Homosexuality can be considered “a mental disorder” in the eyes of Chinese law.
Referring to controversial academic literature, a court in East China’s Jiangsu province ruled that a textbook defining queerness as a disorder is not a “factual error,” but a divergent “academic view,” reported the South China Morning Post. The ruling of the Suqian Intermediate People’s Court confirms the ruling of a lower court.
The Chinese LGBTQ community has criticized the decision. Ou Jiayong, 24, who filed suit in 2017 as a college student to get the textbook publisher to withdraw his “ poor quality work ” from circulation, calling the statement “ arbitrary and unfounded. ”
Ah Qiang, a spokesperson for PFLAG, a support group for the queer Chinese community and their families, accused the textbook editors and the courts of being out of touch with today’s culture.
“The editor of the textbook apparently used views that do not reflect current societal perceptions of sexual minorities,” Ah said in a statement.
Officially, homosexuality was decriminalized in China in 1997, and in 2001 it was no longer classified as a mental illness – with the exception of homosexuals who, according to the Chinese classification of mental disorders, are particularly troubled by their sexuality.
Now a social worker, Ou, who prefers the nickname Xixi, discovered the questionable text in a 2013 edition of “Mental Health Education for College Students” (Jinan University Press) during her freshman year at South China Agricultural University in 2016. It book described homosexuality under “common psychosexual disorders,” and stated homosexual relationships are “believed to be a disruption of love and sex or perversion of the sexual partner.”
Xixi sued the publisher and retailer of the book JD.com, demanding that the company remove the reference and publicly apologize for the homophobic content distributed in universities in China.
The court’s first ruling stated that, according to the SCMP, the lawyer’s case also had no scientific basis and called the case a difference of opinion.
In November, Xixi filed the appeal that had just been brought against her. She disagrees that her evidence is lacking and plans to continue her fight.
“Perhaps this statement is intended to ease the controversy,” she said. “But it has also kept textbooks that pathologize homosexuality in circulation, which is a shame.”