Recently, a draft law has been prepared for parliament that seeks to offer lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and questioning couples (LGBTIQ) the same rights as heterosexual couples.
The incident started from the Northern part of Thailand when a couple of Nathee Theeraronjanapong, 55, and Atthapon Janthawee, 38, decided to make their twenty-year relationship legal in Chiang Mai and were handed a letter of denial by the head of registrations as section 1448 of Thailand’s Civil and Commercial Code deems same-sex marriage unlawful. The couple then filed a complaint with the Parliamentary Human Rights Commission, the Administrative Court and the National Human Rights Commission insist that Thailand’s constitution guarantees them equal protection under the law.
This draft law on same-sex unions has been presenting to Thailand’s parliament is Wiratana Kalayasiri, Democrat parliamentarian from the southern Thai city of Songkhla, who is also the chairman of the Legal Justice Human Rights committee.
Altogether, there will be five hearings on the bill at numerous universities in the country as well as in parliament. It was discovered in a survey of 300 people only 10.3% were against gay marriage and 78% were in favor. A surprise discovered in Songkhla where a city of 75,000 people, 87% of Muslims attending a public meeting were in favor of gay marriage, nonetheless, nearly 60% of respondents in a government survey last year were not in favor of gay marriage.
Still, Anjana Suvarnananda, who co-founded Anjaree Group in 1987 as the first organization to raise the issue of LGBTIQ, leading activists in Thailand’s LGBTIQ movement, believes that the bill could facilitate the process of moving public attitudes from opposition to acceptance.
Anjana stated that the LGBTIQ struggle with acceptance from parents who normally put a great pressure on them to conform to a more traditional idea of family life rather than opening up their mindset to the more modern idea that a family structure is based on the union of two loving and consenting adults.
Even though Thailand’s gender non-conformity receives a high level of social acceptance, there has been very little progress in terms of recognizing the rights of transgender people, of which there are currently approximately 180,000 across the country, including pop singers, movie stars and celebrities. Yet Thai law does not give permission for transgender to change their gender on their ID cards as well as passports, consequently, this often causes confusion at border crossings and immigration checkpoints.