New laws forbidding sexual reassignment surgery prior to age 18 and requiring parental consent for those between age 18 and 20 years will go into affect November 18 according to Asia One News.
Thailand will also enforce a regulation that a person seeking SRS have undergone a year 'Real Life' experience where in a transgender individual lives in their proper gender and undergoes hormones replacement therapy.
It is unclear what affect the new regulations will have on transgender people from foreign countries when they seek SRS in Thailand.
Thailand however does not have laws allowing a person to legally change there documents to properly reflect there gender which creates incredible hardship for a person in transition. Currently a transgender person is forced to identify themselves as a "Lady Boy", which according to search records at planetransgender is the term that people use when searching for transgender articles involving people from Thailand and many South East Asian countries.
According to Yollada Suanyot, chairperson of the Transgender Women of
Thailand group, the new regulations lack guidelines as to whom would make the determination if the applicant has met the criteria. In her opinion this will create further hardships for transgender people.
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