WHO’S THE WOMAN, WHO’S THE MAN
Oct. 6th, 2010 10:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
defrogAnd we’re back.
Team Def has successfully completed its four-city US tour. Much bloggery will ensue just as soon as I find the time to type it up.
Meanwhile, we have returned to Hong Kong to find this as the main headline:
For those of you who don’t know, gay marriage is illegal here, and while yr allowed to change yr gender, it’s apparently still a roadblock to marriage because yr gender is determined by yr birth certificate.
Which does raise a few issues about the specific case since, as far as I know, you don’t need a birth certificate to get married in Hong Kong. So, ironically, if she hadn’t consulted a lawyer in the first place, she might already be married (unless the Registry checks records to see if you’ve had yr sex reassigned recently).
Also, according to the same logic, if she tried to marry a woman, technically it’d be legal. What a predicament!
Whatever the case, you all know by now how I feel about these things. The good news – in theory – is that the case is generating some long-overdue discussion here not just on on the subject of transgender marriage, but gay marriage as well, and could actually lead to a govt consultation on the subject.
That said, I wouldn’t look for any positive moves towards marriage equality here anytime soon – partly because one issue being raised is the question of inheritance rights (which sounds like another excuse to avoid the issue altogether to me), but mainly because the current chief of HK, Donald Tsang, is a Catholic who has made it clear in the past that he thinks gayness is a moral issue, and that when it comes to sexual morality, minding yr own business is bad for society.
To be fair, he hasn’t used his post as a bully pulpit to dictate who can sleep with whom – and HK politicians in general don’t waste a lot of energy dithering and blustering about the state of sexual morality in society (unlike some politicians I could mention). But I wouldn’t look to his admin to take any kind of leadership on LGBT rights either.
We don’t have to make it complicated,
This is dF
Team Def has successfully completed its four-city US tour. Much bloggery will ensue just as soon as I find the time to type it up.
Meanwhile, we have returned to Hong Kong to find this as the main headline:
For those of you who don’t know, gay marriage is illegal here, and while yr allowed to change yr gender, it’s apparently still a roadblock to marriage because yr gender is determined by yr birth certificate.
Which does raise a few issues about the specific case since, as far as I know, you don’t need a birth certificate to get married in Hong Kong. So, ironically, if she hadn’t consulted a lawyer in the first place, she might already be married (unless the Registry checks records to see if you’ve had yr sex reassigned recently).
Also, according to the same logic, if she tried to marry a woman, technically it’d be legal. What a predicament!
Whatever the case, you all know by now how I feel about these things. The good news – in theory – is that the case is generating some long-overdue discussion here not just on on the subject of transgender marriage, but gay marriage as well, and could actually lead to a govt consultation on the subject.
That said, I wouldn’t look for any positive moves towards marriage equality here anytime soon – partly because one issue being raised is the question of inheritance rights (which sounds like another excuse to avoid the issue altogether to me), but mainly because the current chief of HK, Donald Tsang, is a Catholic who has made it clear in the past that he thinks gayness is a moral issue, and that when it comes to sexual morality, minding yr own business is bad for society.
To be fair, he hasn’t used his post as a bully pulpit to dictate who can sleep with whom – and HK politicians in general don’t waste a lot of energy dithering and blustering about the state of sexual morality in society (unlike some politicians I could mention). But I wouldn’t look to his admin to take any kind of leadership on LGBT rights either.
We don’t have to make it complicated,
This is dF
