As I have written about previously, one of Europe's most progressive nations has had one of Europe's most repressive policies towards transgender people. Sweden has required all transgender people to be sterilized in exchange for legal change of their sex.
On December 19 the Stockholm Administrative Court of Appeal overturned that law, declaring it to be unconstitutional. The appeal period ended January 10, so the old law, enacted in 1972, is now invalid.
Sweden’s 1970s-era statutes on sexual identity mandated that any person who legally wanted to change their sex must be sterile. Transgender Swedes had to go through gender reassignment surgery to have their legal documents updated, and to comply with the law, they were also sterilized, whether or not they wanted to be.
In March an administrative court in Sweden ruled that compulsory sterilization was a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights.
I think that it is important for anyone who has been involved in the issue that the legal community has taken a stand and that we receive confirmation that the convention’s support for human rights apply in practice.
--Swedish rights lawyer Kerstin Burman, last March
But while the liberal and moderate members of Sweden's Parliament fought to repeal the law, the conservative Christian Democrats remained stubborn. One compromise allowed transgender people to marry, which had been banned even though same-sex marriage had been legalized in 2009.
An unidentified plaintiff who desired to change his legal gender but refused to be sterilized then took his case to the Swedish Board of Health…and won that right.
Now around 500 people who underwent forced sterilization in order to change their legal gender are suing. Ulrika Westerlund of the Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights has said that 200,000 kronor ($31,000) is thought to be a "fair sum for damages".
It was an assault, a rape. The state gave an ultimatum I had to accept. The alternative was to die, which I felt so strongly. I do not know how many wills I wrote as a child… I am terribly disappointed that it took so terribly long.
Being transgender is considered embarrassing and unimportant in society. They would rather hide us, it’s hard to even talk about us. Therefore, it has taken time… It’s lucky that I can feel joy for others. Otherwise I would have been driven to madness by the bitterness.
Colliander and her intersex partner, Vio Szabo, are shown in the photo.
Transgender Law Center Operations Manager Maceo Persson offers his reaction to the news.
Today’s news is huge. It lifts a dehumanizing law that traces back to the dark times of the eugenics movement. The sterilization law in Sweden had also been joined with a law that didn’t allow transgender people to be married in order to go through a legal and medical transition. These policies sent a very clear message that the government saw transgender people as unfit to have a family. It is astonishing that we still had to have a legal battle in order to remove this archaic practice and it is a huge victory for transgender Swedes.
--Persson
If lawmakers take the initiative to adopt a law outlining damages, we will not file a lawsuit.
--Westerlund
In 1999 Sweden granted 175,000 kronor in damages to women who had been sterilized under an infamous eugenics program.
Currently sixteen countries require some form of sterilization before they undergo gender reassignment surgery (Belgium, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Monaco, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia. Denmark, the Netherlands, and Portugal are currently reviewing their legal requirements.
Croatia, Ireland, Lithuania have no legal recognition of transgender people. The legal situation in Bulgaria is unknown.
A new policy is slated to be written and the old policy removed from the books effective July 1, 2013.
Comments
Eugenics is never pretty.
The behavior was making me ashamed of my Swedish heritage.
Forgive my ignorance on this subject.
Transgender people can get pregnant or cause pregnancies? How is that biologically possible? If a man becomes a woman, (pronoun confusion) can have a uterus that can carry a baby?
Just how is that done?
Reply is below.
Missed.
Female to male transpeople have given birth...
...after hormone treatment and top surgery on a few occassions. Male to female transgender people have stored sperm in case they decided they later wanted to use it to inseminate a partner (which the Swedish legal system disapproved of). Also some transwomen elect not to have genital surgery, but still want to have their identity changed.
Thank you.
So. The gender transgender people are born with determines what role they can play in the human reproductive process, ne cest pas?
And one can only get this fundamentally cosmetic and optional surgery done if one has the money to do so, correct?
Meanwhile, those afflicted with cystic acne who don't have the money for dermal abrasion have to go through life with their scars, and those women who don't have breasts large enough to suit their tastes who can't afford to spend thousands of dollars on silicon implants just have to make do with what they have, correct?
I don't see the fundamental difference between these three groups of people.
I am not your enemy, but neither am I your friend on this very fundamental issue. I do not understand why people who have undergone such a thing, for reasons I readily admit I do not comrprehend, should be placed in some category above others who have undergone different types of cosmetic surgery for reasons that strike me as none other than personal desire.
This is not an attack. I find mandatory sterilization of people like you a repulsive concept. But, if you want to convince people like me, and I'm in the majority here, like it or not, to support your cause, you have to persuade me to do so. Right now, I really don't care much. My main issue is my and my family's standard of living. How does supporting transgender rights help me and mine at all? Why should I care? I'm not being sarcastic; that's a genuine question.
Gay people are different. They're born that way, just as much as straight people like myself are born the way we are. I can easily understand that. So can most heterosexuals. But this transgender thing is something else because it requires optional surgery. Expensive optional surgery at that.
So expensive that most ordinary Americans cannot even think of affording it.
If you want the support of people like me, you have to convince me why I should support you instead of standing by on the sidelines. Liberal political correctness is completely irrelevant to me and mine. Will you assist in making a more economically just society for all? If yes, how? Or is it all about you?
Again, that's an honest question, not an attack. And it reflects what many in my shoes think. Most of us have accepted gays and lesbians, but really don't understand this transgender stuff, or why we should go out on a limb to support it when there are other things far more important to us.
Here's your chance to tell me why I'm wrong.
It's about basic human rights.
My support is there on that basis. You say yourself that you don't understand and I'm sure many people don't, not 100%. But people do have the right to be who they are and have every right that all other people have.
Basic human rights are food, clothing, and shelter.
And maybe some other things. You miss my point. Read the whole thing, every line, and think a bit before jerking the knee, please.
maybe some other things, yes...
like the right not to be a victim of a policy of eugenics. that was my thought.
you have to be persuaded to support human rights?
no one is asking you to go out on a limb and support lgbt issues, you're being asked to support human rights. you should be extremely cautious about confusing the two issues. the issue that you should see is not that lgbt people are asking for rights and asking for your support, the issue you should see is that PEOPLE are asking to treated EQUALLY.
This is not about surgery.
This is about "legal identity" if you would read closely. It's about having papers that identify a person as the gender they experience.
There is scientific evidence that transgender people are also "born that way". As far as the rest of what you written here...it does feel like an attack. It feels like you know nothing about us, but you're not going to let that get in your way of detesting us and saying hateful things.
You should support us because we are human beings and deserve the same quality of life that you do.
Am I not a human being, too?
I could easily interpret what you said as an attack as well. No matter. That would serve no purpose.
You accuse me of detesting you and saying hateful things. Well, I don't detest you, and I really did not think I was being hateful because I feel no hatred towards you or other transgender people. Saying "I don't understand" does not equal "I hate you." I know my feelings better than you do.
As for quality of life, if you can afford transgender surgery, which costs more than my gross salary for a year, you have a higher material quality of life than I do, so please spare me the self-righteous, I-am-a-persecuted-minority rant. If anything, that makes you my class enemy. No more, no less.
I really don't give a damn about your personal feelings or desires. But you just showed you care absolutely nothing about the standard of living or quality of life of me or mine, or anyone else's besides others like yourself. You did that by not even mentioning it. That didn't even occur to you, did it?
I asked you some honest, if uncomfortable, questions, yet you can't come out of what appears to me to be self-absorption and narcissism to even think about them before turning around and accusing me of hating you. (Sigh) I really was trying to understand, yet again, and run into the same self-righteous how-dare-you vitriol. I run into the same sort of thing on Conservative Cave.
Oh, well. Barbarians get used to this sort of thing from self-described civilized people.
As if you were worth the effort to hate. Please. Nazis are worth hating. Jamie Dimon and Marc Glassman(of Marc's, the rapacious owner of a local grocery store chain) are worth my hatred. You're not. You're no threat to me. You don't endanger me or mine, unless you are in the position to hire or fire, and that has absolutely nothing to do with gender preference.
But you are no help to me, either. At least not for the now.
And the really, really, inconvenient truth is this: you need the likes of me far more than the likes of me need the likes of you. You really should think about that. It is in your best long term interests to do so. As I said, I'm not your enemy. No need of you to go out of your way to try and make me one.
Jesus wept. Buddha laughed.
I have no desire to be counterproductive here or start some kind of blog feud. Not here on VOTS. I'll leave you alone so long as you extend me the same courtesy. Live long and prosper, the latter of which you are no doubt already doing better than I, bank account-wise, anyway.
the article was about forced sterilization
I'm not sure how this thread devolved into a 'you don't care about me and screw you and your big bank account', however, it seems to have jumped the shark.
Ohio Barbarian, the point of this essay was about forced sterilization. That did not appear to be your take away from the essay. Your take away, seemed to be that transgenders spend too much money on sex change surgery so why should I care about their concerns????
I'm not the writer of this piece so I am going to see myself out of this thread. Perhaps the writer of this essay can engage you on this topic and offer the additional explanations you seek.
First off...
...my surgery cost slightly less than $10K. I assume you gross more than that in a year.
Most transpeople will never be able to afford surgery. But again, that has nothing whatsoever to do with this article. And it has nothing to do with transpeople having fewer legal rights than you do.
Personally I'm a college professor and have been one for almost 35 years. As such, I've never been able to purchase a home until my partner inherited some money recently. So we finally have a place to live...one year before I will retire.
I live month to month, hoping not to bounce checks at the end of the month.
Again, nothing you have asked about had anything to do with this article, but rather just expressed your opinion of transpeople being rich entitled people who are just a waste of space. Pardon me if I object to that.
No...rather, screw you.
I want to attempt a partial response
Partial because I don't fully understand what you're saying and also because I am woefully uninformed about transgender issues, also with a ton of confused thoughts and conditioning in my own head. If I participated in robyn's essays more fully, I'm sure both of those limitations would be fixed. But my energy gets drawn into things easily, and I consciously choose not to make some issues my own. I'm sorry to say that transgender issues and lgbt issues are two that I made a conscious choice to give myself permission not to have to study closely. I'm afraid I am all too typical, which is one reason people who are affected by these causes feel abandoned or at least not very well supported by people like me who like to think of ourselves as liberal.
The main thing I don't understand about these remarks is what the expense has to do with it. The issues you raise wrt money seem challenging and important to me, but I don't see the implications for this discussion. In my view, whatever people can afford that doesn't hurt other people or society in general, they have a right to purchase. And they also have a right not to have to agree to give up an essential part of themselves in order to live their lives as they see fit. To me, this part doesn't seem complicated. A rough analogy might be, if you can afford a yacht you're welcome to buy one, but you'll have to put your firstborn up for adoption in order to complete the purchase. That may not be an apt analogy because, as I say, I don't fully understand what you're saying. And I'm not absolutely certain I'm interested in hearing it expanded on, which I have to admit, but the effort seems sincere, so here I am, giving it a try.
It seems to me that you are asking transgender people to justify having the right to be themselves. Believe it or not, I appreciate some of your points about assuming a need for progressive support, about confusing rights with wants or needs, etc. But the point of this essay is that we do not live in a neutral world--there are active attempts to control people's lives and to force things on people which no one has a right to force on anyone. If you don't care when laws dehumanize people or rob them of dignity, fine, then don't care. But please don't make it into a righteous cause not to care. As a matter of record, I offer this writer minimal support, as I do countless other writers with countless other issues. Perhaps everyone does not share with Bruce a passion for promoting rail transportation. At the same time, I also celebrate the work that this writer and others are doing and I am fully sympathetic to their causes, even if I disagree with aspects of their position.
This is a stab at a response. Others said it more succinctly: this essay is about human rights and ways in which laws promote or deny those rights. Human rights are not dependent on the character of the human--they are rights fundamental to everyone, such as the right not to be subjected to forced sterilization. You mention gay rights. I wonder if you're aware that gay men were sterilized routinely as late as the 1930's or perhaps later--as I say, I am not well-educated on this issue. As a matter of trying to figure out what your point is, I wonder if you feel the same about that issue and would be unconcerned if gay men were sterilized today in exchange for, say, the right to marry.
I don't have the words.
This is just sick. Forced sterilization? Procreation is a basic human right. Like breathing. No man can deny such a right. That is just SICK!