<Reporter Choi Jae-young>

Transgenders are people who think they have different genders when they are born and grow up.

It is used for both men and women.

As you just saw, transgender is a member of our society who already lives with us.

In 2006, the Supreme Court's alliance emphasized that gender changers have the right to enjoy dignity and value as human beings while pursuing happiness.

Fourteen years have passed, but the reality is not so and government policy is still in place.

[Park Han-hee, Lawyer / How to Make Hope: Right now, sexual minorities, including transgender people, are not caught by any population. It can be said that it has become an invisible group that is completely invisible to national policy or legislation.] The

SBS issue coverage team has been trying to figure out the current state of transgender nationwide where the government is not even providing statistics.

<Reporter Bae Yeon-woon> How

many transgender populations will there be in Korea?

[200 people? 5,000?]

No one knows.

This is because there is no accurate statistics on the domestic transgender population.

The SBS Issue Reporting Team created the first transgender population data in Korea by requesting information disclosure from 226 basic municipalities nationwide.

As a result of the analysis, it was found that there were at least 517 domestic transgender people who had undergone a gender correction process due to resident registration.

Statistically, based on the results of research that shows that 10 to 15% of all transgenders are gender-corrected, the total number of domestic transgenders is estimated to be around 6,000.

[Lee Seung-Hyun / Chairman of the After-Rainbow Foundation: Legal requirements for correcting gender in Japan and those required by Korean courts are almost the same. About 13.2% (of transgenders in Japan) say they are gender corrected.] When

517 were divided by gender, the trans female category was 260 and the trans male category was 257.

Initially there were a lot more trans women, but recently trans males have increased significantly.


<Reporter Bae Jeong-hoon> In

the case of transgender people, it is almost 20 years old to establish their gender identity.

However, the average age at which they corrected their gender was 32.8 years, with a difference of over 10 years.


[Lee Seung-hyun / Chairman of the Rainbow After The Rainbow Foundation: (Gender Correction) We can understand that surgery to meet the requirements, or time to earn money for medical measures, etc. has been melted in (about) 13 years. .] The

average age plummeted in 2013, when the cost-adjusted gender correction requirements were alleviated, and in the absence of parental consent.

65% of all transgender people lived in the metropolitan area.

Given that more than half of the local governments that refused to request information disclosure by SBS are Seoul autonomous districts, the concentration in the metropolitan area is likely to be higher.

Experts analyzed that it is because a big city like Seoul provides a more free environment from so-called 'outing', which requires unintended revealing of one's gender identity.

(Video coverage: Lee Byung-joo, video editing: Lee Seung-jin, CG: Hong Sung-yong, Choi Jae-young, Lee Ye-jung, proceedings: Kwon Young-in, Kim Yu-mi)

▶ Three different but the same person… Living as a transgender in Korea