Today Wednesday the 30th of June 2010 the National Board of Health and Welfare published their report following the recent overwiev of transgendender care in Sweden that was initiated during the 2009 Stockholm Pride Festival by the Board after demands from RFSL, the National Federation for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Rights.
The report suggests farreaching changes for Sweden’s trans and gender variant people and the most important change is that the Board have put forward a solution on the legal issue. Instead of suggesting that the Parliament (Riksdagen) will initiate yet another proposal, the Board proposes that the present law shall be stripped of those parts that are in violation of the human rights of trans and gender variant people such as described by Thomas Hammarberg the Comissioner for Humans Rights at the Council of Europe in his Issue Paper and in alignemenet with the Yogyakarta principles.
The proposed revison of the law is suggested to be effective of January 1st 2011 and the will grant any resident in the Kingdom of Sweden on application to have his/her legal gender changed to the gender the person feels he or she belong to.
In §1 the conditions laid down for who may apply for a legal gender changeare “ a person who, since youth experiances that he belongs to a different gender then the gender put down in the national register and since considerable time is acting accordingly, and must be assumed to continue to live in this gender can apply for a decision that he belongs to the other (legal) gender.”
The former prerequisites of being a Swedish citizen, unmarried and sterile are removed from the proposed law revision. Only two things remain from the old law of 1972, the age limit for legal gender recognition wich is 18 years of age. The other part of the old law that will be in effect is the special permission by the the Forensic Council of the National Board of Health and Welfare needed to undergo GRS/SRS in Sweden which is due to the present laws on sterilisation and castration. This doesn’t apply to similar procedures performed outside of Sweden.
The report proposes an separate overwiev in general of the conditions for trans and gender variant youth and hopefully this age limit will be scrapped. Furthermore there is a suggestion that two regional gender teams that exclusively will work with trans kids shall come into existance as well as a much wider use of hormone blockers.
Generally speaking, transgender care will be made available to all trans and gender variant people and not as is the case now, only persons with the ICD-10 diagnosis of F64.0 Transsexualism.This means that persons not desiring GRS/SRS can obtain HRT or other forms of treatment.
The Board has been listening to the LGBT and transcomunities with the support of the most progressive representatives of the profession. The new law will separate the requirements for legal gender reconition from the forensic and medical issues. So if the law is effectiv January 1st 2011 you will only need to apply to the Section for adminstrative decisions and peromissions at the Board of Health and Welfare, which will simplyfy the procedure imensely and once an for all do away with the grip that psychiatry has had on legal gender reconition in the past in Sweden.
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