Over There. Over There…

Overseas there are a couple of trans items in the news; the first stop is China

China: Limited victory for man in transgender dismissal case
BBC
3 January 2017

Mr C, who was born female but identifies and dresses as a man, was working at a health centre in Guiyang last year when he was fired.

The court said he had been illegally dismissed, but said there was not enough evidence to rule he had been fired due to discrimination against transgender people.

Mr C told AFP news agency that he was "quite happy" with the outcome.

But he said that the court's decision to reject discrimination as the cause showed that "legislation in this field requires greater attention".

So the court found he was fired illegally but not because of discrimination.

In the end the court's ruling was a limited victory - awarding Mr C compensation but not ruling that he was dismissed because of his transgender status.

China's courts are not independent, and a politically sensitive case like this would have attracted the attention of the country's central authorities.

Talk about a “cop out,”  yeah it was illegal to fire him but we don’t think it was because he is trans. Then what was the reason he was fired? They totally ignored the reason why he was fired.

Next we take a look at Japan.

Doctors push for policy change following transgender inmate case
Japan Times
January 4, 2017

Last June a 30-year-old transgender female inmate convicted of killing her boyfriend filed a lawsuit against the government demanding to be allowed to receive hormone therapy.

According to the complaint submitted to the Tokyo District Court, the plaintiff was born a man but was diagnosed with gender identity disorder as a teenager. After taking female hormones every day in a bid to match her mental and physical identity and undergoing gender-reassignment surgery, she changed her sex to “female” on her official family registry in 2006.

In February 2015, the woman was arrested for murdering her boyfriend, 48, and transferred to the Tokyo Detention House the following month. According to her lawyer, the facility did not allow her to take female hormones and she became mentally unstable, repeatedly asking “whether she would return to being a man.” She then became unable to communicate well with other people.

With having surgery and not getting the proper hormone treatment she is at grave risk of bone disorders.

A sudden break in the administration of hormones may not only cause depression and other conditions but also lead to osteoporosis and arterial sclerosis in the long run, Nakatsuka said.

I hope that for her sake they do start hormone therapy before it becomes too late.a