Audrey Tang (; born 18 April 1981) is a Taiwanese free software programmer and the inaugural Minister of Digital Affairs of the Republic of China (Taiwan), who has been described as one of the "ten greatest Taiwanese computing personalities". In August 2016, Tang was invited to join Taiwan's Executive Yuan as a minister without portfolio, making her the first transgender and the first non-binary official in the top executive cabinet. Tang has identified as "post-gender" and accepts "whatever pronoun people want to describe me with online." Tang is a community leader of Haskell and Perl and the core member of G0v. Early life Tang was born to father Tang Kuang-hua and mother Lee Ya-ching. Lee Ya-ching helped develop Taiwan's first consumer co-operative, and co-developed an experimental primary school employing indigenous teachers. Tang was a child prodigy, reading works of classical literature before the age of five, advanced mathematics before six, and programming before eight, and she began to learn Perl at age 12. Tang spent part of her childhood in Germany. Two years later, she dropped out of junior high school, unable to adapt to student life. By the year 2000, at the age of 19, Tang had already held positions in software companies, and worked in California's Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur. In late 2005, Tang began transitioning to female, including changing her English and Chinese names, citing a need to reconcile her outward appearance with her self-image. In 2017, Tang said, "I've been shutting reality off, and lived almost exclusively on the net for many years, because my brain knows for sure that I am a woman, but the social expectations demand otherwise." In 2019, Tang identified as "post-gender" or non-binary, responding to a request regarding pronoun preferences with "What’s important here is not which pronouns you use, but the experience...about those pronouns... I’m not just non-binary. I’m really whatever, so do whatever." The television news channel ETToday reported that Tang has an IQ of 180. Tang has been a vocal proponent for autodidacticism and individualist anarchism. Free software contributions Tang initiated and led the Pugs project, a joint effort from the Haskell and Perl communities to implement the Perl 6 language; Tang also made contributions to internationalization and localization efforts for several Free Software programs, including SVK (a version-control software written in Perl for which Tang also wrote a large portion of the code), Request Tracker, and