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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) 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.