Japan’s Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that a law requiring transgender people to have their reproductive organs removed in order to officially change their gender is unconstitutional. The decision by the top court’s 15-judge Grand Bench was its first on the constitutionality of Japan’s 2003 law requiring the removal of gonads for a state-recognized gender change, a practice long criticized by international rights and medical groups.
The case was filed by a plaintiff whose request for a gender change in her family registry — to female from her biologically assigned male — was turned down by lower courts. The decision comes at a time of heightened awareness of issues surrounding LGBTQ+ people in Japan and is a victory for that community.
Currently, transgender people who want to have their biologically assigned gender changed on family registries and other official documents must be diagnosed as having Gender Identity Disorder and undergo an operation to remove their gonads. International rights and medical groups have criticized the 2003 law as inhumane and outdated. Activists have stepped up efforts to pass an anti-discrimination law since a former aide to Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said in February that he wouldn’t want to live next to LGBTQ+ people and that citizens would flee Japan if same-sex marriage were allowed.
But changes have come slowly and Japan remains the only Group of Seven member that does not allow same-sex marriage or legal protections, including an effective anti-discrimination law.
The plaintiff, who is only identified as a resident in western Japan, originally filed the request in 2000, saying the surgery requirement forces a huge burden economically and physically and that it violates the constitution’s equal rights protections. Rights groups and the LGBTQ+ community in Japan have been hopeful for a change in the law after a local family court, in an unprecedented ruling earlier this month, accepted a transgender male’s request for a gender change without the compulsory surgery, saying the rule is unconstitutional.
The special law that took effect in 2004 states that people who wish to register a gender change must have their original reproductive organs, including testes or ovaries, removed and have a body that “appears to have parts that resemble the genital organs” of the new gender they want to register with.