Right to describe own gender

Star: KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysian authorities should seriously consider whether people have the right to describe their own gender so that no individual is denied his or her human or civil rights, said a panel comprising a doctor, a judge and an activist.
They said this after discussing the legal and psychological hurdles a transsexual faces, at the session on Gender Issues – Gender Reassignment on the second day of the 13th Malaysian Law Conference yesterday.
Malaysian Medical Association Ethics Committee chairman Dr Ravindran Jegasothy, High Court Justice Datuk V. Thiripurasingam and Honey Tan of the Women’s Centre for Change spoke on this.
Dr Ravindran, in pointing out a medico-legal anomaly, said: “Although sex change operations and therapy for transsexuals are legal in Malaysia, there is no law that allows the sex on the identification documents of the individuals to be changed.
“Appropriate changes in the Registration of Births and Deaths Act 1957 can be made after an evaluation and certification by an identified team of multidisciplinary medical practitioners to prevent abuse.”
He said the medical community would also support a review of the Minor Offences Act 1955 that interpreted cross-dressing as indecent behaviour.
“Transsexuals dress according to their gender identity for a medical reason and not for crossing swords with society.”
Justice Thiripurasingam called on legal institutions to see if the law should continue to rely on traditional sex criteria to define one’s legal sex or if these factors should be subordinated to self-identified sex.
Justice Thiripurasingam said: “No principle of justice will be undermined if the courts adopt a more flexible approach that includes 'intersexuality' as a sex classification and allows transgenders to self-identify their sex, provided there is a legislation to regularise this category of people.”
Tan said the experiences of transsexuals with the law had mostly been in the negative.
Citing a 2001 study on male transsexuals in Malaysia, she said the reasons for the arrests were cross-dressing (33%), indecent dressing (18%), prostitution (16%), failing drug tests (13%), picked up in police raids (10%) and loitering (6%).