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Japan's Supreme Court upholds transgender sterilization requirement
Those who wish to change their gender on official documents must have their original reproductive organs removed, according to the 2004 law.
Japan’s Supreme Court has upheld a law that effectively requires transgender people to be sterilized before they can have their gender changed on official documents.
The court said the law is constitutional because it was meant to reduce confusion in families and society. But it acknowledged that it restricts freedom and could become out of step with changing social values.
[...] [Takakito] Usui, 45, had appealed to the top court after he unsuccessfully requested lower courts to grant him legal recognition as male without having his female reproductive glands surgically removed.
Despite the unanimous decision, presiding justice Mamoru Miura joined another justice in saying that while the law may not violate the constitution, “doubts are undeniably emerging,” according to Usui’s lawyer, Tomoyasu Oyama.
The two judges proposed regular reviews of the law and appropriate measures “from the viewpoint of respect for personality and individuality,” according to Japanese media reports.
[...] Japan does not legally recognize same-sex marriages. As LGBTQ rights awareness has gradually grown in recent years, some municipalities have begun issuing partnership certificates to ease problems in renting apartments and other areas, but they are not legally binding.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 27 2019, @09:26PM (10 children)
This made sense up until you brought in politics. Trans womanhood exists without reference to any particular means of social organization (capitalist/communist/whatever). Furturemore you completely erase the existence of right-wing trans women. Caitlyn Jenner is an obvious example, and so-called "based traps" have recently risen to prominance in the alt-right movement, but trans women have always been represented among supporters of capitalism. Historically, only the very wealthiest trans women have had the resources to transition.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday January 27 2019, @09:43PM (8 children)
Caitlyn Jenner is a disgusting example of humanity. Just goes to show you a new pair of boobs doesn't make someone a better person, ugh. She cares about no one but herself.
I had never heard of the "based trap" phenomenon, but the term itself absolutely reeks of low-intelligence, smirking, overprivileged, thoughtless alt-righthood. "Trap" itself is one of those terms that gets transwomen killed, since it's a justification for "trans panic" murders, which are depressingly common. Sounds to me like they've done the equivalent of, well, what Jenner did, and become the right wing's "pet trannies."
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @12:08AM (7 children)
There exists a strong current in the alt-right which holds as cis women, mislead by feminist ideology, abandon traditional female gender roles trans women are a better alternative. Everything about femininity that cis women are taught is demeaning or wrong are intensely desirable for trans women, who largely escaped that conditioning. Realizing a traditional family dynamic has become very difficult for cis women, but trans women are eager to fill the void. And men are recognizing that.
Not only is the "trad[itional] trap waifu" currently a popular archetype among the alt-right, it's spreading in popularity as trans women transition earlier (to much better results) and cis women continue to double down on imitating the worst parts of masculinity. In the near future's "house with a white picket fence," the wife will likely have (or have had) a penis.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday January 28 2019, @01:38AM (6 children)
...i figured it had to be something like that. Ew, ew, ew. So this comes down to exactly what feminism was always fighting to begin with, and exactly as I feared on reading your earlier post, we have transwomen over-compensating and over-feminizing themselves to stay alive in a rightward-trending milieu.
That will end very, very badly for them. What a shitshow. And now I've got some more understanding of what feeds the fires of "gender-critical" feminism.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @03:55AM
It's probably more of the psychology of trans-women than any kind of overcompensation. A man raised in patriarchal society doesn't want to become a woman who wants to escape patriarchy - but rather to take the place assigned to a woman in patriarchy.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @04:31AM (4 children)
There's no standard of reference for being "overly-feminine" except individual tastes and preferences. A trans woman who celebrates a demure and submissive idea of womanhood is precisely feminine enough for her. And her partner. Whether some third party thinks it too much or too little femininity is altogether beside the point.
Nor is this merely some survival mechanism. Many trans women find joy and genuine fulfillment in these arrangements. Perhaps much like the (underrepresented) majority of housewives in 1950s American, who found traditional femininity empowering.
There's a certain poetry to how trans women are rediscovering the soul of femininity. A bit like finding the essence of the "American dream" in an immigrant neighborhood and not a WASPy country club. Competition is great for any market.
Those with the privilege of being incumbant players (cis women) will naturally complain, but everybody will find a place in the new equillibrium.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday January 28 2019, @05:17AM (3 children)
Modded +1 Interesting, as the same had occurred to me, but the dark side here is that the alt-right men have some very specific and very dehumanizing ideas about a "woman's place." I can only hope the transwomen playing into the "based trap" (ugh) archetype understand that this isn't some kind of kinky BDSM roleplay; this is for-real patriarchy with a capital P, the kind the *First Wave* suffered and died to fight off.
...also, it's hilarious how the notoriously homophobic alt-right is suddenly having no problem with having sex with people born males.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @12:39PM (2 children)
The third or fourth largest board on the infamous 8chan is /cuteboys/. Food for thought (and maybe other things).
If first-wave feminists had understood their plight as "kinky BDSM roleplay," they might have enjoyed it. Obviously true consent was impossible given the laws and social mores of the time, but today's circumstances are probably robust enough to support this lifestyle. Which isn't so bad in the first place.
Take the common meme that "a woman's place is in the kitchen." For a trans woman, being limited to this "woman's place" might be very gender-affirming. Certainly a breath of fresh air after a lifetime's confinement to often more restrictice male roles. The only problem arises when society tries to enforce this on every woman unilaterally. But, online shitposting aside, that's not likely to happen. We're just seeing pent-up demand for a good hitherto unavailable on the market being satisfied by new entrants. Most white Americans won't deign to pick fruit or scrub toilets, but Latinos use these jobs to vastly improve their living conditions. Likewise modern women vis-a-vis trans women regarding "martini and a blowjob"-style homemaking.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday January 29 2019, @01:44AM (1 child)
If it works for them, then more power to them, but the instant things go sour, we're going to see a wave of dead transwomen that makes the already-horrific carnage they face look like a vacation in Maui. These men are not stable or sane and transwomen are some of the most vulnerable people in the nation; what will happen the day one of these alt-righters suddenly has, for example, a hardcore religious experience and becomes violently homo- and trans-phobic? His transwoman wife is deader than disco, and will be LUCKY if all that happens to her is getting her head blown off with a shotgun, and sure as hell the local "justice" system will care nothing for her. She'll be as disposable as she would have been on the street, and believe me, in the course of the anti-trafficking work I've done, I've seen exactly how disposable people in that position are...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 29 2019, @09:28PM
It's amazing to read how far some people goes on hating. "Men" aren't willing to hurt you.
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Sunday January 27 2019, @10:18PM
My analysis here is a fundamentally political analysis, because the political process is how we decide to fund this women's shelter or that LGBT clinic or make preventative health services such as pap smears and mammograms available and to whom. I did not mean to imply that LGBT identities are primarily or only political identities. What I am saying is that capitalism is incapable of meeting the needs of the working class, and by implication is incapable of meeting the needs of LGBT people, women, racial minorities, etc in the working class.
Right-wing trans women like Caitlyn Jenner and pseudo-left trans women like Brianna Wu are well taken care of by the capitalist system. I erase them from my analysis, because their concerns are bourgeois concerns. The world they exist in is completely alien to the world the vast majority of trans women exist in.
Alt-right trans women in the working class occupy a precarious position. They will be eaten alive by fascism when it turns on them. Any noises that proto-fascists are making right now about LGBT acceptance will be as meaningless as Donald Trump inviting bourgeois trans women into the bourgeois women's room in Trump Tower while he creates the legal basis of the exclusion of working class trans women from working class women's rooms!
And I suppose if they are not eaten alive by fascism, well, that's worth something I suppose, perhaps a victory for a tiny intersectional struggle, though I do not know what else.
I am rejecting identity politics, because identity politics are right-wing politics. Identity politics seek to change LGBT identities into political identities, and that is wrong for the historical reasons you note. Changing LGBT identities into fundamentally political identities is historical revisionism and plays straight into the notion that these people are somehow a completely new phenomenon, never before seen in all of human history.