Policy|Legislation
The requirement of infertility is removed from the law. It has been said that the preparation of the law has been left behind by the corona pandemic.
The government The motion for a new trans law has been submitted to the parliament for consideration on Thursday, after a delay of months. Originally, the law was supposed to be discussed already at the beginning of the year, but the preparation of the reform included in the government program has reportedly been delayed by the corona pandemic.
Chairman of the Green Party, Minister of the Environment Maria Ohisalo praised the presentation, calling the reform one of the government’s most important measures to promote human rights.
“It has been demanded both by citizens’ initiatives and by expressions of opinion over the years of government. I was already worried for a while that the law we pushed into the government program would be implemented after all, but the work finally paid off”, Ohisalo was happy in his blog post and thanked all those who fought for the reform.
Spring however, in the opinion round, the proposal received a lot of criticism for the fact that legal confirmation of gender will also be allowed in the future only for those who have turned 18. The age limit has been agreed upon in the government program.
Legal confirmation of gender means changing the gender marking on the personal identification number to another.
The requirement of being of legal age is also in the current law, and Finland has received a note about it from, among others, the UN Human Rights Committee.
Presentation has been prepared in the working group set up in the spring of last year and it has also been accelerated by a citizens’ initiative. The initiative called Oikeus olla exceeded 50,000 signatures in the spring of last year.
The initiative demands that the legal confirmation of gender as a matter of notification should become possible for those who have reached the age of 15. For those younger than that, the initiative requires this right with the consent of the guardians.
The current translation law, dating from 2002, requires that in order to confirm a person’s gender other than what they were assigned at birth, they must present a medical certificate that they have been sterilized or that they are otherwise incapable of reproduction.
The new law proposes to waive this sterilization requirement, as it has been considered a violation of the right to self-determination.
The new translation law is supposed to enter into force at the beginning of next year. The reform brings with it changes to a total of twelve other laws.
For example, the Maternity Allowance Act is amended so that a pregnant person has the right to a benefit regardless of their legal gender. Nowadays, only women are entitled to the subsidy.
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