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OpinionLetters

Letters | For Hong Kong’s transgender people, gender identity doesn’t always hinge on the biological body

  • Readers discuss the role of gender affirming surgery in the lives of transgender Hongkongers, and an app that some in the transgender community have found useful

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Henry Edward Tse holds a fai chun carrying the Chinese characters for “victory” outside the Court of Final Appeal on February 6 after the court handed down a landmark ruling finding that the authorities’ refusal to allow two transgender people to use their preferred gender on their identity cards without undergoing full reassignment surgery had breached their rights. Photo: Edmond So
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The Court of Final Appeal ruled that the commissioner of registration’s policy which insists upon “full sex reassignment surgery” before a “female to male transgender person” is permitted an amendment to the gender marker on their identity card violates the appellants’ rights under Article 14 of the Bill of Rights and is unconstitutional.

The general public may be curious about the role of “sex reassignment surgery” – or “gender affirming surgery”, the term many transgender people prefer – in the lives of transgender people.

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Some transgender people do see gender affirming surgery as vitally important and undertake gender affirming surgeries with different levels of intrusiveness and risk. However, not all transgender people would like to undergo gender affirming surgery or they may have concerns about the surgery.

A study of 234 Hong Kong transgender people – the largest-scale study on Hong Kong’s transgender population – that I conducted in 2019-2020 in collaboration with Transgender Resource Centre showed that 28.4 per cent of the participants had received or were receiving hormone treatment, 31 per cent wanted it someday, 14.7 per cent were not sure, and 25.9 per cent did not want it.
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Among the 93 participants assigned male at birth, 9.7 per cent had undergone or were having facial feminisation surgery, 8.8 per cent had undergone or were having top/chest/breast surgery, 13 per cent had undergone or were having an orchidectomy (removal of testes), and 13 per cent had undergone or were having genital surgery.

While 40 per cent of them wanted to have some feminising surgeries someday, 19.6 to 29.7 per cent said they were not sure, and 24.7 to 29.3 per cent said they did not want to undergo the surgeries.

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