Across the world, scores of countries still require transgender people to submit to such surgeries before their genders are legally recognized, a practice international human rights bodies have condemned as torture. These policies have left untold numbers of transgender people with an agonizing choice between their fertility and their identity.
For those who opt against surgery, the policies’ consequences can be severe, limiting their prospects for jobs, housing, marriage and safe passage through the world. Since their identification documents list their genders as the opposite of how they present in public, they can easily be outed, leading to everything from bureaucratic hassles to life-threatening confrontations.
For some, the fear of being outed is so intense that they withdraw from the world. Loh, however, has taken the opposite approach, becoming an unusually visible transgender rights activist in Singapore, a rigidly controlled city-state that only announced it would decriminalize sex between men in August.
[Isn’t this the same surgery that transgender activists want minors to be able to choose without parental involvement? — Ed]
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