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congratulations to sweden on approving a new gender recognition law that is very slightly better than the old one
will the media circus end now
with the new law, uhh…
- less medical involvement in legal gender change (but still some. law text itself is silent)
- non-binary people can legally change gender (but still only to male or female lol)
- 16-year-olds can legally change gender (with parental permission)
oh right also approval for surgery is completely separated from approval of legal gender change. previously they went through the same committee of a government agency. now there is no approval from that agency required for surgery.
oh the biggest change might be that there is no longer any requirement that the applicant “has experienced for a long time that he or she belongs to the other gender” or “has for some time been acting in accordance with this gender identity”. less justification to force delays
you know i have to say i'm quite happy about it. moved a little maybe. i've seen two compromise gender recognition proposals get torpedoed in the uk. after the previous, left-wing government in sweden failed to pass this law, i assumed it was dead with a right-wing one. not so!
for comparison, british institutions' capture by transphobes really kicked off with the 2017 conservative govt trying to introduce self-id. it was meant to be a tiny manifesto pledge that would win some lgbt votes. instead that opened pandora's box somehow.
it eventually got so bad that a later uk government used the nuclear option, never before used, to veto the devolved, left-wing scottish government's own self-id law, and now not being transphobic is politically incorrect among the major british political parties. nightmare!
meanwhile in sweden, sure, self-id didn't happen because the previous, left-wing government made some political mistakes, but somehow it's under a right-wing government that a compromise proposal passed. and this was despite internal splits within the government!
normally laws that pass through riksdagen are proposed by the government. but the current right-wing government consists of three parties (moderates, liberals, christian democrats), supported by a fourth (sweden democrats), and these last two parties both were against this law
so instead this new law law was introduced by one of riksdagen's committees (an unusual thing, a previous example was same-sex marriage), rather than by the government. 2/4 parties in the governing constellation voted against it. but 8/10 parties in riksdagen voted for :)