Trans women’s rights from the perspective of Vietnamese Labour Law

The rapid development in medicine has led to various legal issues related to transsexual persons. In terms of female workers’ rights, it is worth considering the rights of male to female transsexuals (trans women) from the perspective of labour law. The question here is whether trans women have the same rights as those of female workers. In fact, trans women must use hormones to maintain their female characteristics during their lives, which make them weaker and shorten their life. Furthermore, after the sex transition, many parts of trans women’s bodies shall have significant changes such as the face, skeleton, muscle, genitals and so on. At this point, trans women should be treated in the same way as ‘women-born-women’. Since this issue may become a heavy burden for trans women, the paper aims to have an insight on the current Vietnamese labour law concerning mainly (i) the trans women’s right to raise a child under twelve months of age and (ii) retirement ages. This paper is structured into three main sections. The first section aims to shed light on the re-consideration of the modern feminist theory on who are counted as women. The second section takes a view of trans women’s rights from the perspective of labour law. The final section is for conclusion and recommendations. It is pointed out that in the Vietnamese legal context that trans women workers may easily become victims of discrimination because of the lack of specific regulations. It is worth stating that the gap of legal procedures and provisions related to gender recognition for trans women could be barriers preventing trans women from enjoying the rights of female workers under the Vietnamese Labour Code. To summarize, this study is necessary, especially in the context that Vietnam is currently drafting the Law on Gender transition. The Feminist Legal Theory and the methodology of analysis, comparison, and synthesis of legal dispositions are used to analyse the mentioned matters.