LGBTQI+ pressure group wins case at Constitutional Court
The Constitutional Court has overturned part of the law relating to the rights of transgender people in Belgium. In a ruling made at the end of a sitting on Wednesday morning the court said that “Persons with a non-binary gender identity should have the possibility to be able to modify the sex given on their birth certificates to make it compliant with their gender identity”.
This means that those that don’t identify as being male or female will be able to have the sex listed on their birth certificate changed to “X”.
The ruling is a victory for the LGBTQI+ rights pressure group Çavaria. The organisation was not satisfied with the law on transgender rights that came into force on 1 January 2018.
Although the law allows those that wish to have the gender identity changed on their identity document without having had to have undergone a sex change operation, Çavaria didn’t feel it went far enough. This is because non-binary persons (those that identify as neither male nor female) were still excluded.