Japan’s Transgender Community Under Quiet Siege
Sharp horns, beady eyes, and gnashing teeth represent the souls of jealous and tormented women-turned-demons — Hannya. Masks of this kind were common in Noh theater production art and have remained present in Japanese irezumi tattoos. Across the Pacific at a tattoo shop in California, my artist laid the stencil for a bright blue Hannya just below my sternum. He noted my obvious decade-old top surgery scars where the horns neatly stop. Presumably, to assuage my nerves, he said, “My wife’s friend just had top surgery.”
It is difficult to imagine such a conversation occurring in a tattoo shop in Japan, where — according to the Ipsos LGBT+ Pride 2021 Global Survey — only 34% of the nation supports LGBTQ individuals being universally open with their identity. This bias skews so severely that in 2003, Japan’s National Diet passed Act №111: The Act on Special Cases in Handling Gender Status for Persons with Gender Identity Disorder to mandate trans people become cis-passing through a series of medical procedures — including genital surgery — before they are allowed to legally change their gender marker. More specifically, the law requires the following from an applicant:
Must be 20 years of age or older
Unmarried
Have no minor children
Have no reproductive glands or have reproductive glands that have permanently lost function
And have external genitalia which appears to resemble that of their desired gender marker.
However clearly this reads to fresh eyes as the eugenic forcible sterilization of transgender people, Japanese lawmakers disagree. It should be noted that only once in the nation’s 12,000-year history have LGBT citizens’ rights been called into question — then, at the behest of Western colonizers (1872–1880). At the time of Act №111’s introduction in the early aughts, it was a revolutionary inclusion of trans issues when LGBT rights were being fought in brutal political theater across the globe. Today, as at its signing, it is as much a relic as the 19th Century law before it.
The idea that any trans person applying for a gender marker change could somehow circumnavigate their path through medical or even social transition without turning heads due to the innumerable ways in which a second puberty fails to meet societal expectations is laughable. Transition is neither immediate nor linear. According to the Callen-Lorde Center’s Protocols for the Provision of Hormone Replacement Therapy, it can take as little as one month to see changes and as long as six years. If one must simply be on hormone replacement therapy to qualify for a gender marker change, then an applicant could be at any stage of transition imaginable and therefore ‘cis-passing’ or not.
One cannot assimilate in the apparent blink of an eye — unless, of course, you are Caitlyn Jenner or Elliot Page, a wealthy celebrity with limitless funds to put toward your transition. For the average trans person, the cost of surgery, hormone replacement therapy, hair removal procedures, gender-affirming clothing, and legal fees for a name and gender change are insurmountable. In Japan, this process ranges from 300,000 to 2 million JP¥ (2,633 to 17,550 USD). Working 40 hours a week on the recently-raised Japanese national minimum wage of 930 JP¥ (8.11 USD) per hour, it would take approximately one year to earn ¥ 2 million yen — disregarding all other financial factors.
However, the costs of a forced ‘transition’ are far greater than monetary.
Based on data from a 2019 publication of Translational Andrology and Urology which studied ‘Demographic and temporal trends in transgender identities and gender-confirming surgery,’ it can be assumed that 43 to 70% of trans men or female-assigned non-binary individuals are enduring forced hysterectomies in Japan and an estimated 87 to 99% of trans feminine Japanese complainants are undergoing forced sterilization via invasive and life-changing orchiectomy (testicle removal) procedures. It is easily understood that the impact of an unwanted change to one’s anatomy is as causal to gender dysphoria as an elective procedure is curative.
Mental health co-morbidities are exceedingly common in transgender populations across the globe. Tokyo Mental Health cites a suicide attempt rate of 10% in the Japanese trans community. This is notably lower than rates of suicide attempts for transgender populations in other G7 nations — 51% in the United States, 22–43% in Canada, or 48% in the United Kingdom. Additionally, Italian researchers have found the rate of suicidal ideation among their transgender populace to be 51.7%, significantly higher than the general European population’s incidence of suicidal ideation of 3%.
Among the general Japanese population, the suicide rate is 16.7 in 100,000. As reported by the Japan Times, 5.5% — or 6,919,000 — of Japan is gender variant. 10% of that population, or the number of transgender people who have attempted suicide, is 691,900. Although 10% appears to be a preferable statistic at surface value, it does not provide legitimacy to the law’s willful blockade of essential human rights otherwise guaranteed to Japanese citizens. It should also be noted that, though suicide attempts are markedly lower, among the 84 LGBT people who died by suicide between 2009 and 2018, 0.5% of the sample population (N= 17,638) as identified by the Tokyo Medical Examiner’s Office, 42.9% were transgender.
Realistically, the process the Japanese government has meted out to create a ‘homogenous’ society does anything but. Trans men walk the streets of Kyoto with full, masculine beards and female ID cards, and their trans feminine counterparts experience equal incongruence — both due to their unwillingness to undergo surgical alteration to their internal or external reproductive organs as prescribed by law. This is more than a mere inconvenience. One transgender man interviewed by Human Rights Watch described being unable to find work, a human resources representative even expressing they “weren’t ready to accept transgender people” at the company to which he applied. Japan has no local anti-discrimination laws, but the nation has signed several international human rights documents which delineate protection against “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment” as well as guaranteeing other basic rights and freedoms.
The deeply personal choice to change one’s genitals has no impact on lawmakers who so flippantly decide it is their purview to quality-assurance-check the gender of trans people. Rather, the arduous path through a holistic transition is slow and winding — a buffet, not an assembly line. Even for those who have no financial limitations, binarism is an artificial barometer by which to measure transgender people — a community of people whose existence is inherently extraneous of it.
