Japan court lets transgender man change official status without sterilisation in legal first
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.
The Okayama court found that the hormone therapy Usui received made him eligible for gender affirmation. Usui welcomed the recognition, saying he thought the law in Japan might be evolving faster than public awareness.
Many LGBTQ+ people in Japan still hide their sexual orientations and gender identities due to fear of discrimination at work and schools. The country remains the only Group of Seven member state that does not allow same-sex marriage.
Activists have pressed for greater rights and protections. But change has come slowly in a country led by a conservative government that sticks to traditional paternalistic values and is reluctant to accept gender, sexual and family diversity.
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.