I do think there is a trend that say in America people are indeed more verbal in their relationship. They tend to be more verbal but in Taiwan people are not. People a lot of times do things implicitly and hoping the other person will pick up some cues or they don't think verbal expression is necessary. So I do think maybe in a culture like Caucasian white American, middle-aged white American maybe it does happen to them that oh they would sit down their parents and say mom, dad, I'm gay. Maybe it does work for them but even within America there are so many different cultures like you know the Hispanic immigrants right and an immigrant from East Asian countries in I don't know East European countries and or South European. It's just so many different kinds of cultures but it is the so-called why the Caucasian, middle-aged Caucasian American stories are usually featured. Also because of methodological limitation sometimes it's just easy to do say survey research with your college students just you know because they're your captive survey viewers. I just have them do the survey, it's just easier. So like accumulative effect is that we oftentimes see the stories of certain group of people but then we ignore other kinds of possibilities. Okay, because of time I think what we're gonna have to do is to kind of bunch up I think three questions. So let me just summarize a couple of them come in the chat and then I'll give our pass on to Raza for her question. So Josh has asked about the impact of Taiwanese celebrities being open about their sexual orientation and how that has helped children to discuss issues with their parents. And then Cass asks the question about whether non-normative gender identity is more easily acceptable than non-normative sexualities. Cass, did you wanna kind of just elaborate a bit on what you meant there? Yeah, sure, I mean it was I was thinking this through as Rita was answering Lianna's question. And it's something sort of I've seen I'm transitioning from a research project based around China and kind of trying to learn a bit more about Taiwan because I'm actually able to get to Taiwan this summer. And something I've seen is in kind of Chinese LGBTQ communities in kind of Beijing and so on very often kind of there's a difference between non-normative genders. So kind of transgender and whether that's and non-binary people it seems to be more difficult to accept for families and so on than non-normative sexualities. And I kind of wondered what you think about whether that's sort of something that you've experienced as well. And I suppose I think you already answered it really. But yeah, I thought that was really interesting the kind of discourse of choice around gender and sexuality and we can't choose our gender but we choose our sexuality. And actually maybe moving past that idea of choice is really where we make progress. So yeah, I'd be delighted to talk to you more at some point about this. Definitely, I would love that. And I'd love to hear it. And great to hear you're going to go to Taiwan as well. Yeah, that's great. So Rita, if you want to hang on a second let me just bring in the final question. Then you can kind of pick and choose within a kind of limited time because I think we need to wrap up by about one. But Raza, do you want to come in? Oh, Raza, your mic. I think you're still on mute. No, I still can't hear you. So Rita, did you have any responses to Josh and Cass? Although I know that to a certain extent, as Cass mentioned, you already kind of got into that with the honest question. I did talk about something because of the discourse of choice, sometimes you are finding those passing to the opposite end of the binary more acceptable, but definitely, trans men and trans women's experiences are highly different, especially if you are of a minority ethnicity. Then that's a whole different story. In Taiwan, most of us are Han, Chinese ethnicity, but we do have different indigenous tribes and we now have immigrants. We have so-called new immigrants. So people who got married moved to Taiwan and then have babies. So I would say, first of all, in a trans man and trans woman, their experiences really are different. Sometimes people are most of the time less friendly to transgender women. They're more likely to be viewed as potential sexual predators or just perverts. Yeah, so, and another thing is really just how they look. Do they look good enough? Yeah, so I think that's a little bit cruel. Yeah, and because of the celebrity culture, some of the trans men and trans women, when they pass so successfully and they look so good, then that becomes some kind of norm for people. So if you don't look that good, it's actually harder for you to live as a transgender person. And that kind of touches on the celebrities, yes, Taiwan. I think there are several high profile celebrities that are extremely vocal of their support, of Tongzhi community, like Zhongmin Cai and Amei. Two of them are the super diva in Taiwan. I think even for a younger generation, they still really like this too. So I think their influences are definitely there, but as a discourse scholar, sometimes we need to pay very close attention to what kind of message or kind of discourse are they shaping, right? When they came out, I think in 2016, all the A-liners, there was a huge concert, put in three concerts called Love is for Love, and they're all A-liners like Amei, like Zhongmin, and all those people, and then they're like, okay, we need to support, right, same-sex marriage. But when they use the discourse of love, I think there is a limitation to that discourse. And then again, that also kind of couched upon the discourse of choice, right? And then that almost feels like, that also almost sounds like to some parents that if I cannot find a way to accept my child, the way they want me to, I don't love my child, right? And then it actually became harmful to the parent-child relationship. And so I think it is very important that they are supportive, just that there has to be more voices to kind of balance out and for people to, you know, find discourses that work for them. Yeah, definitely, Rasa, feel free to email me. Yeah, Rasa said she's gonna email you afterwards. I mean, originally we were gonna, this was gonna be a one and a half hour session, but I think we had so many questions. Yeah, thank you so, thank you for allowing me more time. No, I think that's great. I think in a way it kind of felt like you were just really kind of touching the surface of your project. So I think we definitely need to try and find a way of getting you back here and ideally in person in the future. Yeah, I would love to. And lastly, of course, just to mention, for those of you that are around in London, make sure to come in for tomorrow afternoon's session, starting at 12 o'clock, the first one on Myanmar-Taiwan relations. And then we'll have a second one starting at 1.30. And if any of you are not on our mailing list, just make sure you get in touch with us and we'll make sure you're informed about all our events. But before we all go, would you like to turn on your cameras so we can get a kind of an online group picture? And also, of course, we wanna give Rita a very big so-as-round of applause. But thanks for sharing your amazing research. Yeah, thank you so much for listening to my talk. Thank you. Okay, great. So can we get a few more cameras on and then how you could you get a picture for us? Oh, yeah, sure. So is there anyone I want to join? Anyone else? Anyone else gonna join? I'm shy. No worries, all right. Three, two, one. All right. Okay, three, two, one. Great, thank you. Okay, fantastic. Thank you so much. Yeah, feel free to email me for more if you have any questions or just wanna get in touch. Fantastic, good luck with the ongoing research and all the challenges for being a kind of a junior academic in such a tough time. Yeah, thank you so much again. Thank you. Hope to see you all soon. Thank you. See you all either online or in person. And I see there's at least one person who's gonna be at a NATSA in the audience as well. Oh, David, David, before you go, just a few minutes. One is about the documentary. What do you think of that one? Acha Yilan, the indigenous.