Photo/Illutration Takakito Usui at a news conference in Okayama after the Okayama Family Court’s Tsuyama Branch approved his petition for gender reassignment without surgery on Feb. 7. (Kunio Ozawa)

OKAYAMA—After years of legal struggle, a local transgender man has been allowed to legally change his gender to male without first undergoing sterilization surgery.  

The Okayama Family Court’s Tsuyama Branch approved a petition for gender reassignment without surgery filed by Takakito Usui, 50, a resident of Shinjo, Okayama Prefecture, on Feb. 7.

“I can get married to (my partner) and form a family now. I hope we can be happy,” Usui said.

Usui was a female at birth but identifies and lives as a male. He is a farmer and lives with his female partner, 46, and her 13-year-old son.

Usui has been diagnosed with gender identity disorder but has not undergone an oophorectomy or other surgery.

This was Usui’s second petition, after the first one was denied by the Supreme Court in 2019.

However, in October, the Supreme Court ruled in a different case that a provision of the special law for gender identity disorder--which requires people to undergo surgical sterilization before they can legally change their gender on the family register--is unconstitutional.

In response to that ruling, Usui filed his second petition to change his legal gender to male in December.

The Okayama Family Court’s Tsuyama Branch approved his petition, citing last year’s Supreme Court decision.

The court also stated that the special law requiring surgery to remove a person’s reproductive capacity violates the “freedom to not have one’s body invaded against one’s will,” which is guaranteed by Article 13 of the Constitution.

“Soft buds have emerged from the asphalt, and I wonder if they will grow,” Usui said at a news conference held in Okayama after the decision, describing his joy.

In addition to sterilization surgery, the special law stipulates that a person must “have genitalia similar in appearance to that of the adopted gender,” which is often called the “appearance requirement.”

The Tsuyama Branch held that Usui met the appearance requirement. However, the court did not indicate whether the appearance requirement is unconstitutional or not.

A LONG JOURNEY

Usui and his partner submitted their marriage certificate to a local government office in March 2016, but it was not accepted.

Thinking that importance should be placed not on surgery, but on how one wants to live their life, Usui filed a petition for gender reassignment in December 2016, claiming that requiring surgery for gender reassignment was unconstitutional.

But the case was rejected by the Tsuyama Branch as well as the Hiroshima High Court’s Okayama Branch.

The case was then taken to the Supreme Court, which ruled in 2019 that the surgery requirement was “constitutional at this time.”

Reluctant to show an insurance card that marked his gender as “female,” Usui has avoided going to the hospital.

Nevertheless, Usui has continued to publicly advocate for societal change.

In October 2023, when the Supreme Court ruled that the law requiring sterilization surgery was unconstitutional, Usui felt that society and the times were changing.

However, Usui is concerned that the “appearance requirement” of the special law has not been ruled unconstitutional.

In cases of female to male transitions, the appearance requirement can usually be met by taking hormones. However, in cases of male to female transitions, penis removal surgery has been required.

Usui urged that the appearance requirement should also be eliminated.

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