HRW urges Japan to change transgender ‘sterilisation’ law
TOKYO: Japan should ‘urgently’ revise a law that effectively requires transgender people to be surgically sterilised if they want legal recognition of their gender identity, Human Rights Watch said yesterday.
Under rules introduced in 2004, transgender people who wish to change their official documents must appeal to a family court and meet a set of strict criteria.
Applicants are required to be without reproductive capacity, effectively requiring most people to be sterilised to meet the criteria.
They must also be single and without children under the age of 20, and undergo a psychiatric evaluation to receive a diagnosis of “gender identity disorder”.
“Japan should uphold the rights of transgender people and stop forcing them to undergo surgery to be legally recognised,” said Kanae Doi, Japan director at Human Rights Watch
“The law is based on an outdated premise that treats gender identity as a so- called ‘ mental illness’ and should be urgently revised,” she added.
The statement accompanies a report by the rights group which includes interviews with 48 transgender people, as well as with lawyers, health providers, and other experts on the issue.
It criticises the law as based on a “pejorative notion that a transgender identity is a mental health condition” and criticises the requirement that transgender people “undergo lengthy, expensive, invasive, and irreversible medical procedures”.
“Why do we have to put a scalpel through our healthy bodies just for (the) sake of the country’s order?” the report quotes a transgender man as saying. “It is humiliating.” The World Health Organisation has removed “gender identity disorders” from the “mental disorders” section of its new International Classification of Diseases, the rights group noted. — AFP