Asia-Pacific Week 2006 Japanese Studies Graduate Summer School ABSTRACT

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In July 2003, Japan passed a law permitting transgendered persons to change their legal gender identity in accord with evolving international concepts of gender-based human rights. Ironically, the law impinges on the bodily integrity and reproductive freedom of transgendered people by its insistence that legal gender cannot be amended in the absence of sexual reassignment surgery ("SRS"), a procedure which sterilizes the patient. The situation for transgendered people in Japan is exacerbated by a mandatory national registry system ("koseki") long-implicated as a tool of discrimination in a variety of contexts. This article reviews the failure of equal protection claims by transgendered plaintiffs in Japanese courts and critiques both sex and gender classifications in the law and their relationship to concepts of natural law. Remedies for transgender discrimination include the abolition of gender categories in the law and, specific to Japan, tighter administrative control over legal identification documents.

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