The Japanese Supreme Court has ruled that transgendered people must be sterilized if they wish to update their documentation.
The Japanese supreme court has ruled in favor of a law that requires transgender people to get sterilized in order to update their documents.
The case was brought by Takakito Usui, a trans man who wanted to update his papers but was told that he couldn’t because of a 2004 law that requires a trans person to have “a body which appears to have parts that resemble the genital organs of those of the opposite gender.”
“The essential thing should not be whether you have had an operation or not, but how you want to live as an individual,” Usui said.
He appealed, but lost when a four-judge panel unanimously agreed that the law was constitutional.
The court ruled that the government had an interest in limiting societal “confusion” and “abrupt changes.”
Words fail me.