Through three candid interviews with trans people living in Hong Kong, journalist Kat Joplin explores the recent change in the city’s laws regarding gender recognition and how it impacts the community in the region.

This past April, Henry Tse, 33, stepped out of the Immigration Tower in Wan Chai, Hong Kong, with his new identification card in hand. After six years of legal battles and an additional year of pressuring the government, Tse had legally corrected his gender markers to male.

Laws that protect LGBTQ+ people have been slow to emerge in Hong Kong. Same-sex sexual acts are legal, and gay and transgender individuals live in relative safety, but Hong Kong does not recognize same-sex marriage, has few laws to protect LGBTQ+ people from workplace discrimination, and—until Tse’s court victory—required full sex reassignment surgery (SRS), including both sterilisation and genital reconstruction, of trans people looking to update their legal gender. As a result, transgender people such as Tse, who have opted not to undergo full SRS, have faced barriers to changing their gender marker.

Hong Kong has a history as both a colony and a semi-independent city-state. Designated a Special Administrative Region of China in 1997, Hong Kong today has a high degree of de jure autonomy and a government with executive, legislative, and judicial branches. Only 20% of the seats in the Legislative Council are directly elected however, with most law-makers appointed by the government. With recent periods of protest and dissent following such laws as the 2020 National Security Law (NSL), Hong Kong is in an unstable period.

In this densely populated group of islands, over 7 million people from Hong Kong, China, and other countries in Asia reside. I talked to Tse and two other trans Hong Kong residents—Way Lam, and Bella Vongvisitsin, who is from Thailand, to learn more about their day-to-day lives, and their shared call for greater rights and protections.

Trans lives in Hong Kong
‘I was born into a traditional family’—this is a common refrain I hear from many trans individuals in Hong Kong and throughout East and Southeast Asia in framing their experiences coming out.

Henry Tse was enrolled in an evangelical Christian girls’ school at age 12 by his conservative family. “I hated the cheongsam (traditional Chinese dress) uniform,” he says. “I always had a hunched back from hiding my chest during puberty.” Tse would bind his chest every day, even through the hottest Hong Kong summers. His parents repeatedly took him to see psychiatrists, thinking his boyish behaviour indicated something was wrong with him.

Tse eventually moved to the UK in 2008 for his A-levels, and there learned about transgender people like himself for the first time; it was at around 18 that he started to transition. He was soon referred to a doctor, changed his UK ID to male, began hormone replacement therapy, and eventually qualified for his top surgery. By the time Tse returned to Hong Kong in 2017, he knew he had achieved the end of his medical transition and felt complete.

Way Lam, 35, was born in Hong Kong and knew he was trans since the time he started to speak. When he was about three, he recalls shouting, “Why do I have to wear a dress? I’m a boy, I’m a boy!”

By contrast, he ended up transitioning late on account of his desire to put his traditional family’s needs above his own.

“I always told myself, ‘Why should I put my family in this situation?’ I thought I needed to cure myself instead,” Lam tells me. “When I was 26, I finally started to think about myself and decided to transition. My mom is rather old and I hoped she wouldn’t notice the change.”

Lam has kept his transition private from his parents, but his siblings understand and accept him. Since he has always expressed himself as a boy, formally transitioning changed relatively little about Lam’s life—to his friends and his family, he is still very much the same person.

Bella Vongvisitsin, 36, from Bangkok, Thailand, similarly grew up with a conservative family. Growing up in Chinatown with a Thai-Chinese background, Vongvisitsin felt a great deal of pressure from her family to act as the ‘second heir’ and preserve the family lineage. Nevertheless, from around five years old, Vongvisitsin was questioning her gender identity, and began transitioning socially and hormonally throughout her teens and early twenties.

“[My transition] was a learning process for my family—even the arguments we had came out of love, I think. I remember when I was 20 years old, I let my family see me for the first time as a fully transitioned woman. My dad said, ‘Oh, you’re pretty.’ I unlocked myself. I felt like I could finally be who I am.”

Since then, she shares with a smile, her family has become very open and accepting with one another, and her two siblings even came out as gay. “We are a queer family!”

Vongvisitsin moved to Hong Kong in 2017 to pursue her PhD at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She plans to stay in Hong Kong indefinitely.

Legal Obstacles and Vulnerabilities
The three have experienced anxieties and humiliation throughout their day-to-day lives, due to the lack of legal protections against anti-trans discrimination in the workplace, difficulty navigating life with misgendered IDs, and marriage and passport issues.

Tse has found the ID situation to be one of the most aggravating for him.

“Not matching my ID was a huge problem,” Tse tells me. “Every Hong Kong permanent resident who is aged 15 or above is obliged to carry their HKID card. It is an offence to fail to produce it on demand to a police officer on the street.”

Checking into hotels, withdrawing money, getting medical and dental aid—all have been prohibitively complex for trans people like Tse to access. Bathrooms and changing rooms became a particular battleground for Tse, and he lamented having to give up sports (one of his life passions) over his concerns.

For Lam, who works as a chief officer on a yacht, the gender marked on his passport has cost him jobs, and deterred his efforts to work on bigger yachts in international waters. Beyond the workplace, Lam’s life has been impacted by Hong Kong’s strict transition laws, preventing Lam from marrying his long-term partner and from adopting his partner’s six-year-old daughter.

“I just want to be normal like everybody else, that’s my goal,” he says. “Just meet a girl, fall in love, and get married, be a father to her child.”

As Lam’s partner lives in Thailand, without getting married, Lam cannot stay with her and her daughter for longer than sixty days at a time; currently, he splits his time between Hong Kong and Thailand.

As for Vongvisitsin, her experience living in Hong Kong as a trans woman has been shaped by her experiences in academia. “At first I was scared. I had always heard that Hong Kong is quite conservative, cisgender-normative. The School was supportive, but I’ve been lucky.”

Vongvisitsin says that she dealt with some gossip in her department but felt overall the university had been well-prepared to welcome her, holding sensitivity discussions ahead of her arrival.

Her main difficulty during her PhD was accessing women’s dorms: because Vongvisitsin’s school ID card still listed her as male, the same as her passport, she could not scan her card at the door to enter the building, and had to visit the reception counter most days in order to return home.

“Hong Kong cares a lot about privacy—which is good. But socially Hong Kong is very conservative, and the gender patriarchy is quite high. The new policy on gender recognition doesn’t see trans women fully as women and requires a complete medical transition.”

Vongvisitsin feels that changing her gender markers would ease her fears, especially if she needs to buy or rent a house, open a bank account, or purchase insurance.

Incremental Victories
As in many conservative states where passing new human rights legislation is tricky, the most effective way of changing the laws in Hong Kong is through the courts. As Tse points out, Hong Kong’s legislature is not democratically elected; any initiative to enact LGBTQ+ rights legislation relating to government policies would have to come from either the government (who, in Tse’s view, would be reluctant even when public opinion supports such laws), or from legislators with the Chief Executive’s consent.

The first time a case involving a transgender applicant reached the top court was in 2013 in W v. Registrar of Marriages. In this landmark case, the applicant, W, was a transgender woman suing the government for the right to marry her male partner as a heterosexual union. After W won her case, the court recommended that Hong Kong adopt the UK’s 2004 Gender Recognition Act to allow for easier legal gender transitions; the government ignored this recommendation.

Instead, in response to the W v. Registrar of Marriages ruling, in 2014 Hong Kong created the Inter-departmental Working Group on Gender recognition in order to “consider whether it is necessary to introduce legislation… to deal with issues concerning gender recognition.” The Working Group, which consists of six conservative consultants, has consistently been a smokescreen against real action for trans rights protection, and a thorn in the side of LGBTQ+ activists in the ten years since.

When Tse won his own lawsuit in 2023, the government delayed making any meaningful change to its laws or giving Tse his new government ID. After exhausting every other method to get the court order acted upon, Tse finally filed a new lawsuit in 2024, challenging the unreasonable delay. About two weeks after the new lawsuit was lodged, the revised policy was announced with immediate effect: Hong Kong had lowered the requirements for changing one’s gender marker.

“The preexisting track, that requires genital surgery and sterilisation, still exists, but now there’s a new track,” Tse explains. “As regular applicants, we need to be diagnosed as having gender dysphoria and we need to be undergoing hormones and top surgery, but now [trans men] no longer need invasive bottom surgeries.”

The new policy ensures that people like Lam can finally apply for their gender correction. With a new ID and passport in hand, Lam can marry his partner, receive his Thai spousal visa, and apply for overseas jobs.

“For trans men it’s a wide-ranging improvement, but for trans women, the impact might not be so extensive,” Tse says. “This has to do with the fact that no trans women came forward as a plaintiff in the process, thus the court declaration was granted only for trans men when I won the case. The outcome, while burdensome, should not be a surprise to anyone who has done basic research.” The government’s new policy reflects minimal compliance with the outcome of Tse’s court case.

“This is not the end of our journey and I’ve been working to continuously follow up on the new policy’s human rights issues,” Tse says. “With our victories, we have built a solid foundation for further actions in the future.”

With his NGO Transgender Equality Hong Kong, Tse will continue working legally and socially to change the situation of trans people in Hong Kong for the better.

“My message is that we’re humans, and we deserve to live and be recognised like any other human,” Tse says. “There’s a lot of information online demonising trans people, but if you see me—a real trans person—and hear what me and my friends are demanding, you realise we’re just normal, hardworking Hong Kong-ers who want to get on with our lives.”

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