Governments should not be telling us who we are. That’s for each of us to say for ourselves.
And that, in essence, is what Spain’s parliament reconfirmed yesterday with the passage of a comprehensive new law that expands protections and entrenches rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) people.
The law will improve people’s lives on a number of fronts. It broadens access to assisted reproductive techniques. It strengthens sexuality education. It bans medically unnecessary, “normalizing” surgeries for intersex children before they can consent.
The new legislation also enables parental recognition for unmarried same-sex couples, and introduces measures to combat discrimination against LGBTI people in various sectors, including in healthcare, employment, and housing.
Key provisions of the new law will also allow for gender recognition based on self-identification through a simple administrative process. It’s an important move forward.
Up to now, changing the gender marker on ID documents in Spain was a complicated and degrading process. It required you to get a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria and go through a two-year period of medical treatment to align your physical characteristics to the gender marker you sought.
The new Spanish law sweeps away these old requirements and is rightly based on a trans person’s self-identification.
With this, Spain puts itself in step with European and international law and standards. It also joins a growing number of countries eliminating burdensome and dehumanizing government demands, including medical and psychological evaluations, sterilization, and divorce.
Argentina, Belgium, Colombia, Denmark, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Norway, Portugal, and Uruguay also now have gender recognition procedures that put individual autonomy first. Regular readers of this newsletter will recall the good news from Finland two weeks ago, as well.
It all adds up to a welcome trend: victories for individual freedom against abusive government power.