Bulgaria's top court just told the government to recognize trans people

via Washington Blade and ILGA-Europe, TGEU, Bilitis and Deystvie joint statement

In 2023, Bulgaria's Supreme Court of Cassation issued a ruling that effectively shut the door on trans people changing their name and gender on their ID. No procedure, no path, no documents that matched the person carrying them. At the end of July this year the same court reopened the door, and last week the country's LGBTQ groups told the world about it.

what the court ruled

The rulings, dated July 22 according to the Blade, came down in favor of four trans applicants. The judges found that the Bulgarian constitution never prohibited legal gender recognition; earlier courts had simply read the word "sex" too narrowly. They held that trans and intersex people have an equal right to recognition, that blanket bans are unlawful, that a diagnosis plus a demonstrated commitment to living in one's gender is enough, and that nobody can be made to have surgery to qualify. Then they wrote a sentence Bulgarian trans people had waited years for: "The rule of law in Bulgaria implies a universal equality of the dignity of all human beings, including transgender people."

The push came from Luxembourg. In March, the EU Court of Justice ruled in the Shipova case that member states must let trans people change their name and gender on identity documents. The plaintiff was a Bulgarian trans woman living in Italy who had spent nearly a decade fighting for a passport that matched her life. Bilitis and Deystvie, the two Bulgarian groups, backed her alongside ILGA-Europe and TGEU. The Supreme Court has now concluded that EU law obliges Bulgaria to build an actual procedure, so its trans citizens can travel and live freely inside the union like everybody else.

why it may change nothing yet

Which is the catch. A court can say a procedure must exist. Only the government can write one. In a joint statement on September 1, the four organizations demanded that Sofia legislate a fast, transparent, accessible process based on self-determination rather than leave every trans person to relitigate the question case by case. Denitsa Lyubenova, co-chair of Deystvie, said "the government needs to act swiftly now to put in place an LGR procedure that is fully in line with European human rights case law."

Bulgaria is not the country you expected on this page this week. That is rather the point. Cracks, again. This is how it starts.