Mexico City.- After months of debate within the left-wing government, the Spanish Congress definitively approved this Thursday a law that authorizes free gender self-determination, despite the fact that other pioneering European countries have rejected the regulation on the delicate issue.
Flagship initiative of the radical left of Podemos, a minority partner in the government of Pedro Sánchez’s socialists, the so-called “trans law” opens the door for anyone over the age of 16 to freely change their gender through a simple administrative procedure .
The requirements demanded until now will no longer be necessary: a medical report that diagnoses gender dysphoria and a test of hormone treatment for two years.
The text, approved this Thursday by 191 votes in favor, 60 against and 91 abstentions, extends the right to young people between the ages of 14 and 16, if they are accompanied by their legal guardians, and to those between 12 and 14, if they obtain judicial authorization.
Spain becomes one of the few countries that authorize the choice of sex in a simple way, in the image of Denmark, which was the first country that granted this right to transgender people in 2014.
“We have taken a giant step” by recognizing “the right to self-determination of gender identity,” the Minister of Equality, Irene Montero, from Podemos, congratulated herself in Congress before the vote, defending that the law “depathologizes to ‘trans’ people.
“Caution”
The debate about gender dysphoria, which is the mismatch between a person’s biological sex and the gender with which they identify, has gained momentum in several countries in recent years, with the increase in requests to change gender. gender, especially among minors.
But Spain is taking this step at a time when several countries, which were pioneers in the matter, have put on the brakes or have recoiled from the complexities arising from the delicate issue.
Sweden decided a year ago to stop hormone therapy for minors, citing the need to observe “precaution”, something Finland had already done two years earlier.
In France, the Academy of Medicine called for “great medical caution” in the treatment of young patients.
And in the United Kingdom, the Government blocked in January a Scottish law similar to the Spanish one adopted at the end of December by the Edinburgh Parliament after a heated debate.
The controversy around the Scottish law, which was inflamed by the entry into a women’s prison of a transsexual woman convicted of raping women before her transition, was one of the causes that led the head of the regional government to resign on Wednesday from Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon.
Warnings
In Spain, the “trans law” was harshly criticized by the right.
“We are not here to experiment with people. We have known references from countries that back down because now they know that they rushed and that this has cost a lot of suffering, let’s not go through the same thing,” said the Popular Party (PP, conservative) deputy. Maria Jesus Moro.
The project also provoked a fierce debate in the left-wing government and within the feminist movement, months before the general elections at the end of the year.
The law was defended tooth and nail by Podemos and by FELGBTI+, the main LGBT organization in Spain, whose president Uge Sangil estimated that “it will make other countries make the decision to start moving forward and set an example.”
On the other side of the debate, the socialists of Pedro Sánchez unsuccessfully sought that before the age of 16 people needed judicial guarantee to change gender.
A sector of the feminist movement considered that sex is not something that is chosen and that free self-determination “erases” women after decades of fighting for their rights.
“It is very dangerous that children can change their bodies without any restrictions,” the UN rapporteur on violence against women, Reem Alsalem, recently warned in an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Mundo.
