Tse Henry Edward v Commissioner of Registration [2023] HKCFA 4, together with its conjoined case Q v Commissioner of Registration, are landmark cases of the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal which ruled that the government violated the right to privacy guaranteed in Article 14 of the Hong Kong Bill of Rights in requiring full sex reassignment surgery for transgender people to change the legal gender recorded on their Hong Kong Identity Card. Background The appellants are transgender men who have so identified since their youth. They each underwent treatments including psychiatric treatment, hormonal treatment, mastectomy, and real-life experience. They were medically certified to have been sufficiently attenuated to enable their social integration without the need for additional surgical procedures. Hong Kong residents are required to carry Hong Kong Identity Cards, a form of identity document which contains the holder's name, photograph, and gender marker. The gender marker operates as an element for verifying the holder's identity, and does not signify recognition of the holder's sex as a matter of law. The Commissioner of Registration adopted a policy requiring transgender people to have undergone full sex reassignment surgery to change the gender marker on their identity cards. The appellants applied for judicial review against the policy, alleging a violation of Article 14 of the Hong Kong Bill of Rights, which guarantees the right to privacy. Article 14 of the Hong Kong Bill of Rights is materially equivalent to Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The appellants were unsuccessful both at the Court of First Instance and the Court of Appeal. Holding By a unanimous decision, the Court of Final Appeal overturned the lower courts. The leading judgment was delivered jointly by Mr Justice Ribeiro PJ and Mr Justice Fok PJ. The Court, finding that the policy concerned core values relating to intimate personal characteristics, applied the "no more than reasonably necessary" standard of scrutiny in assessing the proportionality of the Commissioner's policy. The court held that the Commissioner's policy was disproportionate to the legitimate aim of establishing a clear administrative guideline for deciding when an amendment to the gender marker was to be accepted. The Court rejected three justifications advanced by the Commissioner: First, the Court did not accept the Commissioner's argument that full sex reassignment surgery was the only workable and verifiable criterion for amending the gender marker. The Court pointed to examples in other jurisdictions