Formulation of Legal Provisions Concerning Gender Change

LGBTI persons and access to justice, 2015

Fides et Ratio, 2024

The review article presents the phenomenon of transsexualism through the prism of the etiology, scale and dynamics of the phenomenon as well as the most controversial social consequences concerning "sex change" and the acceptance or non-acceptance of voluntary personal forms adopted by children and adolescents. Review of contemporary literature, analysis of positions on the issues of the so-called gender changes (gender reassignment, gender matching). The text shows the evolution of understanding of gender identity disorders in the ICD-10 and DSM-5 classifications as well as the controversy related to the tendencies depathologizing gender inconsistency in the ICD-11. Looking at the etiological issues we present an attempt of in-depth psychological analyzes as opposed to the dominant, reductive medical approach. In the text, we also recall the basic developmental regularities of children and adolescents, often overlooked in discussions on transsexualism. The basic developmental regularities of children and adolescents, often overlooked in discussions on transsexualism, were also reminded. As the review of the data shows the rapid increase in gender identity disorders in recent years, their pronunciation leads to emphasizing the growing role of pop culture influences on young people. There is also a lack of research on the use of puberty blockers in children/adolescents -their introduction appears to be an experiment with, in fact, unknown consequences. The analysis of developmental regularities, the transience of dysphoric tendencies and the lack of reliable scientific data on the use of puberty blockers and the consequences of taking hormones of the opposite sex lead to the conclusion that accepting voluntary personal forms proposed by children/teenagers is premature.

This chapter argues that although the legal recognition of transsexuality came early in the Czech Republic, the social and legal understanding and recognition of transgender identity and transgender people’s rights has been and continues to be limited. I understand transsexuality as the desire to undergo (or having undergone) ‘gender reassignment treatment/surgery’ and consider legal provisions that are exclusively tied to physical transition as addressing transsexuality. I understand transgender to be a wider concept, which includes but goes beyond transsexuality, and entails the desire to live in (or living in) the role of a gender which is not the one designated at birth. The chapter’s main argument is that while Czech law has to some extent addressed concerns of those who wish to ‘fully transition’ – such as the possibility of a name change and birth-record change connected to sex/gender confirmation surgery – it has not paid attention to those transgender people who do not wish to do so. It observes that the law is based on a heteronormative, biological, and dualistic understanding of sex (rather than gender). First, its heteronormative character manifests itself in the requirement that a marriage be dissolved before a person can submit to sex/gender confirmation surgery. It continues to be unthinkable for Czech law that two persons of the same sex could be married. Second, the biological attachment to ‘sex’ is apparent in the requirement of surgical intervention for any legal recognition of a person’s preferred sex/gender. The law recognises the possibility that ‘biological sex’ and ‘psychological sex’ are misaligned. And it now enables their ‘realignment’, medically and legally. What it does not recognise is the possibility that gender identity can be different from biological sex, without a person wishing to physically modify their body, including their sex characteristics. The law does not accept that it might be called to recognise such a situation and enable some legal recognition of a person’s preferred legal sex/gender or allow for a name change without that person first having submitted to gender confirmation surgery. Czech law can thus be said to address transsexual rather than transgender issues. Third, the law is incapable of transcending the sex binary. This is true for gender identities non-confirming to the clear male-female binary – a part of the required Real Life Test is the ‘proven ability to live in the opposite sex role’. It is also apparent with regard to reproduction. The law continues to require sterilisation as part of legal recognition, thus normatively ensuring the biological reproductive binary of men and women. All three underlying gender assumptions of the law impact the ability of transgender people to self-determine in ways recognised by the law. Aside from the limiting conceptualisation of transgender issues as relating to sex, the legal framework can moreover hardly be considered as guaranteeing ‘rights’. Access is very much in the hands of the medical establishment (with regard to determining suitability for surgical intervention), at the mercy of administrators (especially with regard to name change), and at the discretion of family courts (with regard to care of children of transgender parents). I believe that both observations can be understood as legacies of the Czech Republic’s socialist past: the country’s intellectual isolation up until the 1990s prevented it from reaching a critical understanding of gender as a social construct when this happened in the West. I therefore dedicate particular attention to historical developments leading up to the current framework. The chapter is organized as the other contributions to the comparative volume. It discusses 1) Legal Framework and Statistics, 2) Changing Legal Sex/Gender – Procedure and Requirements, 3) Consequences of the Change of Legal Sex/Gender and 4) Legal Challenges to the Existing Rules.

Salud Colectiva, 2014

The social weight of transsexual groups has been and continues to be crucial in many aspects regarding transsexuality, from the progressive elimination of discrimination to influence in the legislative branch. This paper especially discusses a classic demand of these groups, comprehensive medical treatment of transsexual people within the National Health System. Thus, progress in the development of an adequate healthcare system for these groups, their treatment in the legal systems of Spain in general and of some of its autonomous communities with more noteworthy laws (especially in Andalusia, an autonomous community that has been pioneering in this regard, as well as the Basque Country and Navarre) and remaining challenges will be observed in this work. The article will also take particular note of the substantial developments that the publication of the Fifth Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has established in this area.

International Survey of Family Law, 2019

Transgender issues, such as legal sex change and all the legal consequences a er the gender reassignment surgery, have been taboo in Serbia for a long time. Not only was there no legislation to regulate these legal issues, but there is also still a negative attitude of the population towards same-sex couples, same-sex sexual orientation and transgender people. However, there have been certain positive shifts in the field of gender identity law since the adoption of the Anti-Discrimination Act 2009. A er the implementation of this Act, some issues dealing with discrimination on the basis of gender identity were brought before the Constitutional Court, the case law of which eventually led to an important legislative change dealing with legal sex change in Serbia in 2018. is chapter will analyse transgender issues in the Serbian constitutional law practice and its impact on the legislation.

2016

The experiences of countries all around the world show that there is no single, the same and universally applicable scenario of legal changes in terms of regulating the status of transgender people. The process most commonly begins by providing gender reassignment hormonal surgery procedures, which are followed by the legal recognition of a new gender identity. The next step necessarily implies the need to enact legislation to regulate the so-called social gender or gender identity, according to the right to self-determination of transgender persons, which is unrelated to previously undertaken medical treatment and gender reassignment surgery. Some countries have gone far in the implementation of this third step, while others have not taken even the first steps. Notably, different initiatives and events may be observed worldwide, many of which constitute the necessary "first steps" aimed at increasing the social acceptance of gender diversity. These steps may seem small an...

Trans Health. International Perspectives on Care for Trans Communities, 2022

Negotiating the Borders of the Gender Regime

3.1 developments and debates on tr ans(se xualIt y) In se xology from the 1990s to 2010 The sexological debate in Germany from the 1990s to 2010 was marked by four major developments. First, while enquiries into the aetiology of transsexuality, like in other Western countries, overall shifted towards somatic research, perspectives that questioned the search for a cause of transsexuality and called for a depathologisation of transsexuality entered the debate. Second, alongside homogenising concepts of transsexuality, perspectives emerged that acknowledged the publicly discernible proliferation of trans subjectivities, including the heterogeneity of transsexual subjects. Third, while the vast majority of sexologists continued to endorse a course of treatment based on authoritative psycho-medical control of trans subjects, one sexologist argued in favour of taking into account trans expertise and self-determination. Fourth, despite disagreement over concepts of transsexuality and the organisation of the treatment of transsexual individuals, sexologists developed authoritative national guidelines for the treatment and diagnostic assessment of transsexual individuals. This chapter analyses clinical categories and underlying concepts of trans according to the perspectives and resulting tensions that emerged in the course of the developments mentioned above. Drawing upon articles from the sexological journals Zeitschrift für Sexualforschung, Sexuologie and relevant articles in Psychoendocrinology, Zeitschrift für Humanontogenetik (Journal for Human Ontogenetics) and a sexological handbook, the chapter starts out with a systematic account of aetiological approaches to transsexuality. The next section deals with the reconceptualisation of transsexualism as it features in terminology and definitions, clinical pictures and differential diagnoses. Thereafter this chapter will address the debate on the diagnostics of transsexualism with a particular focus on the patient history, the physical 1 | The debate on the German Standards includes perspectives of trans and cis sociologists, a lawyer and the national trans organisation Transidentitas e. V.

American Journal of Legal History, 2017

In the common law world, both the medical and legal professions initially considered gender reassignment surgery to be unlawful when first practised and discussed in the first half of the twentieth century. While most medical procedures are covered by the medical exception to the law governing serious offences against the person, many doctors and the lawyers they consulted doubted that this exception applied to gender reassignment surgery. In this article I trace the differing and changing interpretations of the medical exception as applied to gender reassignment surgery, and the shift towards legal acceptance in the two common law jurisdictions which led the way in both performing gender reassignment surgery and debating its legality, the United States and the United Kingdom. Although this shift occurred without formal legal intervention through either legislation or judicial decision (for example on a test case), inferences of legality drawn from related civil law decisions bolstered the legal acceptance of gender reassignment surgery. By increasing the suffering of patients and potential patients, the criminal law played both an important and primarily malign role prior to the eventual public, professional and legal acceptance of GRS. A real threat of criminal prosecution  Professor of Law, Centre of Medical Law & Ethics, Dickson Poon School of Law, King's College London. I am grateful to the conference participants at 'Transforming wrong(s) into right(s): The power of 'proper medical treatment' held at the University of Manchester, to the Wellcome Trust for a research expenses grant in their medical humanities programme which supported this research, and to the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their extremely helpful comments.

Health and Human Rights, 1999

The problem of changing the civil status of transsexuals has been tackled in different ways in various European countries. Six applications made by transsexuals have led to judgments by the European Court of Human Rights. These cases illuminate some specific aspects of the relationships between health, law, and human rights, including criteria used to determine gender and the impact of authorities' refusal to modify civil status, which may be seen as violating the right to be free from inhuman or degrading treatment; respect for the private and family life of transsexuals; and the right to marry. Only one Court decision found a State party (France) to be in violation of the ECHR for refusing a transsexual the right to change civil status. This judgment, however, has left open a number of outstanding issues. Le problerme du changement de l'tat civil des transsexuels a et6 l'objet d'approches diverses dans les differents pays d'Europe. Six requetes de la part des transsexuels ont abouti a des jugements a la Cour Europeenne des Droits de l'Homme (CEDH). Ces cas illustrent certains aspects specifiques des rapports entre la sante, le droit et les droits de la personne y compris les crite'res de determination du genre et l'impact du refus de la part des autorites de modifier l'etat civil, ce qui peut etre considere comme une violation du droit de ne pas subir de traitement d6gradant ou inhumain, du droit au respect de la vie privee et de la vie de famille des transsexuels et du droit au marriage. Un seul jugement de la Cour a declare qu'un etat (la France) avait manque aux regles de la CEDH pour avoir refuse a un transsexuel le droit de changer son etat civil. Neanmoins ce jugement n'a pas retpondu a de nombreux autres questions qui ont ete laissees en suspend. El problema de cambiar la condicion civil de los transexuales se ha abordado de diferentes maneras en distintos paises europeos. Seis solicitudes hechas por transexuales han requerido dictimenes por parte de la Corte Europea de Derechos Humanos. Dichos casos sirven para esclarecer algunos aspectos especificos de la relaci6n entre salud, legislaci6n y derechos humanos tales como los criterios utilizados para determinar el genero y el impacto producido por el rechazo de las autoridades a peticiones de modificar el estado civil. Este rechazo puede ser visto como una violaci6n al derecho de no sufrir un trato inhumano o degradante, al respeto por la privacidad y la vida familiar de los transexuales, y al derecho a casarse. Solamente en uno de estos casos, la Corte encontr6 que un Estado signatario (Francia) habia violado la CEDH al denegar el derecho de un transexual a cambiar su estado civil. Este dictimen, sin embargo, deja sin resolver un amplio espectro de asuntos.