EO Files (May 2018)
“THINGS WE DO, PEOPLE WE
MEET – Reflections in Brief”
Hong
Kong’s LGBTI community needs legal protection from discrimination, not just
awareness campaigns
Alfred C.
M. Chan says the government should introduce legislation banning discrimination
against sexual minorities and make it clear that this does not infringe on
freedom of speech
Most arguments
against any advocacy for minority rights boil down to this: “You’re doing just
fine the way things are. There’s no need for change.” One could facilely wield
the same logic against LGBTI people in Hong Kong, who seem to be in no
immediate danger, at least not when compared to those living through ridicule
and life-threatening ordeal elsewhere – in Ecuador, for instance, where gay men
have been subject
to “corrective rape” at unlicensed rehab clinics, or in
Indonesia where transwomen were reportedly stripped
and beaten by the police and forced to cut their
hair in public earlier this year.
But is
Hong Kong really the safe haven it appears to be?
Let’s
rewind to the year 1842, when Hong Kong came under British rule and the
colonial government criminalised sex between consenting men, a flagrantly
discriminatory move that went unchallenged until the 1980s and which was
finally repealed in 1991.
We can
all learn a thing from this quick history lesson – the status quo has never been
sacred or immutable. And once we shake off our sense of complacency, we begin
to discern the lingering presence of cruelty, prejudice and discrimination
against our LGBTI community today: transgender people cannot change the gender on
their ID cards without completing sex
reassignment surgery, and proposals to replace this rigid rule with alternative,
more humane requirements have been met with searing
opposition; a lesbian expat who won her case to
obtain a dependent visa from the Immigration Department for her partner is now facing an
appeal from the government; and intersex people
continue to struggle in their fight against intrusive
and irreversible treatments on unknowing children. The list
goes on.
Just as
violence can disguise itself as kindness, injustice can be committed in the
name of administrative convenience. Lifting that mask to hit out at what’s
underneath – intolerance against the unfamiliar and fear of the unprecedented –
is precisely the spirit of the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia
and Biphobia.
Created
in 2004 and falling on the 17th of May every year, IDAHOT marks the
day when the World Health Organisation removed homosexuality from its list of mental
disorders in 1990, and encourages us to call out and root out persecution of
LGBTI people in all forms.
Hong Kong
marked its first IDAHOT in 2005, when a local newspaper ran a four-page ad containing
a statement signed by 9,800 individuals and over 370 organisations who
staunchly opposed to the government’s proposal to legislate against
discrimination based on sexual orientation, adding that homosexuality poses a
threat to family values. LGBTI groups took to the streets and urged the public
to “turn fear into love”, the theme of their march in Causeway Bay that year.
Still, the government shelved its legislative plan in 2006 citing divergent
views in society.
Twelve
years on, there is still no legislation dedicated specifically to addressing discrimination
on the grounds of sexual orientation, gender identity and intersex status in
Asia’s world city. While the Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Bureau has rolled
out an annual
funding scheme for projects promoting equal
opportunity for LGBTI people, a code of
practice for employers, and a TV series
to spread the message of anti-discrimination, the government’s one-sided
reliance on education and self-regulation ultimately belies a lack of
commitment to initiating concrete legislative change.
Naturally
enough, in legitimising such inertia, the “line-to-take” has always invoked the
image of a divided public. The timing, it seems, is never right, despite
empirical evidence of LGBTI discrimination documented by NGOs and a study
released by the Equal Opportunities Commission in 2016, repeated calls from
monitoring bodies of the United Nations, as well as landmark
court rulings that could have been capitalised on to effect
meaningful and wholesale change.
As thorny
as the issue may be, the Equal Opportunities Commission has been advocating to
the government to accelerate the legislative process and take the lead in dispelling
widespread myths, including concerns about “reverse discrimination” and
infringement upon the freedom of speech and religion – rights that are already
enshrined under current laws such as the Bill of Rights Ordinance and can be
further protected through exemptions in the new law.
The government
should also communicate clearly to the public that such a law does not grant
any privileges to the LGBTI community since it would extend equal protection to
straight and cisgender people (that is, people whose gender identity matches
the sex they were assigned at birth), the way the Sex Discrimination Ordinance protects
both women and men.
If
Weibo’s recent
U-turn on its gay content ban has taught us
anything, it is that LGBTI people will never relent in their fight for respect
and justice. And as John F. Kennedy once said, “If we cannot now end our
differences, at least we can make the world safe for diversity.” The government
can of course continue to play the controversy card and defer the challenge to
future administrations, or it can rise above the ruckus and do the right thing.
Professor Alfred CHAN Cheung-ming
Chairperson
Equal
Opportunities Commission
(Note:
A version of this article was originally published in the South China Morning
Post on 16 May 2018.)