Reframing the timeless debate about the legal implications of transsexuality. Special reference to the situation of minors after Spanish Constitutional Court judgment 99/2019 of 18 July 2019
Keywords:
Transsexuality, transgender minors, female genital mutilation, circumcision, sexual rights, right to privacy, human rights, Transexualidad, menores transexuales, derechos sexuales, derecho a la intimidad, derechos humanosAbstract
By virtue of the existing laws and regulations in Spain (i.e., Law 3/2007, of 15 March, regulating the register rectification of the entry related to a person’s sex) any person of Spanish nationality, of legal age and with sufficient capacity to do so, may request the register rectification for sex change. A new aspect regarding the legal age was introduced not long ago. In this regard, the Constitutional Court of Spain in judgment 99/2019, 18 July 2019, declared unconstitutional article 1.1 of the aforementioned Law 3/2007 since it does not allow the sex change in the registry (and, consequently, the name) to minors, who, however, have sufficient maturity and live in a steady state of transsexuality. The Court states that this prohibition implies a disproportionate interference in minors right to privacy and it is contrary to the principle that guarantees them a space for the free development of his/her identity. Under the pretext of the mentioned landmark case-law we will highlight a series of controversial issues concerning sexual rights. Obviously, this question is still subject to debate and has lost none of its urgency.
A tenor de la regulación que, en la actualidad, rige en el Estado español (esto es, la Ley 3/2007, de 15 de marzo, reguladora de la rectificación registral de la mención relativa al sexo de las personas) toda persona de nacionalidad española, mayor de edad y con capacidad suficiente para ello, puede solicitar la rectificación de la mención registral del sexo. Una novedad importante respecto del requisito de mayoría de edad acaecía hace no mucho tiempo. Así las cosas, el Tribunal Constitucional en Sentencia 99/2019 de 18 de julio de 2019, consideraba inconstitucional que el art. 1.1. de la mencionada Ley 3/2007) no permita cambiar el sexo registral (y, consiguientemente, el nombre) a los menores de edad, que, no obstante, tengan “suficiente madurez” y se encuentren en una “situación estable de transexualidad”, por entender que dicha prohibición supone una injerencia desproporcionada en su derecho a la intimidad y es contraria al principio que les garantiza un espacio de libertad en la conformación de su identidad. Este singular posicionamiento jurisprudencial nos da pie a abordar en este trabajo una serie de controvertidos conceptos objeto de eterno debate.
Available from: https://doi.org/10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1187
Downloads
Downloads:
PDF 282
XML 16
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2021 Elena Atienza-Macías
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
OSLS strictly respects intellectual property rights and it is our policy that the author retains copyright, and articles are made available under a Creative Commons licence. The Creative Commons Non-Commercial Attribution No-Derivatives licence is our default licence, further details available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 If this is not acceptable to you, please contact us.
The non-exclusive permission you grant to us includes the rights to disseminate the bibliographic details of the article, including the abstract supplied by you, and to authorise others, including bibliographic databases, indexing and contents alerting services, to copy and communicate these details.
For information on how to share and store your own article at each stage of production from submission to final publication, please read our Self-Archiving and Sharing policy.
The Copyright Notice showing the author and co-authors, and the Creative Commons license will be displayed on the article, and you must agree to this as part of the submission process. Please ensure that all co-authors are properly attributed and that they understand and accept these terms.