While most governments regulate what trans people can do with our
bodies and identity documents, Argentina is taking off the transgender
training wheels. We're big kids now.
Last week, Argentina gave citizens the freedom to change their legal and physical gender
without having to undergo medical, psychiatric, or judicial procedures.
Along with eliminating patronizing barriers to swapping an "M" for an
"F" on a driver's license, the law gives Argentinians a freedom you
won't find anywhere else: gender self-determination.
In the United States, changing a gender marker
on a birth certificate usually requires proof of hormone therapy, sex
reassignment surgery, and/or a psychological evaluation. These
stipulations unfairly prevent many transgender people from changing the
gender markers on their birth certificates because they require costly
and sometimes unwanted medical procedures. Similar legal barriers exist
in Canada, where the legal gender status of Miss Universe hopeful Jenna Talackova recently sparked a global debate. In 17 European countries, trans people have to agree to be sterilized in order to change gender markers on legal identification.
Argentinians won't have to undergo any kind of medical treatment to
legally change their gender. But for those who do want to change their
bodies, hormone therapy and surgery will be covered by both public and
private insurance.
In addition to granting unprecedented rights to trans Argentinians,
the Argentinian government implicitly recognizes changing one's gender
identity and/or expression as a rational choice. That choice doesn't
have be pathologized or approved by a judge to be legitimate, and that's
a first for a world that's lightyears behind Argentina.
So how will Argentinians take advantage of gender self-determination?
Will its freshly liberated citizens plunge into a full-fledged
genderpocalypse? Given the freedom to change their bodies whenever and
however they want to, will Argentinians express an even broader range of
gender identities? Will cisgender Argentinians begin to see gender
differently?
For now, we'll just have to watch and wait, looking forward to a future that puts gender identity in our own hands.
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