Hong Kong’s Court of Appeal has granted a transgender woman the right to marry her boyfriend. The ruling overturned earlier verdicts which held that marriage is only allowed between couples who were of the opposite sex at birth.
The case concerned ‘W’, a woman who underwent sex realignment surgery in 2008. W argued that her post-operative gender is recognised by the law and as a result the earlier rulings were a violation of her constitutional rights. Hong Kong’s laws do not allow for a birth certificate to be altered. As a result the city’s Registrar of Marriages argued that W and her male partner could not marry as her birth certificate states that she was born male.
The Court dismissed the arguments of the Registrar of Marriages and said that the nature of marriage as a social institution had “undergone far-reaching changes” and thus W should be afforded the right to marry. The decision of the Court is suspended for 12 months to allow for the government to amend the city’s marriage laws. The judgment falls short of allowing for same-sex marriage. Instead, it allows a transgender person who was born male to marry another male and for one born female to marry a woman.
The majority of countries in the Asia-Pacific region have legislated for transgender people to marry as their new gender including Singapore, India, South Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand.
Click here to read an article about the case in TheJournal.ie and here in The Guardian.
Click here to read the full Court of Appeal judgment.