Hong Kong’s LGBTI community needs legal protection from discrimination, not just awareness campaigns

Most arguments against any advocacy for minority rights boil down to this: “You’re doing just fine the way things are. There’s no need for change.” One could facilely wield the same logic against LGBTI people in Hong Kong, who seem to be in no immediate danger, at least not when compared to those living through ridicule and life-threatening ordeals elsewhere – in Ecuador, for instance, where gay men have been subject to “corrective rape” at unlicensed rehab clinics, or in Indonesia where transwomen were reportedly stripped and beaten by the police and forced to cut their hair in public earlier this year. 

We can all learn something from this quick history lesson – the status quo has never been sacred or immutable. And once we shake off our sense of complacency, we begin to discern the lingering presence of cruelty, prejudice and discrimination against our LGBTI community today: transgender people cannot change the gender on their ID cards without completing sex reassignment surgery, and proposals to replace this rigid rule with alternative, more humane requirements have been met with searing opposition; a lesbian expat who previously won her case to obtain a dependent visa from the Immigration Department for her partner is now facing an appeal from the government; and, intersex people continue to struggle in their fight against intrusive and irreversible treatments on unknowing children. The list goes on.