Hong Kong’s top court rules surgery not needed to register gender change
The legal challenge was brought in 2019 by Henry Edward Tse and another person — who was identified only as “Q” — against the Commissioner of Registration after an official refused to review their gender status on their Hong Kong identity cards. The two transgender men have successfully amended their gender markers on their British passports.
In 2019 and 2022, two lower courts in Hong Kong rejected Q and Tse’s appeal, siding with the government that a transgender person is required to undergo a full sex reassignment surgery to amend their gender marker.
The procedure would include the removal of their uterus and ovaries and the construction of male genitalia, which Tse said could be a risky surgery that could lead to complications in patients, and the challenge asked to scrap such a prerequisite.
In a judgment released Monday afternoon, the court reasoned that the kind of “incongruence” that most commonly caused problems for transgender people arose out of discordance “between the gender marker and a transgender person’s outward appearance,” and not the appearance of the “genital area.”
“The policy’s consequence is to place persons like the appellants in the dilemma of having to choose whether to suffer regular violations of their privacy rights or to undergo highly invasive and medically unnecessary surgery, infringing their right to bodily integrity. Clearly this does not reflect a reason balance,” the court wrote.
Outside the court Monday, Tse said the ruling is “delayed justice.”
“We all dreamt that we will not be outed by our ID cards anymore, that we will no longer be rejected to cross borders and come back to Hong Kong, our home, and be stripped of our rights to marry and establish a family with the opposite sex. In every aspect of everyday life, our dignity has been damaged,” Tse said.
“This case should never have happened in the first place.”