Outing is the disclosure to a third party, without the person’s consent, of their sexual orientation, gender identity, or other personal information about their sexuality. As an act that strips the person of self-determination, it infringes privacy and personality rights and can cause serious psychological and social harm. In Japan, awareness rose sharply after a 2015 case at Hitotsubashi University’s law school, and a prohibitory norm has formed through local ordinances from 2018 and the 2020 amended labour-policy act (the power-harassment prevention law). This article covers the concept, the case, the legal framework, the contrast with coming out, and international debate.

Concept and etymology

English outing derives from out + -ing; in the minority context it took, from the late-1980s US, the metaphor of dragging a person out of the closet (the state of not being public about one’s sexuality). The verb to out in the sense of disclosing another’s homosexuality appears in major outlets around 1990. The Japanese loanword autingu spread in the 2010s. The core of the definition is the absence of the person’s consent. Disclosure by the person themselves is coming out, conceptually distinct; passing on information shared in confidence to a further third party is in principle outing. The information at issue typically includes sexual orientation, gender identity, a discrepancy between registered and lived sex, past medical procedures, and HIV status.

The Hitotsubashi University case

In April 2015 a male graduate student at Hitotsubashi University’s law school confessed romantic feelings to a classmate. In June, the classmate disclosed in a LINE group that the student was gay. The student suffered severe distress, sought help from the university’s harassment office and health centre without improvement, and in August fell to his death from a campus building.

The family sued the disclosing student and the university in 2016. The case against the student is reported to have settled; the case against the university went through the Tokyo District Court (February 2019) and Tokyo High Court (November 2020) and was finally lost by the family. While the courts did not find the university’s response unlawful, the rulings stated clearly that outing “infringes personality and privacy rights and is plainly an impermissible act”, giving the issue legal contour. The case became symbolic for LGBTQ people in Japan and the starting point for discussion of outing, feeding the local ordinances and the labour-law treatment that followed.

Local ordinances and labour law

Kunitachi City in Tokyo, in an ordinance in force from 1 April 2018, provided that “no person shall make public the sexual orientation or gender identity of another against that person’s will”, the first Japanese local ordinance to ban outing explicitly and a model for others. Mie Prefecture (2021) added a similar ban at the prefectural level. By the mid-2020s comparable ordinances had spread across many municipalities; the bans carry no penalty but declare the act impermissible.

The 2019 amended labour-policy act (in force June 2020 for large firms, April 2022 for SMEs), known as the power-harassment prevention law, imposed prevention-management duties on employers (Article 30-2). The accompanying MHLW guideline listed, as an example of the “invasion of privacy” type of power harassment, “disclosing a worker’s sexual orientation, gender identity, medical history, fertility treatment, or other sensitive personal information to other workers without consent”. Outing in the workplace thereby became a legally recognised form of harassment, with employers bound to preventive measures and offenders exposed to internal discipline and civil tort liability under Civil Code Article 709.

Contrast with coming out

Coming out is disclosure by the person, on their own initiative, of their orientation or identity, which acquired a positive political meaning in the US movement after the 1969 Stonewall uprising as a strategy of visibility. Coming out is rarely all-or-nothing; it is typically staged and selective by audience, so a person out to family and close friends may not be out at work. The wrongfulness of outing is the violation of the person’s right to choose to whom information is disclosed (informational self-determination).

International debate and points of contention

In the US from 1989 the journalist Michelangelo Signorile and others advocated “politically motivated outing”, disclosing the homosexuality of conservative politicians against their will to expose the hypocrisy of anti-gay figures, a fiercely contested tactic within the movement. The critic Larry Gross documented the argument in The Trouble with Outing (1993). The US politically motivated outing and the Japanese workplace and educational outing overlap in concept but differ in emphasis: the former centred on strategic disclosure of public figures, the latter on a comprehensive ban on non-consensual disclosure in private and workplace settings. UN Human Rights Council reporting and European Court of Human Rights case law (interpreting Article 8 of the Convention) treat orientation and identity information as highly protected sensitive data.

Outing covers not only hostile disclosure but also well-meaning disclosure from a lack of care: a family member telling relatives, a manager sharing a subordinate’s sexuality with a team, a medical worker passing on information without need. Discussion since the Hitotsubashi case stresses the wrongfulness of non-consensual disclosure regardless of the discloser’s intent. “Secondary outing”, where a person passing on information confided to them by someone out only to a few, is recognised within communities, and confirming the scope of disclosure with the person is continually emphasised.

See also

• LGBTQ
• Transgender
• Sexual harassment
• SOGI harassment
• Sexual minority