LGBTQ year in review: What happened in 2022

As 2023 gets underway, we now look back at progress and regress of LGBTQ rights the past twelve months have brought the LGBTQ communities in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

Escalated censorship and resilient LGBTQ independent cinema

This past year witnessed China’s tightened censorship over LGBTQ content in popular culture with the removal of gay storylines in the local releases of foreign TV series and movies.

In February, Chinese fans of the U.S. sitcom Friends complained of censorship after noticing changes in a version of the show newly released on Chinese streaming services, including the deletion of several gay plots and scenes.

Similar cuts were made to the Chinese version of Hollywood blockbuster Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore. A brief but explicit mention of the romantic relationship between two main male characters was edited out from the Harry Potter spinoff.

Disney movie Lightyear, a prequel to the Toy Story franchise, was also asked by Chinese authorities to undergo editing in order to achieve a Chinese release, according to its producer. Disney claimed that they declined the request; the movie was not released in China.

These negotiations happened at a time when China’s movie business was mired in a slump, with box office revenues and the import of foreign movies taking a dramatic plunge in 2022.In the first ten months of this year, Chinese theatergoers were able to watch only 38 foreign movies, down from the total of 73 in 2021, and 139 in 2019.

Despite the setbacks, local independent LGBTQ cinema is resilient. Although these films could not be shown in theaters in mainland China, many of the new Chinese documentary and arthouse movies produced in 2022 presented more diverse issues and themes, including:

• A documentary named Xiaodi features a 17-year-old transgender girl and shines a spotlight on the experiences and conditions of transgender groups in China.
• Outside mainland China, Safe Distance, a documentary by Hong Kong Filipino filmmaker Jamie Chi (池清麗 Chí Qīnglì), tells the stories of 31 Chinese queers living in London during the COVID-19 pandemic, including activist Qiū Bái 秋白, who is originally from mainland China. Before moving to the UK, Qiu had been deeply involved in a social campaign against university textbooks containing homophobic content.
• Chinese director Huáng Shùlì 黄树立 won a Canees prize and a Taipei Golden Horse award with Will You Look at Me, a short film that shows the 25-year-old filmmaker returning to his hometown in China after film school and coming out to his parents.

Deaths of “rose boys” sparked public discussions over bullying against LGBTQ youth

A string of deaths of young people since the end of 2021 sparked national discussions regarding gender norms, homophobic discrimination, and school bullying. One of the first cases that garnered public attention was the suicide of 26-year-old photographer Zhōu Péng 周鹏, also known by his internet name Lù Dàosēn 鹿道森. A few days before he was found dead in November 2021, Zhou shared a farewell post to Weibo, where he recounted years-long bullying and discrimination he had experienced due to his “effeminate” gender expression.

In May, a 26-year-old food content creator included a suicide note in the last video he uploaded to video-streaming website Bilibili, where he revealed his queer identity. “I am gay and it feels great to come out of the closet,” reads the note. His cooking channel Yīshíjì 一食纪 had more than 720,000 subscribers, and his last video has been watched for over five million times.

In early September, a 19-year-old university student named Gāo Yàn 高彦 took his own life at home. According to screenshots circulated online that were said to be conversations between Gao and his friends, Gao’s suicide might be related to his supervisor Zhāng Dàlǔ 张大鲁 at Shandong University of Arts. In one chat, Gao mentioned quarrels with Zhang, and accused him of vindictively placing him in a group with lower-graded students despite his outstanding academic performance. A few internet users who claimed to be Gao’s friends in school said that Gao was a victim of bullying by Zhang, who they said specifically insulted Gao’s sexuality and gay mannerisms.

The outpouring of outrage and heated discussions caused by these incidents was quickly stifled by censorship. In the case of “Yishiji”, the blogger’s suicide note was widely reported by news outlets, but the person’s gay sexuality was left out in the most of the articles. When it comes to Gao, many of the discussions on Weibo commemorating his death were censored, including a post made by a lawyer who said he had sent a letter to the provincial government demanding further investigation into the incident. Comrades’ Voice, (tóngzhì zhī shēng 同志之声), an influential LGBTQ account on Weibo, was suspended from posting for several weeks after sharing posts about Gao.

In discussions about these news stories, many people raised the question of the responsibility of schools in addressing bullying and providing LGBTQ-friendly sex education. Unfortunately, LGBTQ student groups — arguably the only place where Chinese queer teenagers can have the chance to find a sense of community — have been facing diminishing space in the past few years, especially after the suspension of dozens of social media accounts run by such groups in mid-2021.

As the latest example of the crackdown, two students at Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University were penalized in the summer of 2022 for handing out a small number of rainbow flags at an on-campus convenience store. They were accused by the school of “distributing promotional materials on campus without authorization,” a behavior that it said had violated student code of conduct. Disagreeing with the penalty, the two students appealed to higher-level administrations, but the Beijing Education Commission upheld the school’s decision.

Revisions of medical regulations had mixed impacts on the transgender community

The past year also saw the revisions of several medical regulations concerning the Chinese transgender community.

In April 2022, Chinese medical authorities released a new version of regulations on gender reassignment surgery, which lowered the minimum age for receiving the procedure from 20 to 18, simplified mandatory operative procedures, adopted internationally recognized terminologies, and removed the conditions that previously required recipients to go through an one-year psychological counseling or psychiatric treatment pre-surgery.

The new regulations are generally considered as aligning the country’s standard of transgender medicine more closely with the international trend of de-pathologization. Take, for example, the simplification of operative procedures: In China, going through the surgery is a necessary condition for the change of gender on national ID cards and other legal documents. While the 2017 version stipulated that one could receive a validation document from the surgeon only after the completion of two separate surgeries, genital removal and reconstruction, in contrast, the new edition specifies that the removal operation alone can suffice.

A few months later, China’s proposed ban on online sales of hormone drugs was met with divided opinions from transgender individuals. While some worried that the potential limitation would make it harder for them to access gender-affirming medications, others considered it a “protection” of those under the risk of overdosing due to self-medication.

International LGBTQ events in Hong Kong and Taiwan faced logistical and political hurdles

In February, Dennis Philipse, the co-chair of the 2022 Hong Kong Gay Games, announced his resignation from the position. Following his departure, the Mexican city Guadalajara, another finalist for the 2022 Gay Games, was selected as a co-host of the event. Phillipse explained his resignation as stemming from concern over “the continuing uncertainty affecting international travel in Hong Kong.” The event was originally scheduled to take place in November 2022 but was postponed to November 2023 due to strict COVID-related travel restrictions in Hong Kong.

On August 12, the Taiwan organizers of WorldPride 2025 announced that the international LGBTQ gathering would not be held on the island, citing the cancellation as a result of major discrepancies between them and InterPride, a global LGBTQ rights group that licenses the event. The major subject of the dispute was about the naming of the event, as InterPride requested the self-ruled island replace “Taiwan” with “Kaohsiung.” Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs also released a statement regarding the issue, in which it claimed that InterPride’s request for the name change was due to “political considerations.”

The announcement of the cancellation was made after the U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s short visit to Taiwan in early August, which caused a massive outcry on the Chinese internet and was followed by military actions near the Taiwan strait.