Advertisement
Hong Kong’s landmark transgender ruling: will the rest of Asia now follow suit?
- Mainland China, Singapore, South Korea and Japan all require trans people to undergo reassignment surgery to have their gender identity recognised
- So did Hong Kong, until a recent ruling that advocates hope will influence regional debate on trans people’s rights – including in Thailand
Reading Time:5 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
7
LGBTQ advocates are hopeful that a landmark court ruling on transgender rights in Hong Kong earlier this month will create a legal ripple effect granting greater official recognition for trans people living elsewhere in Asia.
Advertisement
Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal ruled on February 6 that it breached transgender people’s rights for the government to require them to undergo full sex reassignment surgery as a precondition for using their preferred gender on their identity cards.
A similar surgery requirement is also imposed by authorities in mainland China, Singapore, South Korea and Japan.
Taiwan has the requirement too, but judges there have since 2019 been granting ad hoc exemptions to it, leading a lower court judge to file a case with the self-ruled island’s Constitutional Court to clear up the legal uncertainty.
That case was ultimately rejected on a technicality – it needed to have been filed by an ordinary citizen – but one of the presiding judges cited the Hong Kong court’s earlier decision as a reason for the constitutionality of a surgery requirement being “highly questionable”.
Advertisement