The Courts

Many countries that we think of as progressive still lag behind in our human rights such as Japan where the courts just ruled on whether we have to be sterilized in order to change our documents.

Japan court lets transgender man change official status without sterilisation in legal first
Ruling comes months after supreme court ruled that requiring sterilisation before a change of gender in official records was unconstitutional
The Guardian
Associated Press
7 February 2024

A court in western Japan has approved a transgender man’s request to have his gender changed in official records without undergoing sterilisation surgery, the first known ruling of its kind since the country’s top court struck down a surgery requirement for such record changes.

Tacaquito Usui, 50, could get the gender listed for him in his family registry updated to male, the Okayama family court’s Tsuyama branch ruled on Wednesday. Usui’s original application for the revision was rejected five years ago.

“It’s like I’m standing at the start line of my new life,” he said during a televised news conference after the ruling came out. “I’m so excited.”

Japan’s supreme court ruled in October that a provision of a 20-year-old law that made the removal of reproductive organs a precondition for the legal recognition of gender changes was unconstitutional. The ruling, however, applied only to the sterilisation provision and did not address the constitutionality of requiring other procedures.

They are still in the dark ages because…

The law that the supreme court addressed in its ruling took effect in 2004. It stated that individuals who wanted to register a gender change needed to have reproductive organs, including testes or ovaries, removed. They also were required to have a body that “appears to have parts that resemble the genital organs” of their expressed gender.

More than 10,000 Japanese have since had their gender officially changed, according to court documents from a separate court case. A court in central Japan noted in last year’s case that sterilisation surgery was not required in most of the approximately 50 European and central Asian countries that have laws that allow the gender on official documents to be changed.

We think of Japan being a very progressive country but they are still living in the past when it come to us. Trans people for many reason do not have surgery, the whole purpose of transitioning is to relieve the dysphoria, for some it require surgical intervention, for other it is hormones, and for others it may be just social intervention is needed. For some surgical intervention is life threatening and any surgery could cost them their lives why should they be forced to put their life on the line to change their documents?