Meet our grantee partner, Oii-Chinese!

Published on Dec 29, 2017

An interview with Hiker Chiu of Intersex Human Rights Fund grantee partner Oii-Chinese, who discusses intersex activism in China and Taiwan and what it’s meant to receive support from Astraea.

Oii-Chinese was established by Hiker Chiu in 2008 to provide Chinese-speaking intersex people with information created by intersex people and to bring intersex people together for peer support. Oii-Chinese’s mission is to raise awareness in the general public, reframe the meaning of intersex from traditional stigma and superstition, advocate for intersex human rights, and help intersex people develop self-understanding and support each other.

In this video, Hiker Chiu discusses intersex activism in China and Taiwan and what it’s meant to receive support from Astraea’s Intersex Human Rights Fund.

Learn more about Oii-Chinese here.

***

Video transcript:

Nowadays, activism depends a lot on the internet, on computers, on social media.

Discrimination on intersex people in Chinese society is still very strong. We are seen as neither male nor female, which puts it much like a “human monster.” And many intersex people are hiding, so that was a real empowering experience to find the OII international website. And I started to be in contact with people there and read their stories, and in the process I gradually identified: “Oh, I might be one of the intersex people.”

I started Oii-Chinese from translating the OII website into Chinese because I found there are so many other languages but there’s no Chinese, so I really want to look for people who can speak Chinese and share experience.

For me, Astraea’s Intersex Human Rights Fund is very important because I have to support people in Taiwan and China and also all Asian people. I have a general grant, so that I can use freely. I just started to have a computer, a very basic thing. And I tried to travel to China to have a meeting with intersex people who had contact with me.

I really want to help the general public know about intersex people. We are human beings, and we have love and we need to love and to be loved.