Portraits of Same-sex Marriages in Taiwan

Yen-hsin Alice Cheng, Academia Sinica

Existing research on the characteristics and pairing patterns of same-sex marriages have largely focused on Western societies, particularly in Europe. As Taiwan becomes the first Asian country to legalize same-sex marriage in late May 2019, nearly 10,000 homosexual couples have married under the new law by the end of 2022. The characteristics of these married same-sex couples have not been explored; and very little is known about whether they differ from those in the West. This paper aims to make use of the marriage registration data during 2019–2022 in Taiwan to showcase how marriages among Taiwanese gays and lesbians are similar or different from heterosexual unions reported in current literature. Overall, homosexual marriages make up about 2% of all marriages observed each year. Preliminary results indicate that two-thirds of the same-sex marriages observed were between lesbians, and that same-sex married couples’ pairings are less homogamous in age and education when compared to heterosexual marriages in Taiwan, with lesbian unions being more homogamous than gay ones. This study will further explore assortative mating patterns among same-sex married couples based on other socio-demographic traits. The findings will offer a more comprehensive portrait of same-sex marriages in a non-Western context for the first time.

Keywords: Families, Unions and Households, Civil Registration and Vital Statistics, Gender Dynamics

See extended abstract.