Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Gender-registry push advances
Spain’s Cabinet favors bill to facilitate teens altering records
MADRID — The Spanish Cabinet on Tuesday passed a draft bill on LGBTI rights that will seek parliamentary approval to allow transgender people older than 16 to freely change their genders and names without doctors or witnesses intervening in the process.
The proposal could still change during a lengthy parliamentary debate of the legal draft. But if its essence prevails, Spain would join a handful of countries around the world enshrining gender self-determination without a diagnosis of gender dysphoria or requiring that a person’s physical appearance conform with traditional male or female expressions.
It would also make the changes in the official registry faster than in most countries: up to four months from the first application to the change finally appearing in official documents. The process would be easily reversible for half a year, but it would require going to court after that.
The legal proposal has been controversial from the start, and it opened an internal battle within the left-wing ruling coalition, with the leading Socialists initially opposing self- determination in line with historical feminist activists while the junior partner of the governing alliance, the far-left United We Can party, strongly pushed for the free, unsupervised right to choose one’s gender.
Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, the leader of the Socialists, said the draft law put Spain “at the international forefront” in rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex communities.
The law also bans socalled conversion therapies to suppress sexual orientation or gender identity, establishes fines and punishment for attacks on LGBTI people, and overturns a ban that prevented lesbian couples from registering their children under both parents’ names.
The Spanish government’s move comes amid deep divisions in the European Union on the issue, and with a backlash against LGBTI rights playing out in Hungary and Poland, two countries led by liberal-opposing populist governments that have used the issue in an apparent attempt to energize their conservative voters.
According to the Spanish draft, all nationals older than 16 will be able to change their genders and names by simply stating twice their desire to do so. Previously, applicants needed a diagnosis by several doctors of gender dysphoria, which is the psychological condition of feeling a mismatch between one’s biological sex and gender identity. In some cases, they also needed proof that they had been living for two years as the gender they identified with — or even records showing they had taken hormones.
Teenagers between 14 and 16 can also apply with parental permission or by going to a judge if there is disagreement among them. A court is involved in applications for those between 12 and 14, and children under 12 are only allowed to register a new name but are not allowed to switch their genders.
Transgender rights groups had put pressure for months on the government by holding hunger strikes, proposing more ambitious drafts to Parliament and urging organizers of the country’s biggest Pride celebration, in Madrid, to exclude the Socialists from the annual march.
Mar Cambrolle, from Plataforma Trans, said Tuesday that while the proposal accepts their demand for self- determination, it falls short in protecting transgender children under 14 or guaranteeing the rights of non- binary people and transgender migrants.
Some feminist opponents say they fear that some men could use gender self-determination to invade women’s safe spaces, that it puts pressure on young women who see it as easier to succeed in today’s world as men or that it would skew quotas and national statistics.