A Chinese university student is taking legal action again China’s Ministry of Education claiming many school textbooks “demonise” homosexuals, CNN reports.
21-year-old Chin Qiuyan, a student at Guangzhou’s Sun Yat-Sen University, is fighting for the university library to remove psychology textbooks that categorise homosexuality as a mental illness, or recommend that gay and lesbian people need to be “healed.”
Beijing No 1 Intermediate People’s Court have accepted the case.
Chen discovered the textbooks in her freshman year, before she had come out as a lesbian. Seeking information on sexuality, Chen looked to the textbooks in her university library and found the offending texts.
“I was terrified when reading the books. What would my friends and classmates think of me if they read them?” Chen said.
The Chinese government decriminalised homosexuality in 1997, finally removing it from an official list of mental illnesses in 2001. 90 textbooks were analysed by Guangzhou LGBT group ‘Gay and Lesbian Campus Association of China’ and it was revealed that 31 deemed homosexuality to be a disease – all published after 2001.
“It doesn’t matter if I win or lose or we settle outside the court,” Chen told CNN, “What matters is the Ministry of Education will have to respond to the issue regarding text books.”
OIP Staff
