Rights in Transition: Making Legal Recognition for Transgender People a Global Priority
Chapter Author(s): Neela Ghoshal and Kyle Knight
The process is as universal as it gets: when a baby is born, a doctor, parent, or birth attendant announces the arrival of a “girl” or “boy.” That split-second assignment dictates multiple aspects of our lives. It is also something that most of us never question.
But some people do. Their gender evolves differently from their girl/boy birth assignment and might not fit rigid traditional notions of female or male.
Gender development should have no bearing on whether someone can enjoy fundamental rights, like the ability to be recognized by their government or to access health care, education, or employment. But for transgender people, it does—to a humiliating, violent, and sometimes lethal degree.
The Trans Murder Monitoring Project, an initiative that collects and analyzes reports of transgender homicides worldwide, recorded 1,731 murders of transgender people globally between 2007 and 2014. Many were of a shockingly brutal nature, sometimes involving torture and mutilation.
Outright violence is not the only threat to the lives of transgender people. They are as much as 50 times more likely to acquire HIV than the population as a whole, in part because stigma and discrimination create barriers to accessing health services. Studies in the United States, Canada, and Europe have found high rates of suicide attempts among transgender people, a response to systematic marginalization and humiliation.
Several countries, including Malaysia, Kuwait, and Nigeria, enforce laws that prohibit “posing” as the opposite sex—outlawing transgender people’s very existence. In scores of other countries, transgender people are arrested under laws that criminalize same-sex conduct.
This data only gives a glimpse of the horrific variants of violence and discrimination transgender people face. Absent legal recognition in the gender with which they identify, and associated rights and protections, every juncture of daily life when documents are requested or appearance is scrutinized becomes fraught with potential for violence and humiliation, driving many transgender people into the shadows.
The demand for legal gender recognition provokes moral panic in many governments. But it is a crucial fight to wage. If transgender communities are to thrive, and if the rights to privacy, free expression, and dignity are to be upheld for all, the human rights movement needs to prioritize eliminating abusive and discriminatory procedures that arbitrarily impede the right to recognition. Governments should acknowledge that the state should no longer be in the business of denying or unjustly restricting people’s fundamental right to their gender identity.
Download: Rights in Transition: Making legal recognition of transgender people a global priority