Without the need to submit “expert reports,” transgender and nonbinary people in Germany will soon be able to update their legal documents to reflect their gender identity.
A simple pronouncement of identification at a registration company is required by the country’s parliament on Friday to release the names and gender signs on official documents like IDs. Additionally, the law permits adolescents between the ages of 14 and 18 to release their files with parental consent. Adolescents overriding their parents can petition a family court for approval if they are 14 or older.
The “Self-Determination Act” replaces a decades-old German law that forbids transgender people from being recognized legally as they are.
Before they could update their legal documents, trans people were required to get assessments from two distinct experts who were “sufficiently knowledgeable about the specific problems of transgenderism.” As the Associated Press (AP) notes, Germany’s Constitutional Court had already invalidated other parts of that law, including its surgical requirements.
The German Cabinet approved the new legislation in August last year. Marco Buschmann, the Free Democratic Party’s justice minister at the time, reported to ZDF television that transgender people who had gone through the process of complying with current law described it as being “very insulting.”
According to the AP, Buschmann said, “Imagine that you… simply want to live your life and you don’t wish anyone anything bad, and then you are questioned about what your sexual fantasies are, what underwear you wear, and other similar things.” We are merely trying to make a little group’s living easier, for which it is significant.”
One of the first explicitly transgender members elected to the German Parliament, Nyke Slawik, claimed that it had taken her two years and cost $2,000 to update her ID to reflect her title and gender identity. “As trans people, we repeatedly experience our dignity being made a matter for negotiation,” she told lawmakers last week.
The “Self-Determination Act” passed in the Bundestag, the German Parliament’s lower house, last week by a vote of 374 to 251, with 11 abstentions. It is set to take effect in November, the AP reports.
“For over 40 years, the ‘transsexual law’ has caused a lot of suffering… just because people want to be recognized as they are,” Sven Lehmann, the German government’s Commissioner for the Acceptance of Sexual and Gender Diversity, told lawmakers. And we are ultimately putting an end to this immediately.”
According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), Germany joins a growing number of nations — including Argentina, Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Norway, Portugal, Spain, and Uruguay — that have also done away with costly requirements.
In a speech, Cristian González Cabrera, a top LGBTQ+ rights scholar at HRW, described requiring medical treatments and internal analyses for trans people to update their documents as “pathologizing.” He claimed that those kinds of requirements “have no place in diverse and democratic societies.”
“As populist politicians in Europe and beyond try to use trans rights as a political wedge issue, Germany’s new law sends a strong message that trans people exist and deserve recognition and protection, without discrimination,” Cabrera said.
