From early November, over-18s will be able to change official records altering their name and gender or have the gender marker removed altogether, under Germany's new Self-Determination Act.
There is a mandatory three-month wait between applying and making a personal declaration. Yet the requirement for two psychiatric assessments and a court hearing have been scrapped.
Minors — over the age of 14 — can do so with parental approval, or seek legal recourse. Parents can act on behalf of younger children, but the child needs to be present at the register office and give their assent.
This is a purely bureaucratic procedure with no medical implications.
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Kalle Hümpfner, policy officer for the German Trans* Association (BVT), welcomed the fact that gender self-recognition will now be much more accessible and less costly.
Hümpfner also stressed that the new law also made the process far less intrusive. "In the assessments, people were forced to divulge a lot of very personal information — information that was shared with the court. There have been many awful reports of people having to talk about their sexual preferences, about their masturbation practices, or their underwear choices."
Some 1,200 people in the capital Berlin with its thriving LGBTQI community have submitted applications up to now, according to the German press agency dpa. The Catholic news agency KNA reports there's a similar level of interest in other big cities.
German parliamentarian and transgender woman Nyke Slawik — who helped negotiate the bill for the Green Party — hailed the law as a historic reform of international significance. "I think it is a sign of hope in times where right-wing populist voices are getting louder again and where there is........