PRIDE - The life of Audrey Tang by Jess Dam

June is PRIDE month🌈, a moment for those who identify as LGBTQIA+ and their allies, to pause and reflect on how far they have come but also celebrate the breadth, strength and beauty of experience within the community. These articles aim to inspire you through the stories of resilience, strength and determination within the LGBTQIA+ community. 

This article was written by Jess Dam, a Software Engineering Alumni at Starling Bank

On the topic of pride month, I’d like to take the opportunity to talk about Audrey Tang - an extraordinary pioneer in the world of software engineering and social equality, someone definitely worth knowing about! 

Tang has achieved a great number of firsts, including being both the first openly transgender and non-binary cabinet member in the world, as well as the youngest minister to join Taiwan’s government. 

Born in 1981, Audrey was considered a child prodigy, consistently getting an IQ of 180, the highest achievable score for children. However, Audrey left education at 14, reflecting on their time at school as “more of a hardship than a pleasure”. Their ability to understand concepts before they were taught by teachers made them a threat among their classmates in Taiwan’s competitive academic landscape; Audrey was often bullied as a result. 

Tang decided to further educate themselves through the internet, which after spending time studying languages abroad allowed them to learn from academics across the world. From here, they went on to establish a company at the age of 16 and moved to Silicon Valley at 19; some of their work included developing software at Apple that would eventually become part of Siri. 

Audrey was born male and began transitioning to female at 24. When they were 25, they changed their name to the gender ambiguous Feng (鳳), and Audrey for western languages - preferring “They” over “She” or “He”. Audrey has previously commented that their transition was “not difficult at all”, because of the support they found among LGBTQIA+ groups online.

“If you can easily reach 5,000 people and their stories of transition, then it’s just like joining a tribe of people and less like embarking on an unknown venture,” Tang noted.

In their ministerial application to government, Audrey drew two additional check boxes, declaring both their gender and party affiliation as “none”, becoming the first non-binary minister worldwide; in their current position they work to make circumstances such as theirs more widely accepted in mainstream society.

Despite starting their career from a very young age and working for a large US tech firm, some of their most notable work stems from the Sunflower Movement. On 18th March 2014, many young activists and students took over the Taiwanese government building for 24 days, in a peaceful protest against an attempt to discreetly pass a trade deal with Beijing without a vote - which would have increased the chances of the country being absorbed by the People’s Republic of China.

Tang helped to provide the equipment and infrastructure to broadcast the students’ message and efforts from inside parliament to the rest of the world, as part of a civil hacktivist group called G0v. Their involvement led to Audrey being hired by the government, rather than being persecuted for their actions. 

Tang announced their retirement at age 33, stating that they would spend the rest of their life doing the things they enjoyed, including the role of Digital Minister. At Apple, Tang was paid 1 bitcoin per hour which then rose exponentially in value, making them extremely wealthy.

Audrey has the strong belief that citizens should have access to government data, rather than blindly trusting the government, and government decisions should be driven by open-sourced ideas of the public, rather than the decisions of a select few. 

Open-source is a term commonly used in software development for apps where the code is available to the public, and anyone can contribute to building it. In this case, Tang uses this to describe transparency in government and enabling the public’s opinion to guide government action.

Taiwan now uses a large amount of “Collective Intelligence”, using platforms such as pol.is, which is a website where citizens can post ideas, but others cannot comment on them, only using “agree” or “disagree” buttons to help decide which ideas should be acted upon in government. 

Other work Audrey can be credited for includes enabling Taiwan to be the first Asian country to legalise same-sex marriage, making broadband a human right for Taiwanese people, and holding social media companies operating in Taiwan more accountable. 

Unusually, Tang describes themselves as a “conservative anarchist”, which is someone who doesn’t believe in societal hierarchy, but acknowledges that the ideology has issues when taken to the extremes . Audrey’s traits enable them to have an incredibly unique and unbiased perspective to politics and problem solving, as neither male or female, and not belonging to any one party. 

“There is no half of the world which is different from me” they stated.

During a hackathon in 2019, an app to track mask availability using the Google maps API had emerged as a response to the rise of Covid-19 in the nearby Wu Han. 

Tang helped to ensure the government’s APIs were tailored to better provide the information the developers needed for this app, which was released in January - before the World Health Organisation (WHO) had even declared a pandemic.

The app even enabled users to notify the government when mask supplies were low in an area, so that they were able to update their mask distribution algorithm to ensure masks could be provided more equally.

The acceleration of tech development has allowed for a more streamlined, ”digital democracy” in Taiwan. This has provided enormous benefits for Covid-19 efforts, including helping to prevent misinformation by posting memes in response to fake news that provided scientist-backed information in a “humour over rumour” approach. 

Taiwan did not have to go into lockdown, unlike much of the rest of the world during 2020 and 2021, and suffered from very few fatalities.

Tang has found many ingenious ways to contribute to the LBGTQIA+ community with their profound understanding of the tech industry and social change. Tang has become a fundamental component for the rapid growth of the tech industry and the advent of digital democracy across Taiwan.

Audrey believes that a bigger open-source culture could help Taiwanese start-ups to pursue growth in the way Google has. Google can contribute much of their huge success to the free open-source Linux operating system, which runs in all android phones and many other Google devices.

Want to know more about inclusion or the world of software engineering? Feel free to join some of the many events coming up as part of Pride month and beyond for more insight!

In the spirit of Audrey - thanks for reading and have a good local time :spock-hand: 

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