Transgender Europe (TGEU), launching the revised edition of the Legal Gender Recognition toolkit hope it can inspire more change across Europe in the area of gender recognition procedures. The Legal Gender Recognition Toolkit is the most up to date overview based on European human right standards. Legal gender recognition in Europe is complex but also dynamically evolving. Every year more and more countries seek to update their procedures to bring them up to human right standards. The landscape in Europe is very diverse and over a dozen countries are looking into changing or introducing procedures in 2017.
Richard Köhler, Transgender Europe’s Senior Policy Officer commented on the new edition of the toolkit “we invite policy makers and activists to use this toolkit to advance trans rights. We were overwhelmed with the demand for the first toolkit and realized it quickly became out of date, with many better laws and case law evolving in the last five years.”
“Our toolkit came in handy when Malta was striving to create the best law possible. Other countries should similarly check current law and proposals to meet European human rights standards.”
Many countries are still far from quick, transparent and accessible procedures based on self-determination. One of these is Germany, whose current gender recognition procedure would result as ‘poor’ on the TGEU legal gender recognition checklist. This Thursday, two expert opinions with reform proposals on legal gender recognition will be presented.
“We recommend law makers in Germany and elsewhere to assess any proposal on the table against our TGEU checklist. Human rights must not be an afterthought in legal gender recognition. Any legislative change needs to legislate for the future not the past.“ adds Köhler.
The second edition toolkit is a practical set of different tools. It explains the underlying human rights standards, includes a revised myth busters section, and a checklist to crosscheck a law proposal or law against the minimum recognised standards, to see where it would stand. The revision of the toolkit has also added a discussion on the current best laws, the Malta’s GIGESC law and the Argentinean Gender Recognition Act, and a new section on jurisprudence covering European and key national-level case law.
Legal Gender Recognition is the official recognition of a person’s gender identity, including gender marker and name(s) in public registries and key documents. The European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly ruled on gender-identity recognition and its conditions, strengthening the human rights of trans people, namely privacy, the right to a fair trial and the right not to be discriminated against.