courts) in the ECtHR arguing that the court should not decide in favor of the petitioners. While the court lacks a strong enforcement mechanism, the ruling sets a new legal guideline for all 47 countries party to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), including 20 that still have sterilization laws on the books.īut back on J, ADF International filed an intervention (similar to an amicus brief in U.S. France was thus no small feat for LGBT activists and their allies.
The April 2017 decision in A.P., Garçon and Nicot v. In 2013, the Netherlands repealed the law. In practice what is required is the removal of the ovaries (trans men) or testes (trans women), unless there are, for example, pre-existing medical conditions that have resulted in permanent infertility. Hormone treatment alone is also insufficient: while it often leads to infertility, it does not necessarily result in permanent and irreversible infertility. This second requirement is often referred to as the “sterilization requirement,” but this label does not in fact quite capture the drastic nature of the requirement: ordinary sterilization techniques used for family planning purposes do not suffice, since in principle these are reversible. Most egregiously, Dutch law allows trans people to change their gender on official documents only on condition that they have altered their bodies through hormones and surgery, and that they are permanently and irreversibly infertile. In 1985, the Netherlands was among the first European nations to adopt legislation granting transgender people - individuals whose gender identity differs from the sex assigned them at birth - legal recognition of their gender identity, albeit under onerous legal conditions. In response, the state created a system “whereby the change of gender on documents was only available to trans people who went through a very specific medical setting, leading to genital surgery and sterilization."Ī 2011 Human Rights Watch report on a sterilization law in the Netherlands described a similar evolution and the "drastic nature" of the requirement: The French sterilization law was the result of a 1990 ECtHR decision (based on a 1982 petition) that ruled the state must provide proper identification for transgender citizens. These laws came out of an earlier period when the medical and psychological fields had only just started to grapple with the rights of transgender people. The French law that had been challenged was scrapped in October 2016 while the case was before the international court, but it had stood for decades. LGBT advocates and activists celebrated the ruling across Europe. In so doing, activists said, the court set a new legal standard that calls for changes to laws in.countries under its jurisdiction. On April 6, it issued a ruling in favor of three transgender people in France who had been barred from changing the names and genders on their birth certificates because they had not been sterilized. Gay and transgender activists in Europe have argued for years that the sterilization requirement was an institutionalized violation of human rights, and last week the European Court of Human Rights agreed.
ALLIANCE DEFENDING DOM ORG LICENSE
As The New York Times reported:Ĭhanging the name or gender on a government-issued document like a driver’s license has long included a frightening step for transgender people in almost two dozen European countries: mandatory sterilization.īut those days may be coming to an end. France a landmark ruling in support of transgender rights. In April of this year, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) issued in A.P., Garçon and Nicot v.
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