With no Law Reform Commission currently in place, and having regard to constitutional provisions which save pre-independence laws, some legal minds are of the view that it is highly unlikely that Guyana will be complying any time soon with the recent directive given by the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) to strike out the entire section of the law prohibiting cross-dressing.
However, Kamal Ramkarran, one of the attorneys who represented the state against which the challenge to the cross-dressing law was brought by a group of transgender women, has said that the mere pronouncement by the Trinidad-based final court effectively strips the impugned section from the law books.
Having lost at both the local Supreme and Appeal Courts, transgender women—Quincy McEwan, known as Gulliver, Seon Clarke, known as Angel Clarke, Joseph Fraser, also known as Peaches Fraser, and Seyon Persaud, known as Isabella Persaud—had appealed all the way to the CCJ—the court of last resort for Guyana, where they argued that the law prohibiting cross-dressing discriminated against them.
