Written by I-Sheng Wang.
Image credit: 07.12 「自由民主永續之旅」總統出席哥倫比亞大學座談 by 總統府/ Flickr, license: CC BY 2.0.
At first glance, Tsai Ing-wen’s election in 2016 looks like an obvious breakthrough for gender equality in Taiwan. She was Taiwan’s first female president, and during her presidency, Taiwan passed Asia’s first law legalising same-sex marriage. In both international media and domestic political discourse, these two achievements are often presented together as symbols of Taiwan’s progress and democratic values. However, to see Tsai’s significance only in terms of “a woman being elected” or a “rainbow achievement” would underestimate its wider political meaning. Marriage equality was not simply the result of greater cultural openness or changing public attitudes. It was also shaped by a changing political environment that brought questions of sexuality and equality more directly into party competition and state governance.
In the Taiwanese context, gender equality is not only about whether women can enter the core of political power. It also concerns how equality in marriage, family life, and intimate relationships is redefined. From this perspective, Tsai’s election was indeed a breakthrough moment for gender equality in Taiwan, but it was also selective and deeply shaped by governance, as it both expanded the politics of equality and exposed its institutional and social limits. To understand this mixed legacy, this article considers how gender equality became part of Taiwan’s democratic identity, how movement demands were incorporated into government, and how marriage equality extended recognition to some queer subjects while leaving other forms of intimacy and kinship outside the dominant narrative of progress.
First, the importance of the Tsai era lies in the fact that gender equality became more firmly incorporated into the core narrative of party competition, rather than remaining only an external demand from social movements. Research on Taiwan’s path to marriage equality identifies the 2008 electoral reform, the 2014 Sunflower Movement and the DPP’s electoral victory in 2016 as important political changes that created new opportunities for LGBT mobilisation. Together, these developments made marriage equality a more prominent issue within party politics. Same-sex marriage was not an isolated issue. Rather, it became one example of how Taiwanese parties responded to the growing political importance of social and moral issues.
During Tsai’s presidency, the DPP government increasingly presented marriage equality as evidence of Taiwan’s democratic progress and international identity. For example, in a 2019 speech at Columbia University, Tsai cited both her election as Taiwan’s first female president and Taiwan’s legalisation of same-sex marriage as evidence that progressive values could take root in East Asia. In the same speech, she contrasted Taiwan’s democratic development with Hong Kong’s experience under “one country, two systems” and argued that the political and cultural differences across the Taiwan Strait were growing wider. In a 2020 address to the National Democratic Institute (NDI), she again placed marriage equality alongside women’s political representation, human rights institutions and Taiwan’s defence of democratic values. In this sense, Tsai’s breakthrough was not simply that a woman became president, but that gender equality became more clearly integrated into Taiwan’s democratic brand.
Second, the breakthrough of the Tsai era also lies in the fact that marriage equality and other gender issues no longer remained only in the moral language of social movements. They became more clearly part of state governance and institutional practice. Research on Taiwan’s women’s movement shows that, from the mid-1990s onwards, feminist NGO leaders who entered government began to bring gender mainstreaming into policy design and institutional reform. Further research on women’s policy institutions shows that feminist activists who participated in these bodies between 2005 and 2009 helped institutionalise gender mainstreaming across the central government.
In this sense, Tsai did not create gender equality in Taiwan out of nothing. Rather, her administration brought together achievements that had already been developing across institutions, public policy, and civil society, and integrated them more systematically into state governance and the ruling party’s political narrative. The breakthrough of the Tsai era was therefore not a single policy miracle, but a broader process of translating movement gains into the language of governance.
Even so, the success of marriage equality should not be treated as the completion of gender equality under Tsai. Although the Act for Implementation of J.Y. Interpretation No. 748, which came into force in May 2019, was widely praised at home and abroad, it remained a product of political compromise. Same-sex couples were allowed to register for marriage, but they entered a system that was still not the same as heterosexual marriage. This means that the most symbolic reform of the Tsai era was also the result of compromise. More importantly, these limits do not only appear within same-sex marriage itself. They are also visible in the wider structure of gender politics. Analysts have noted that Taiwan’s high level of female political representation, the election of a female president and the legalisation of same-sex marriage do not automatically produce fuller substantive equality. From this angle, Tsai’s election was indeed a breakthrough, but it was still a limited one.
Governance shaped this breakthrough not only by determining the legal form of marriage equality, but also by defining which queer subjects could be included within its framework. To gain recognition, same-sex relationships had to become legible to the state as stable, exclusive and marriage-centred family relationships. This brought important legal protections to many couples, but it also made the respectable married couple the most visible model of queer citizenship. People whose lives could not, or did not wish to, fit this model remained less visible within the official narrative of progress. These included people in non-marital or non-monogamous relationships, as well as those who relied on less formal networks of intimacy and support. The breakthrough was therefore selective: it expanded equality by bringing some queer subjects into the existing family framework, rather than questioning why marriage should remain the principal standard through which intimate relationships receive legal and political recognition.
If we bring this question back to Taiwanese politics after the 2024 elections, Tsai’s legacy of equality is no longer just a historical achievement. It has become a political asset that is still being contested and challenged. Although the DPP remained in power after 2024, it lost its parliamentary majority, which means it can no longer shape debates over equality and rights through institutional advantage alone. More importantly, social and moral issues remain an important area of party competition, although the focus of that competition has begun to shift.
Since Tsai left office, the KMT has pursued a referendum opposing the abolition of the death penalty, while KMT lawmakers have also proposed a referendum on introducing caning for certain serious crimes. These initiatives suggest that the opposition is attempting to shift public debate away from equality and individual rights and towards crime, punishment and public safety. From this perspective, Tsai’s most important legacy is not marriage equality alone. It is that the DPP once succeeded in turning progressive values into public policy, electoral appeal and a broader image of Taiwan as a democratic society. The question now is whether the DPP can continue to win public support for equality and human rights when its opponents are placing greater emphasis on crime, punishment and public safety. That remains to be seen.
In conclusion, Tsai Ing-wen’s election was indeed a breakthrough moment for gender equality in Taiwan, but it was not a simple or contradiction-free one. Its importance lies not only in the election of Taiwan’s first female president and in the legalisation of same-sex marriage. More importantly, the Tsai era changed the political meaning of gender equality by bringing it into Taiwan’s democratic brand and into the practice of governance. This made gender equality, for the first time, a more stable political asset that the ruling party could openly claim. Yet this breakthrough was also selective and deeply shaped by governance. It extended recognition to queer subjects who could fit a stable, marriage-centred model of family life, while leaving other forms of intimacy and kinship outside the dominant narrative of progress. In this sense, Tsai’s legacy matters not simply because it marked a historical first, but because it reshaped the terms on which value politics is contested in Taiwan today.
I-Sheng Wang is an MA Taiwan Studies student at SOAS University of London and a former legislative assistant in Taiwan. His research focuses on Taiwanese party politics, gender equality and same-sex marriage.