Recently I found myself in a very…interesting and enlightening conversation with a few local Taiwanese girls.  It all started when we were trying to decide if our waiter was a boy or a girl– a situation we have found ourselves in more than a few times.  This confusion is due to boys tendency to have long (styled) hair, earrings, tight pants and bright color shirts coupled with the girls tendency to wear loose collared shirts, baggy pants, and a shaggy/mullet-like haircut.  Add those two together and you’re bound to have come gender-identity issues.  (I also want to point out that this is not meant to be a generalization for the Taiwanese population as a whole, but merely pointing out a noticeable fad.)

So this initiates the “girls looking like boys” topic.  Since there are a lot of single-gender high schools and junior high schools, girls don’t feel as pressured to look like the latest supermodel…which consequently leads to the following:

“Actually, its really popular to be lesbian at an all girls high school.  Its cool and trendy.  A lot of girls decide to be lesbian during high school, but then it’s not cool in college so they go back to being straight.”

There you go…homosexuality: the latest fad (??)

I haven’t inquired about all-boy schools yet…