Click to expand Image Gen Suzuki, center, enters Shizuoka family court in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka prefecture, central Japan for a court hearing on October 14, 2022. 2022 Kyodo News via AP Photo A Japanese family court has ruled that the country's requirement that transgender people be surgically sterilized to change their legal gender is unconstitutional. The ruling is the first of its kind in Japan, and comes as the Supreme Court considers a separate case about the same issue. In 2021, Gen Suzuki, a transgender man, filed a court request to have his legal gender recognized as male without undergoing sterilization surgery as prescribed by national law. This week the Shizuoka Family Court ruled in his favor, with the judge writing: "Surgery to remove the gonads has the serious and irreversible result of loss of reproductive function. I cannot help but question whether being forced to undergo such treatment lacks necessity or rationality, considering the level of social chaos it ma