This week’s ILGA World Conference in Bangkok (28th November – 2nd December) sees the launch of the organisation’s first global Trans Legal Mapping Report. Co-ordinated by Zhan Chiam, Gender Identity Officer from ILGA, and co-authored by Chiam, Matilda Gonzales Gil (Colombia Diversa), and myself, the report marks an important step in ILGA’s engagement with the status of trans* persons around the world.
The TLM project is a global survey of the availability of legal gender recognition and/or the legal option to change one’s name (whether as part of, or separate to, gender recognition processes). With help from organisations, teams, and researchers around the world, we have created a survey of every continent, finding measures allowing for at least some legal recourse for gender-diverse persons seeking recognition in 103 countries.
The creation of this report posed a number of challenges, not least my own experiences as a desk-based researcher. My sections of the report cover the regions of Europe and South Asia, a linguistically and legally diverse set of countries. Relying on materials from trans organisations, legal commentary, and a selection of dictionaries and translation tools, my task was to – insofar as possible – unite these sources into a coherent whole. The imperfections inherent to this approach have been mitigated by help from ILGA staff and partners across the region, as well as regular consultation with my coauthor, coordinator, and editor Zhan (whose encouragement, kindness, and assistance have been invaluable in not only the research elements of the project, but its every aspect from inception to publication).
The report illuminates the broad spectrum of legal and administrative manners in which different jurisdictions regulate – or fail to regulate – recognition of gender-diverse persons. Many countries operate on the basis of medical requirements for access to updated gender registration, although in some cases, the law requires medical intervention or certification both does not specify what level of intervention is required. In several jurisdictions, the law requires a judicial process, a policy which intensifies the uncertainty facing gender-diverse applicants for recognition – as it means that there is a possibility that the decision-maker could decide against them. The research also turned up some jurisdictions in which the law is currently in flux, showing the very much alive process by which gender recognition laws become updated.
We acknowledge that this project is a snapshot of one aspect of trans lives across the world, and that laws on the statute books do not always translate to accessibility or respect in day-to-day lives. Nevertheless, and in particular because each of the authors has a background in law, we believe that the law is a living instrument and a tool that does not guarantee, but significantly aids the struggle toward equality for minority communities, including gender- and sexuality-based minorities. The influence of international law on domestic legal systems is evident in the legislative processes of many countries, and the process can also operate in reverse (for example, the citation of a trend toward gender recognition cited in the seminal European Court of Human Rights case Goodwin and I v United Kingdom). The Trans Legal Mapping report joins a body of research from bodies such as Transgender Europe and the United Nations Development project with the goal of informing and educating interested parties, and providing a resource base of international standards for potential activist use. Gender recognition as a field of human rights law is growing and becoming more mainstream, and it is vital that we continue to build these engagements between policy-makers, academics, and front-line activists in order that it continues to flourish.
We hope that the report will promote engagement with debates around legal gender recognition in countries which do not yet feature in its pages, and in those where the laws in place are less than ideal. It is the first edition of what we hope will be an ongoing legal mapping project, with the potential to expand to encompass other issues around trans lives and law – healthcare, discrimination, etc. We hope that its audience will find it illustrative and interesting, and that they take away from it a recognition of the progress made toward vindicating trans persons’ right to recognition, along with a picture of how vital it is that we continue that work.
Sandra Duffy 