Germany passes groundbreaking law helping trans people easily update their legal documents

Transgender and nonbinary people in Germany will soon be able to update their legal documents to reflect their gender identity without having to provide “expert reports.”  

On Friday, the country’s parliament passed a law requiring trans people over the age of 18 to make a simple declaration of their identity at a registry office in order to update their name and gender markers on official documents like IDs. The law also allows minors between the ages of 14 and 18 to update their documents with parental permission. Minors who are 14 and older whose parents do not approve can petition a family court to overrule their parents.

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“It’s like I’m standing at the start line of my new life.”

The “Self-Determination Act” replaces a decades-old German law that placed onerous hurdles between trans people and legal recognition of their identity.

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The existing “transsexual law” required trans people to obtain assessments from two separate experts “sufficiently familiar with the particular problems of transsexualism” before they could update their legal documents. As the Associated Press (AP) notes, Germany’s Constitutional Court had already invalidated down other parts of that law, including its surgical requirements.

The new law was approved by the German Cabinet last August. At the time Marco Buschmann, justice minister for the Free Democratic Party, told ZDF television that trans people who had gone through the process of meeting the requirements under existing law described it as “very degrading.”

“Imagine that you … simply want to live your life and you don’t wish anyone anything bad, and then you’re questioned about what your sexual fantasies are, what underwear you wear, and similar things,” Buschmann said, according to the AP. “Now we simply want to make life a bit easier for a small group for which it has great significance.”

Nyke Slawik, one of the first openly transgender people ever elected to the German Parliament, said that under the “transsexual law,” it had taken her two years and cost 2,000 euros to get her ID updated to reflect her name 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 abstaining. It is set to take effect in November, the AP reports.

“For over 40 years, the ‘transexual law’ has caused a lot of suffering … and only 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 today we are finally putting an end to this.”

According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), Germany joins a growing number of countries — including Argentina, Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Norway, Portugal, Spain, and Uruguay — that have similarly done away with burdensome requirements.

In a statement, Cristian González Cabrera, a senior LGBTQ+ rights researcher at HRW, described requiring medical procedures and psychological assessments for trans people to update their documents as “pathologizing.” He said those sorts 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.