An annual government survey on gender equality indicates that more than 60 percent of the public supports same-sex marriage, the Cabinet said on Friday, a week ahead of the fourth anniversary of the country’s legalization of same-sex marriage.
Respondents who believed that same-sex couples should have marriage rights accounted for 62.6 percent, an increase of 1.7 percentage points from last year and a rise of 25.2 percentage points since 2018, when gay couples were unable to marry, the Cabinet’s Department of Gender Equality said.
The survey found that 74.1 percent of respondents support the adoption rights of same-sex spouses, a 3.1 percentage point increase from a year earlier and a 20.3 percentage point rise from 2018, it added.
Photo: Liu Hsin-de, Taipei Times
These numbers not only reflect a shift in the attitude of Taiwanese, but also agree with the legislature’s passing of legal amendments to allow same-sex married couples to jointly adopt children to which neither partner is related, it said.
The Legislative Yuan passed the amendments to the Act for Implementation of Judicial Yuan Interpretation No. 748 (司法院釋字第748號解釋施行法), the law that legalized same-sex marriage on May 19, 2019.
Regarding issues related to transsexual people, 77.3 percent of respondents agreed that transsexuals should be able to wear clothes they feel comfortable in when they are at school or work, with 91.4 percent saying they would have no problem working with a transsexual, the department said.
Despite respondents showing a high rate of agreement on the need to respect transsexuals, the survey found the public attitude more conservative when it comes to related policies.
Only 54.8 percent of respondents agreed that transsexuals should have a third gender option on their national identity card, up 5.9 percentage points from a year earlier.
Meanwhile, 46.5 percent supported transsexuals being allowed to change their gender on their identity cards without having to undergo gender reassignment surgery, which represented a 17.2 percent increase from last year.
The survey also identified some movement on concepts related to gender roles and stereotypes, including the idea that women are better suited to looking after babies and less suited to working in the fields of science and engineering, which were opposed by 42.6 percent and 94.3 percent of respondents respectively.
The survey for the first time asked respondents their opinion on male parental leave and the inheritance rights of married daughters, with 84 percent and 95.2 percent of respondents voicing support respectively, the survey showed.
The survey was conducted from April 27 to April 29 among people aged 20 or older via a computer-assisted telephone interview system. It collected 1,076 valid samples and has a margin of error of 2.99 percentage points.
In contrast, a poll by the Taiwan Equality Campaign released on Friday found that despite increases in the country’s overall friendliness toward same-sex relationships in the three years since the legalization of same-sex marriage, support declined slightly over the past year across different categories.
The only category in which the poll showed increased support for was transnational same-sex couples.
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