On Tuesday March 12, associations filed an appeal before the Council of State to request the annulment of texts concerning the change of first name and the mention of sex in the civil status of transgender people and to demand the right to “self-determination” of gender, Agence France-Presse learned from their lawyer.
The modification of the civil status certificate of a transgender person has been authorized in France since 1992. At the time, this modification was conditional on “irreversible and medical proof of a physical transformation”.
On April 6, 2017, the European Court of Human Rights condemned France for forcing transgender people to undergo body modifications and forced sterilization to obtain gender change in civil status. “Making the recognition of the sexual identity of transgender people conditional on carrying out an operation or sterilizing treatment that they do not wish to undergo” constitutes a violation of their right to respect for private life, according to Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the ECHR then considered.
In 2016, a law anticipated this conviction and changed this procedure by no longer asking applicants for medical proof but “a sufficient collection of facts that the entry relating to their sex in the civil status does not correspond to that” in which they present themselves and in which they are known. The fact of having undergone a sterilization operation is therefore no longer mandatory to obtain a modification of the sex designation in civil status. Two circulars dated February 17 and May 10, 2017 specify the contours of this law.
“Gender Police”
“In fact, these circulars replace the obligation of sterilization with an obligation of passing, that is to say the obligation to appear before the court in the appearance of the opposite gender to that originally mentioned on the birth certificate", explains Etienne Deshoulières, lawyer for the seven associations (Stop Homophobia, Adheos, Acceptess-T, Mousse, etc.) and the seven people behind the appeal filed before the Council of State. Transgender people are thus forced to undergo hormonal treatments and operations, sometimes unwanted, in order to be able to change their sex information in civil status.
These texts “constitute an attack on the right to respect for private life and discrimination based on physical appearance”, adds the lawyer, denouncing “gender policing”. “The obligation to pass constitutes discrimination against people who do not conform their physical appearance, their voice, their style of dress, their behavior, their centers of interest to the binary norms of woman and man. » “In addition, non-binary people are excluded from this process, their legitimacy being ignored by current law,” adds the lawyer on his website.
For Nathan Kuentz, lawyer from Stop Homophobia, “the State does not have to be the judge of what a woman or a man should be.” “Other countries have fully adopted the self-declaration model in this area without the sky falling,” he argues in a press release. It is time for France to be part of this vanguard of countries leading the way on this subject. »
According to the International Lesbian and Gay Association, around twenty UN member states allow transgender people to have their marital status changed by simple declaration. This is particularly the case for Argentina, Uruguay, Spain and even Denmark.
