Brazil has passed an historic ruling allowing transgender people to be recognised by their self-determined gender, without the need for surgery.
Responding to a reported rise in demand, the Brazilian Supreme Court voted that people can now update their gender on the civil registry without undergoing gender-affirming surgery.
“Up until now, bureaucratic procedures had been on the rise for those who wanted the civil registry to reflect their gender identity and their names,” said Federal Prosecutor Carlos Eduardo Paz following the ruling.
“We have only now guaranteed a minimum of citizenship to transgender people with both of these rulings but there are still a lot of challenges to overcome,” Keila Simpson, founder of Brazilian-based organisation ANTRA, told The Washington Blade.
She continued: “We believe that even if we had a law approved by the Congress criminalising acts of violence against LGBT people, we would still have this many deaths, because we live in a country where it is allowed to kill, where religious fanaticism sharpens its knife daily to decimate our community, where the prejudice faced by transgender people starts inside their homes."
“It is important to say that for a marginalised community like ours, that comes from having no rights, no nothing, being able to decide our name is a lot, but we are yet to conquer our right to safe living,” Simpson added.
Brazil has the highest number of trans murders in the world, with 179 crossdressers and trans people killed in 2017 alone.
