FRONT LINE HUMAN RIGHTS DEFENDERS:FOR FIVE years, Paisarn Likhitpreechakul fought against the Thai army's practice of altering the personal records of transgender draftees to describe them as suffering from permanent psychosis.
Yesterday afternoon, while in Dublin for the ongoing Front Line conference for defenders of human rights, Mr Likhitpreechakul took a phone call telling him about the decision of Thai courts, earlier that morning, to rule against the practice.
It marked a huge stride forward for transgender rights in the country, he said.
“It is very meaningful that the court found in favour of our petition because the court reasoned that transgenders are like everyone else, they have human rights and human dignities that cannot be violated against.“When I heard about it I saw hope that even the most conservative sector in society can change, that times have changed and they realise that and they are willing to move with time.”
In 2006, Mr Likhitpreechakul and the organisation he works for, the Foundation for Human Rights on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, presented a petition to the administrative court in Thailand which protested against the army turning away transgender draftees on the basis that they were sufferers of permanent psychosis.
As women are not drafted, the foundation’s motivation was not to force the army to allow transgender people to join but to stop them labelling, in such a destructive manner, paperwork that every Thai employer requests from a male-born applicant.
“You can imagine when some people see the form that says they are suffering from permanent psychosis nobody wants to hire them so it makes them very difficult to get decent jobs as they deserve.
“In order to reject them the army has a list of reasons that they have to adhere to, like which category this person belongs to so that it complies with the law, a very very outdated law.”
The foundation has been waiting five years for the court’s decision because of a large backlog of cases, and, in Mr Likhitpreechakul’s opinion, because the court wanted to see the two sides reach agreement themselves.
Late last year, there was a breakthrough of sorts as both sides compromised on an agreeable term for describing transgender draftees, one that loosely translates as “gender incongruence”, meaning that their gender at the moment is not the same as their gender at birth.
“It just describes the state that they are in without labelling them with any psychiatric terms, so I think that this is a much more acceptable term and one that is preferred internationally I think.”
Yesterday’s court ruling which Mr Likhitpreechakul praised for establishing the transgendered community as equals with human rights, will hopefully mark the beginning of the end for the discrimination so prevalent in Thai society, he said.
“You can see a lot of transgender people in Thailand. They are called kathoey in Thai. In a way, Thai people and culture are tolerant of transgenders but not always very kind to them.
“Thai society is very class conscious so people are segregated into different stations.”
This week, Front Line hosts Dublin Platform, a gathering of human rights defenders from around the globe. Each day this week, reporter Cían Nihill tells the story of one such defender