Abstract
Since 2009, public records in mainland China have documented transgender people’s relationships with families through an expanding set of institutional forms. National rules governing gender-reassignment surgery made proof that direct relatives had been informed part of the documentary pathway for major surgery. The 2017 national transgender population survey turned family acceptance, conflict, and support into population-level variables. From 2019 onward, peer-reviewed studies of adolescents, family stressors, mental health, and gender-identity change practices increased the precision with which family experiences could be measured. During the same period, clinical teams, community resource pages, youth-support initiatives, and parent-oriented exchanges increasingly positioned relatives within knowledge referral, health-care communication, and peer-support networks (Beijing LGBT Center and Department of Sociology, Peking University 2017; Peng et al. 2019; Chen et al. 2019; Wang et al. 2021; Wang et al. 2023; Chan, Suen & Leung 2024; aboutTrans 2026).
This article organizes those changes as an evidence history of the family interface. Across sources, “family” performs at least eight distinguishable roles: recipient of family notification → material-resource node → housing and care relationship → audience for identity disclosure → arena for negotiating gender expression → source of violence or change efforts → participant in clinical communication → parent and peer-support infrastructure. Several roles can coexist, and their importance changes with age, residence, economic autonomy, treatment stage, and record systems. The article therefore proposes a family-interface matrix and a relationship-state ledger. The first records how institutions invoke family relations; the second records the concrete state of a person’s family relationship at a particular time.
The central finding is that evidence from 2009 to 2026 shows family expanding from an external documentary field in medical policy into an institutional interface observed by population research, mental-health studies, clinical services, and community support networks. The historical change is best described as greater documentary density and differentiation of roles. Formal medical rules, studies of lived family experience, and support practices evolved on different timelines. Family-notification requirements, material dependence, conflict, care, clinical collaboration, and parent mutual aid therefore coexist within the same historical period. A field-based method reconstructs this history more accurately than a single measure of “family support.”
Keywords: transgender; mainland China; family; family notification; family support; family violence; youth; gender-reassignment technology; evidence history
1. Research question: why family should be studied as an institutional interface
Family is often compressed into a short statement in histories of transgender life in mainland China: relatives support a person, or relatives oppose them. Public records preserve a much more differentiated set of relationships. The Ministry of Health’s 2009 technical standard required an applicant for major gender-reassignment surgery to provide documentation related to having informed direct relatives about the planned surgery. The 2017 standard for “gender reassignment technology” retained that documentary structure. The 2022 G05 standard continued family notification while revising age, notarization, prior treatment, procedure scope, and internal hospital governance (Ministry of Health 2009; National Health and Family Planning Commission 2017; National Health Commission 2022; PROJECT TRANS 2017, 2022).
That clause documents an institutional invocation of family. A medical rule makes a fact about family knowledge part of an application file. Everyday acceptance is a different field. A relative may know about planned surgery, provide money, permit a particular form of gender expression at home, participate in medical conversations, or join a parent-support network. Each action describes a different relationship state. Collapsing them into one support/opposition label removes much of the historical variation that the sources actually preserve.
Research after 2017 provides finer observational tools. The national transgender population survey located family acceptance alongside education, employment, health care, and public life. Peng and colleagues’ study of transgender and gender-nonbinary adolescents measured parental awareness, abuse and neglect, school bullying, and mental-health outcomes together. Chen and colleagues’ national study included parent-child conflict in models of suicidal ideation and suicide attempts. Wang and colleagues later examined symptom networks among youth reporting parental psychological abuse (Beijing LGBT Center and Department of Sociology, Peking University 2017; Peng et al. 2019; Chen et al. 2019; Wang et al. 2021).
The research question is therefore: How have policy, survey, clinical, and community sources in mainland China transformed “family” from a field in an application file into multiple observable institutional roles since 2009, and how do those roles connect health care, mental health, education, disclosure, and material resources?
This article treats family as a set of interfaces. One side connects to a transgender person’s everyday life; the other connects to health care, schooling, housing, money, identity documents, psychological services, and community organizations. Each source illuminates only some of those interfaces. Historical synthesis requires preserving those evidentiary boundaries while tracing how the interfaces connect.
2. Sources and method: the family-interface matrix and relationship-state ledger
The article uses four groups of materials. The first consists of national medical-technology rules and related institutional texts, with particular attention to the 2009, 2017, and 2022 standards governing major gender-related surgical technologies. These texts provide the clearest formal clauses and answer when a national medical rule requires a family relationship to enter a clinical pathway (Ministry of Health 2009; National Health and Family Planning Commission 2017; National Health Commission 2022).
The second group consists of national or multi-region surveys and peer-reviewed studies. The 2017 transgender population survey provides a large community-recruited sample. Research from 2019 through 2026 measures adolescent maltreatment, parent-child conflict, mental health, family stressors, gender-identity change practices, hormone use, and disparities in health-care access (Peng et al. 2019; Chen et al. 2019; Liu et al. 2020; Wang et al. 2021; Wang et al. 2023; Li et al. 2024; Chan, Suen & Leung 2024; Hou et al. 2026; Cai et al. 2026; He et al. 2026).
The third group includes United Nations bodies, international professional organizations, public-interest institutions, and education-governance materials. UNDP’s survey of social attitudes, legal-gender-recognition review, and trans-health blueprint place family relations within wider structures of social support, medical access, and administrative procedures. WHO and international clinical standards provide classification and care frameworks. Education records show that young people simultaneously inhabit school and family institutions (UNDP China 2016, 2018a, 2018b; WHO 2022; Coleman et al. 2022; Ministry of Education 2021).
The fourth group consists of community, archival, and contemporary public records. PROJECT TRANS preserves versions of national rules; aboutTrans organizes public social-support resources chronologically; Common Language Archive preserves youth-rights discussions; and China Development Brief, The World of Chinese, Scholars at Risk, and Radio Free Asia record survey releases, campus organization, and public debate. Their source roles differ: policy mirror, resource aggregator, community archive, and contemporaneous public record. The article uses each within the evidentiary range appropriate to that role.
To keep these materials comparable, the article builds a family-interface matrix:
{time, source_population, age_scope, family_role, institutional_gate, economic_dependency, housing_dependency, disclosure_state, expression_state, violence_or_change_effort, clinical_link, support_infrastructure, source_type}
The matrix begins by asking what role family plays in a given source and then records population scope, age, institutional entry point, and evidence type. A policy clause, online community survey, school sample, and clinical study can therefore sit beside one another while retaining their distinct denominators.
A companion relationship-state ledger is designed for individual or case-level evidence. It separates dimensions often collapsed into “family support”: notification, acceptance, economic_dependence, housing_dependence, identity_disclosure, expression_negotiation, violence_or_change_effort, clinical_participation, and peer_support. A family can provide assistance in some dimensions and pressure in others. Preserving that combination is central to reconstructing family history.
3. 2009–2022: how family notification entered national medical rules
The 2009 Technical Management Standard for Sex-Reassignment Surgery (Trial) provides a clear starting point for the family interface. The standard required applicants to submit a criminal-record certificate, a relevant psychiatric diagnosis, their own written and notarized surgery request, and documentation related to having informed direct relatives of the planned surgery. It also specified age, marital status, duration of a stable desire for surgery, and prior psychological or psychiatric treatment (Ministry of Health 2009).
“Informing direct relatives” has a different institutional structure from allowing parents to substitute their decision for the applicant’s own written request. The former makes evidence of family knowledge part of the documentary chain, while the applicant remains the author of the surgery request. This distinction matters for source criticism. Public reporting, advocacy documents, and first-person accounts sometimes use broader phrases such as “family consent” or “parental approval” to describe lived barriers. The formal rule should be recorded according to its own wording as documentation of family notification. In the family-interface matrix, the clause is coded as institutional_gate=medical_document and family_role=notification_recipient.
When the 2017 standard entered the national framework for restricted clinical technologies, the applicant materials continued to include a personal notarized request, diagnosis, criminal-record documentation, and proof related to family notification. The 2022 G05 standard revised several individual eligibility conditions while continuing unmarried status, criminal-record requirements, a five-year stable desire for surgery, full civil capacity, and family notification (PROJECT TRANS 2017, 2022; National Health Commission 2022). This continuity kept a family relation embedded in the formal entry point to major surgery over more than a decade.
Hospital governance became more structured during the same period. The 2017 and 2022 frameworks elaborated ethics, multidisciplinary discussion, case databases, training, follow-up, quality control, and reporting. The family interface therefore sits between two forms of governance: external relationship documentation supplied by an applicant and internal professional governance of a restricted high-risk medical technology (National Health Commission 2018a, 2018b, 2022).
This policy history connects directly to the site’s comparative guide to the three generations of national medical rules. For family history, it raises a further question: How does a persistent family-notification requirement interact with actual acceptance, dependence on family resources, and clinical communication? Population research begins to answer that question.
4. 2017: family moves from a documentary field into population research
The 2017 Chinese Transgender Population General Survey is a major transition in the evidence history of family. It placed family, education, employment, health care, public space, and legal needs into a single transgender-specific research framework. Family moved from being a relative named in a regulatory file to a social environment measured across a large community sample (Beijing LGBT Center and Department of Sociology, Peking University 2017; China Development Brief 2017a, 2017b).
The first gain is a denominator. A national medical standard describes people entering a specific surgical pathway. A community-recruited population survey describes transgender and gender-nonconforming participants reached through social networks and organizations. Those source populations differ, and so do the questions they can support. The rule answers what a hospital must collect. The survey answers how participants describe family experience alongside other domains of life.
The survey framework also places family inside a resource structure. Many transgender people encounter identity exploration, school, employment, and housing before accessing formal gender-affirming medicine. For a young person without independent income, family can shape residence, tuition, health-care spending, and access to information. For an employed adult, family can remain relevant to marriage expectations, disclosure, and long-term care. The matrix therefore preserves economic_dependency and housing_dependency as fields separate from emotional acceptance.
The survey also created a reference point for later research questions. Lin and colleagues’ systematic review shows the rapid growth of mental-health research involving transgender and gender-nonconforming people in China, with discrimination, social support, violence, health-care need, and psychological outcomes recurring across the literature (Lin et al. 2021). Xie and colleagues’ Lancet commentary placed the need for social support in China’s transgender population into public-health debate, connecting family with wider support networks (Xie et al. 2021).
Family thus acquired three coexisting research identities: relative in a formal medical record, social environment in population research, and risk or protective context in mental-health research.
5. 2019–2021: adolescent research makes events at home measurable
Peng and colleagues’ 2019 study focused on transgender and gender-nonbinary adolescents in China. Its online sample measured parental awareness, abuse and neglect, school bullying, depression, anxiety, and suicide-related outcomes within the same study design (Peng et al. 2019). The historical importance lies in the measurement architecture: family and school environments became jointly observable through highly specific variables.
Adolescence makes overlapping interfaces especially visible. A young person can have disclosed their identity to parents while remaining dependent on the same household for shelter and money. They can encounter bullying at school while needing family assistance to reach psychological or medical care. identity_disclosure, housing_dependence, economic_dependence, and clinical_participation therefore need separate fields. A binary disclosure variable captures only one portion of that institutional reality.
Chen and colleagues’ national population study included parent-child conflict in a broader model of suicidal ideation and attempts. Wang and colleagues then used network analysis among transgender and gender-queer youth reporting parental psychological abuse, distinguishing forms of parental behavior and their links with multiple psychological symptoms (Chen et al. 2019; Wang et al. 2021). These are observational forms of evidence. They map associations and clusters of risk and are best used to describe which experiences repeatedly occur together.
School research supplies the other side of this youth environment. Wang and colleagues’ secondary-school study provides a shared school sampling frame, while Spielmann and colleagues examine contributors to mental health among transgender people in the Chinese social context. The site’s evidence history of transgender school experience traces the separate evidence chain linking school climate, bullying, and educational outcomes (Wang et al. 2020a; Spielmann et al. 2022). Family history and school history meet in the movement of young people between these two institutions every day.
6. Differentiating family pressure: stressors, violence, and management of expression
Research in the 2020s further differentiates family variables. Chan, Suen, and Leung examine family stressors and family violence among transgender and nonbinary people in China and compare experiences across gender-identity groups. Their study separates dimensions such as family acceptance, marriage and reproductive pressure, management of gender expression, and experiences of violence (Chan, Suen & Leung 2024).
This differentiation changes historical interpretation in two ways. First, acceptance and expression_negotiation become separate. Relatives may know a person’s identity while negotiating clothing, names, hairstyle, social presentation, or health-care plans in different ways. A family can also accept an identity label while holding a different position toward medical treatment, public disclosure, or marriage and reproduction.
Second, violence_or_change_effort requires its own field. Wang and colleagues’ national transgender health survey explicitly measured gender-identity conversion practice and distinguished professional from nonprofessional settings. Family-based attempts to change identity therefore enter population research as a measurable phenomenon alongside mental health, substance use, and suicidality (Wang et al. 2023). This framework allows behaviors that appear in personal narratives as persuasion, control, compelled treatment, or other forms of intervention to be compared more systematically.
Common Language Archive’s youth-rights records, national anti-bullying policy, and public documentation of campus organizations show that young people live across family and school systems at once (Common Language Archive 2021; Ministry of Education 2021; Scholars at Risk 2021; The World of Chinese 2021). Family stress can therefore interact with school participation, help-seeking, psychological health, and material pathways.
7. Health-care access: how family resources enter a treatment pathway
Research on transgender health care moves the family interface into the domain of resources. Liu and colleagues’ national population study documents differences between desire for hormones or surgery and actual access to gender-affirming care. Dahlkemper and colleagues’ report on transgender health care in China also records the significance of professional availability, information, cost, and institutional procedures (Liu et al. 2020; Dahlkemper et al. 2019).
Family can perform at least four resource roles here. The first is financial support: people who remain in education or have limited income may rely on relatives for appointments, tests, travel, medications, or surgery. The second is housing and care: treatment and postoperative recovery can depend on stable accommodation and practical assistance. The third is information and communication: younger or first-time patients may use family support to interpret diagnosis, risk, and follow-up. The fourth is the documentary interface: rules for major surgery continue to require proof related to family notification.
Recent research adds detail about hormone use and self-medication. Yang and colleagues study experience and satisfaction with different antiandrogens; Hou and colleagues document gender-identity milestones and hormone utilization; Cai and colleagues examine self-medication with gender-affirming hormones; He and colleagues analyze disparities in health care and hormone therapy by age, education, economic position, and region (Yang et al. 2024; Hou et al. 2026; Cai et al. 2026; He et al. 2026). These studies place family resources alongside a broader health-care structure. Treatment pathways are shaped jointly by material support, personal income, regional service supply, professional information, and formal rules.
UNDP’s trans-health blueprint and legal-gender-recognition review also show that medical and administrative processes connect over time (UNDP China 2018a, 2018b). Family relations can therefore reappear in different forms: medical paperwork, payment, postoperative care, and communication after identity-document changes. A family-interface history follows the whole path rather than a single surgical decision.
8. Clinical collaboration: family becomes a participant in care communication
After 2017, public support records increasingly document another family role: participant in clinical communication. aboutTrans’s social-support compilation records family education associated with the Peking University Third Hospital team, multidisciplinary and family-support practices in Shanghai, and youth-oriented multidisciplinary services with channels for communication among young people, families, and clinicians (aboutTrans 2026). Such a resource page is an aggregation layer. It is useful for locating public service history and entry points, while evaluation of clinical effectiveness requires hospital data or peer-reviewed evidence.
The role itself is historically significant. In national technical rules, family primarily enters as proof that direct relatives have been informed. In clinical communication, relatives may instead become participants in understanding diagnosis, treatment goals, risks, adolescent development, psychological status, and long-term support. Both roles can exist within the same period.
WPATH’s Standards of Care Version 8 emphasizes individualized assessment, informed consent, treatment goals, and developmental and support context for younger patients (Coleman et al. 2022). How local Chinese services implement comparable principles must be established through local institutional evidence. The international standard therefore functions here as a comparative framework for possible dimensions of clinical participation, while Chinese sources establish the historical shape of local practice.
This also demonstrates why “family support” benefits from field separation. Clinical participation may increase information and care capacity while financial dependence continues and negotiation over gender expression remains active. clinical_participation deserves an independent field so that researchers can trace what relatives actually do within a treatment pathway.
9. Parent mutual aid and community support: family also becomes support infrastructure
A further change comes from community organization. From the late 2010s into the 2020s, public resources increasingly include guidance, referral, and discussion channels intended for transgender people, parents, partners, and supporters. aboutTrans organizes hospital, community, and support information into a searchable path, placing family-oriented knowledge alongside medical and social-service entry points (aboutTrans 2026).
The key development is that family members themselves become service users. Parents may need terminology, medical-pathway information, school guidance, identity-document information, and mental-health knowledge. They may also learn from other parents. This produces a new infrastructure chain: transgender person seeks help → family communication → parent knowledge acquisition → parent peer exchange → medical or psychological referral → long-term support.
That chain connects to the site’s history of transgender advocacy infrastructure in mainland China. Advocacy infrastructure links hotlines, surveys, health care, legal support, and digital archives. Family support becomes a specialized interface within that wider system. It also creates new historical sources: parent workshops, Q&As, guides, service pages, and referral records.
Community infrastructure changes who can interpret medical rules as well. PROJECT TRANS and TGR preserve policy text, while community explainers translate age, notarization, diagnosis, family notification, and certificate triggers into practical steps (PROJECT TRANS 2017, 2022; TGR 2022; 心同网 2022). When parents gain access to those materials, family communication can move from an abstract attitude toward concrete procedures.
10. Identity disclosure and family relations: disclosure is a process variable
Research on digital gender practices underscores that identity disclosure always has an audience and a setting. A person may use one name and presentation online, another level of visibility among friends, staged communication within family, and formal legal-name or sex-marker fields in hospitals and schools (Liu 2023). The identity_disclosure field should therefore record to whom disclosure occurred, at what time, and for what institutional purpose.
The family interface is especially suited to a process model. Early conversations may center on names and clothing; later conversations may involve hormones, psychological services, surgery, or identity documents. Economic independence can reduce family control over medical spending while marriage and care expectations continue. Study or employment in another city can change housing dependence and everyday freedom of expression. Each transition can update several fields in the relationship-state ledger.
Legal gender recognition connects family relations to the documentary world. UNDP’s review shows that changes in legal sex markers interact with education, employment, social security, and other record systems (UNDP China 2018a). Document changes can create new moments of family communication around household registration, education credentials, marriage, or kinship records. Family history is therefore also a history of administrative records.
11. Age and generation: one “family” variable covers different life stages
Age is a core field for interpreting the family interface. Minors and students generally have greater economic, housing, and guardianship dependence. Entry into employment can increase income and residential autonomy. Later medical or long-term-care stages can raise the importance of family collaboration again. Combining age groups into a single “family support rate” removes these stage differences.
Peng and colleagues’ adolescent sample, Wang and colleagues’ school sample, and Li and colleagues’ youth study help illuminate early stages where family and school overlap (Peng et al. 2019; Wang et al. 2020a; Li et al. 2024). National transgender studies by Chen, Liu, and Wang cover broader ages and life situations and are more suitable for observing parent-child conflict, health-care need, and change practices across larger populations (Chen et al. 2019; Liu et al. 2020; Wang et al. 2023). Chan, Suen, and Leung add more detailed analysis of family stressors and relationship mechanisms.
The family-interface matrix therefore places age_scope and source_population first. Every percentage should answer who was recruited and at what life stage before it is interpreted as evidence about family. This ordering prevents heterogeneous samples from being assembled into an artificial year-by-year trend.
12. Counterevidence and interpretive boundaries: more records mean stronger observation
The public record on transgender family relations has grown substantially since 2009. The clearest historical inference from that growth is stronger capacity to observe. Policy versions remain accessible, community surveys widened the range of questions, peer-reviewed studies increased variable precision, service organizations created resource pages, and parent- or youth-oriented support practices generated new public records.
Each source type also has characteristic selection effects. Online recruitment reaches dispersed communities while reflecting platform access and demographic composition. Hospital sources center people who reach medical services. Adolescent samples emphasize family and school dependence. National community surveys rely on organizational networks and voluntary participation. Public service pages document visible projects more readily than informal, low-visibility, or discontinued forms of support (Lin et al. 2021; Peng et al. 2019; Wang et al. 2023).
Family violence and family support also occur within the same historical period. Relatives have multiple relationships with one another, and a person’s resources and conflicts change over time. The strongest historical formulation is therefore role differentiation and documentary densification. A family-notification clause can persist while parent peer networks expand; research on family stress can grow while clinical family education develops.
Source language requires the same discipline. The formal rule’s “informing direct relatives,” a questionnaire variable such as “parental psychological abuse,” community language about “parental approval,” and a service goal such as “family support” belong to different evidentiary genres. The relationship-state ledger preserves the original field before cross-source interpretation.
13. Original synthesis: from one support variable to an auditable history of family interfaces
The family-interface matrix can split one historical object into multiple records. For the formal surgical pathway, a record might read:
time=2022; family_role=notification_recipient; institutional_gate=G05 surgical eligibility; notification=required_documentation; source_type=national medical rule
A lived family relationship might instead be represented as:
acceptance=partial; economic_dependence=high; housing_dependence=medium; identity_disclosure=known_to_parent; expression_negotiation=ongoing; clinical_participation=active; peer_support=available
The two records connect institutional requirements with lived relations without substituting one for the other. A research system can then ask more precise questions: Why did family enter medical documentation at a particular time? Which studies measured family conflict and mental health together? Which services made parents participants in care? Does economic independence alter particular family interfaces? Which changes concern documentary practices, and which are supported across multiple independent source types?
The matrix is designed for future extension. A new national rule can create a new institutional_gate version. A new population survey can add denominators and measurement instruments. Hospital evaluations can enrich clinical_link. Community archives can add support_infrastructure. Each addition retains its source date, population scope, and source role.
This structure is especially useful for AI-assisted retrieval. Search systems can easily compress “family notification,” “parental consent,” “family support,” and “parental abuse” into near-synonyms. The family-interface matrix requires preservation of the original term and its institutional location. An agent can first classify the source type and then place evidence into the appropriate field, keeping formal rules, survey variables, and lived experience distinct.
Conclusion: family history as a history of denser interfaces
Public evidence from mainland China between 2009 and 2026 shows family becoming an institutional interface with multiple differentiated roles. The 2009, 2017, and 2022 national medical-technology standards repeatedly bring notification of direct relatives into the pathway for major surgery. The 2017 national survey brings family acceptance and support into large-scale transgender population research. From 2019 onward, studies of adolescents, mental health, family stressors, and change practices increase the precision of family variables. Clinical and community resources then position relatives within health education, health-care communication, parent mutual aid, and professional referral.
The family-interface matrix organizes these source types within a common coordinate system. The relationship-state ledger preserves acceptance, dependence, negotiation of expression, conflict, clinical participation, and peer support as coexisting dimensions. Together they support one historical conclusion: a major transformation of the past decade and a half is the increase in documentary density, number of institutional interfaces, and differentiation of family roles.
The framework also identifies a concrete research agenda. Local implementation of family-notification rules, the effect of household resources on treatment pathways, the formation of parent-support networks across cities, coordination of youth autonomy and family participation, and the effect of identity-document changes on family records all require more local archives, service data, longitudinal interviews, and cross-regional studies. As new evidence becomes public, a family-interface history can add source roles and relationship fields while preserving the complexity of lived relationships.
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- 国家卫生健康委办公厅. 2022. “国家卫生健康委办公厅关于印发国家限制类技术目录和临床应用管理规范(2022年版)的通知(国卫办医发〔2022〕6号).” https://www.nhc.gov.cn/yzygj/s7657/202204/2efe9f8ca13f499c8e1f70844fe96144.shtml
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- Beijing LGBT Center and Department of Sociology, Peking University. 2017. Chinese Transgender Population General Survey Report: Transgender and Gender-Nonconforming People. https://chinadevelopmentbrief.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/2017-Chinese-Transgender-Population-General-Survey-Report.pdf
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- UNDP China. 2016. Being LGBTI in China: A National Survey on Social Attitudes towards Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Gender Expression. https://www.undp.org/china/publications/being-lgbti-china
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- 中华人民共和国教育部. 2020/2021. “关于政协十三届全国委员会第三次会议第3423号(教育类360号)提案答复的函.” https://www.moe.gov.cn/jyb_xxgk/xxgk_jyta/jyta_ddb/202101/t20210119_510389.html
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- Radio Free Asia. 2014. “性少数学生仍遭歧视 维权者吁高校建公平友善环境.” https://www.rfa.org/mandarin/yataibaodao/kejiaowen/xl1-09112014092127.html
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