Transgender victory

Apr 08, 2008
In cooperation with BNS

VILNIUS - The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) will not reopen the case against Lithuania filed by a female aiming to have a sex change surgery - after losing the case in Strasbourg, the Baltic state will have to adopt a sex change law or pay compensation.

The suit against Lithuania was made by a 29-year-old woman from Klaipeda who identifies herself as a man.

"It took a few years of efforts for the ECHR to protect her right to change sex, as stipulated in the Civil Code. The irresponsible conduct of politicians has already cost a lot and may still have a higher price to Lithuanian taxpayers," says director of the Human Rights Monitoring Institute Henrikas Mickevicius, representative of the applicant to the court.

In its ruling last fall, the court said that if Lithuania fails to pass this law, it will have to pay another 40,000 euros to the woman -- the estimated cost of a sex change operation in a foreign country.

Under current laws, a person in Lithuania who wants to change sex cannot, despite the right guaranteed in the Civil Code - there is no legislation regulating the procedure. Even after a sex change surgery, a person would be faced with further obstacles - he would not be able to get a birth certificate, an identification code and a passport indicating his new sex.

Authors of the amendment said adoption of the law on sex change would require that post-op, persons would have costly hormone medications compensated by the state for the rest of their lives. In the opinion of politicians, transsexuals may have their sex changed in any other country of the European Union

Approximately 200 transsexuals - persons considering themselves of a different sex than they were born - are believed to reside in Lithuania.

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