Image copyright Getty Images Image caption LGBT activists have welcomed the new law (file photo)

Portugal's parliament has approved a new law making it easier for people to change their legal gender.

Citizens from the age of 16 will now be able to change their gender and name in documents without the need of a medical report.

Activists welcomed the "groundbreaking" law, saying it respected the right of self-determination.

Critics were against allowing changes without a medical report and lowering the minimum age, currently at 18.

Lawmakers celebrated the vote of approval - by 109 votes in the 230-seat parliament - with a standing ovation.

Isabel Moreira, an MP from the Socialist Party, called this a "historic day that honours every trans person and their families".

Vânia Dias da Silva, from the right-wing party CDS-PP, which opposed the bill, said: "We disagree with this law. [Those who are] 16 years old can't marry, drink, or drive, so they shouldn't be able to make a decision with such definite and serious consequences."

For those aged between 16 or 18, the change of gender will need to be approved by their parents or legal representatives.

Under the old law, those wanting to change their gender on official documents had to present a medical report and be at least 18 years old.

A tradition of liberal liberties

By Mia Alberti, Lisbon

Until 2011 Portugal had no legislation regarding the recognition of transgender identity. Back then to legally change their identity, transgender people had to be sterilised and sue the state for wrongful attribution of identity. That year Portugal approved the current Gender Law, widely celebrated by LGBT activists.

Since then, 485 people have changed their legal name and gender, according to the Ministry of Justice. There is no data on how many transgender teenagers are in Portugal. However, Zélia Figueiredo, a psychiatrist and expert in sexology, says the transgender teens seeking her "are increasingly younger".

The Gender Law follows a number of other liberal law changes that have reshaped the social landscape in Portugal: drug decriminalisation (2001), same-sex marriage (2010), same-sex adoption (2016) and surrogacy (2016).

The legalisation of the medicinal use of marijuana and euthanasia are already scheduled for debate in parliament.

Katrin Hugendubel of ILGA-Europe, an LGBT rights advocacy group, said: "People will be able to change their legal gender through a procedure based on self-determination.

"This means that the law finally recognises and respects that trans people themselves know best who they are and how they identify."

Only five other European countries have a model based on self-determination, according to the group: Malta, Norway, Denmark, Ireland and Belgium.

In the UK, individuals need to be 18 years old to require a legal change of their gender, a process that can take up to five years and requires a diagnosis of gender dysphoria from a psychiatrist.

The new Portuguese legislation also outlaws unnecessary surgery on intersex children.

It now needs to be signed by President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa to come into effect.</s>LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Transgender people in Portugal will no longer need to be diagnosed as mentally ill to change their gender legally, after parliament approved a law on Friday that also bans unnecessary surgery on intersex infants.

Several European nations require transgender people to undergo medical procedures such as surgery and sterilization, be diagnosed with a mental disorder, and get divorced if married to have their desired gender legally recognized by government.

The law makes Portugal only the sixth European nation to allow a change of gender without medical or state intervention, according to ILGA-Europe, a network of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) groups.

It follows Malta, Norway, Denmark, Ireland and Belgium.

People who are transgender do not identify with the gender they were born as, while intersex people have ambiguous genitalia that are not considered typically male or female.

“When trans people are trusted to take decisions for themselves, it signals respect (and) procedures are simplified,” said Transgender Europe’s senior policy officer Richard Kohler.

“It enables anyone who needs legal gender recognition to quickly get through with this bureaucratic step and continue with their lives,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The law also means Portugal will become only the second nation in the world, after Malta, to ban medically unnecessary surgery on the genitals of intersex infants, activists said.

About 1.7 percent of the world’s population, or 129 million people, is thought to be born intersex, the United Nations says.

Doctors often perform surgery to “masculinize” or “feminize” the genitalia of intersex babies aged 2 or under in the belief it will make their lives easier and to ease parental distress.

Yet it can cause life-long pain, sterilization, loss of sexual sensation and health complications, campaigners say.

Rights groups such as Organisation Intersex International (OII) and StopIGM.org said Portugal’s new law was insufficient.

Parents could circumvent the legislation and have surgeries performed on their children by claiming they were confident of their gender identity, said Kitty Anderson, co-chair of OII.

“The law ... doesn’t explicitly prohibit intersex genital mutilation (IGM), nor criminalize or adequately sanction IGM, nor address obstacles to access to justice and redress for IGM survivors,” said Daniela Truffer, co-founder of StopIGM.org.</s>Is it possible to raise a child without gender? That’s the question posed in recent New York magazine story, headlined “It’s a theyby,” and featuring an image of Sojourner, a serious three-month old with a messy shock of black hair. Sojourner is being raised, for now, as gender free or gender open — meaning the baby’s parents don’t identify the child as male or female, and they use the pronoun “they” as a singular rather than “she” or “he.”

It’s up to Sojourner to decide, when they are older, whether they are a boy or girl — or if those labels matter at all. “Our baby is going to be whatever they want to be,” Sojourner’s dad said. “And then we’re going to send somebody out into the world who is in turn not going to project their own opinions or stereotypes onto who someone else should be.”

Choosing to raise a baby free of a gender identity is one of those parenting decisions, like breastfeeding into toddlerhood or allowing a school-age child to play in a park unsupervised, that’s bound to be divisive. Sojourner’s mother and father, and other parents profiled in the story aren’t responding the needs of an older child who has declared themselves to be transgender or gender non-binary. In fact, the babies are too young to have any awareness of gender or sex, at all. Instead, these parents are hoping to inoculate their infants from the clutter and noise of gender expectations right from day one. In a culture that immediately delineates between newborns in hospitals by swaddling them in pink and blue blankets according to their sex, this feels like a radical act — but will it be an effective one?

There are those who are non-binary or transgender, who have felt oppressed by being misidentified as the wrong gender, or having an incorrect pronoun attached to them, or who have been unable at times to live as their true selves. For others, though, the biggest trouble with gender labels is not so much the existence of male and female categories, but rather the baggage attached to them, and how beliefs about those categories (girls are sweet and tender; boys are rough and tumble) make for different treatment and opportunities.

Being gender-free may enable a young child to defer having to conform to gender norms, or take the pressure off those who feel confined by he and she designations, but that still doesn’t solve the broader problem of how value and worth are ascribed to gender and sex. And the bigger question remains: How can those expectations, rules and pressures be lessened for everyone, not just in infancy but throughout our lifetimes?

Because those biases and values are at play right from the start. Researchers at McGill University scoured through birth announcements in a 2005 study, for instance, and found parents were more likely to express happiness at the arrival of a girl and pride at the arrival of a boy. This suggests those parents were unconsciously associating a daughter with feelings of attachment and warmth, and a son with status and accomplishment.

If these distinctions are present at birth, think about how this plays out as children develop: Girls will get more emotional attention and affection, while boys will be more encouraged to succeed in the world. Over time, those biases accrue — boys don’t learn to express their feelings, girls don’t learn to embrace ambition.

In another study from 2016, researchers at the University of Sussex in England observed that adults listening to four-month-old babies crying believed lower-pitched cries came from boy babies and higher pitched ones from girls. (There is no sex difference in vocal pitch until boys’ voices change in puberty.) Those who were told a baby with a high-pitched cry was a boy believed him to be less masculine than average.

When a boy baby is deemed insufficiently macho, we know we have a problem. And whether or not we buy into these prejudices ourselves, ambient gender pressure surrounds us all the time. Most retailers, marketers and advertisers still separate everything into girl or boy versions, from diapers and bedding, to combs and cutlery. The culture we live in is highly binary — there continues to be an expectation that children must, at all times, line up neatly under one gender banner or another. On one side, sports and science, on the other princesses and art. Kids are still discouraged by adults from crossing those boundaries, or they limit themselves from doing so because they’ve absorbed these rules by osmosis.

In the New York magazine story, a childcare worker who felt initially a little awkward adapting to the pronoun requests of a family raising their infant as non-gendered, was surprised to discover the prevalence of boy or girl identifiers. “What it ended up doing,” she said, “was making us really aware of all the things in our class that were gendered unnecessarily. This baby doll that’s wearing blue we would call ‘he.’ But why? Why does Old MacDonald have to be a man?”

Here’s the thing: Babies don’t care one bit about gender — those flowery crib sheets or mini hockey jerseys aren’t for their benefit, nor are pronouns. If anyone is uncomfortable not knowing a baby’s sex, or worries about whether a given baby should be praised for being “pretty” or “handsome,” it’s certainly not the child. When you start to look at gender expectations with even a slightly skeptical eye, all sorts of questions emerge: Do six-month-olds really need gender-identifying socks? Does a stuffed animal have to be male or female? Why are we OK with putting a girl baby in jeans, but uncomfortable at the thought of putting a boy baby in a dress?

Many of the more superficial gender distinctions that are held dear about young childhood, the ones that are often deemed “natural,” in fact differ across cultures and through history. The notion that a boy should have short hair doesn’t hold in many Indigenous communities, where boys and men follow their tradition of wearing long braids. Boys in Victorian England were clothed in dresses and hair ribbons; middle- and upper-class parents of the era deliberately kept their children sexless throughout toddlerhood to extend what they viewed as a period of innocence.

All children could benefit from a loosening up of gender norms and a re-examination of where biases come from and the damages they can cause — gendered kids perhaps even more so than kids being raised as gender-free. Not identifying a baby by gender might only briefly exempt them from stereotyping. If those narrow roles and rigid gender rules parents are hoping to avoid remain in place, then not much changes at all.</s>Starting January 27th, Washington residents will have the option to mark their gender as male, female, or X.

The new rule was announced last week by the Washington State Department of Health and does not apply to new birth certificates. So, parents can't choose X as a newborn baby gender. The rule applies to any existing birth certificate and allows for a request of sex designation change.

The state describes the X option as

Similar 'nonbinary' gender options go into effect this year in California and Oregon .

BONUS VIDEOS - Check Out The Gender Swap Movie Trailers For Cinderella , Hot Pursuit and The Avengers</s>COLUMBIA - Columbia Public Schools will talk about new policies on gender at the Board of Education meeting on September 14.

Currently CPS has a policy against discrimination and has gender-neutral bathrooms for transgender students to use.

Proposed amendments would add "gender equality" and "gender expression" to the policy anywhere gender is noted.

Hillsboro High School students walked out Monday to protest transgender student Lila Perry's use of the girls' bathrooms and locker rooms. The walkout followed a School Board meeting in which parents said they fear Perry is getting special treatment.

Cathy Serino, a member of the transgender community, said there should be no debate over the issue.

"She is a girl, she should be using the girls' bathroom. It's a basic function and we should be using the bathrooms that we identify with."

Jefferson City Public Schools currently has no policy in place that deal with issues concerning gender identity.

If school districts do not allow students to use a bathroom for the gender with which they identify with they could come into conflict with the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights.</s>Over the years, the discourse on reservation for women has undergone a shift from “equal opportunity” to “equality of result”. Direct discrimination and hidden barriers prevent women from getting their share of political influence. Are quotas and other forms of positive measures a means towards “equality of result”? To achieve “equality of result” measures need to be taken to reduce barriers women face.

Sita Natua, a 48-year old elected member of Dakshin Raipur Gram Panchayat, South 24 Parganas, West Bengal says, “In the initial two years, I had no clue what to do and what to say. I was terrified. I could not understand much about the Gram Panchayat. I used to attend the meetings because deep down I wanted to learn and get more information. While doing MGNREGS work I kept asking about the next step. I tried going to the BDO office alone. I did not receive much support. I could move ahead only because of my own drive”.

What happens after a woman is elected to a local body?

The journey of many women elected representatives underlines similar struggles and hardships. Despite having gender-based quotas since the 73rd Amendment of the Constitution, has the environment become enabling and favourable for women to gain experience in politics and emerge as policy makers?

The presupposition for accepting gender-based reservation at local level was that once women gained experience in elected politics, extension of this reservation to the national level could be sought. A study by Equidiversity Foundation, an NGO, with 63 elected women representatives in six gram panchayats in three blocks of South 24 Parganas and Birbhum in West Bengal found that 63.5 per cent of elected women representatives filed their nomination because the political party insisted. An overwhelming 93.65 per cent of women elected representatives said their entry was because the husband or another male family member was actively involved in party politics. “Previously the thought was that we have to fill up seats for women and hence women were identified. At the local, regional and central (party) level, it was decided which household is to be targeted. Usually the ability and experience of the woman was never considered. This practise has started to change but largely prevails,” says Dayamoy Das, a panchayat samiti member in the Labpur block of Birbhum.

In addition, the general practise is to nominate fresh candidates for every election. Only 22.2 per cent candidates were given tickets more than once. As a result once the “reserved” seats become “general seats” or “SC/ST reserved” seats women failed to get tickets.

At the local party level, despite having women contesting panchayat elections, men continue to hold important positions. All political parties show allegiance to women’s participation by creating a separate women’s morcha or wing. Women still predominate in activities that support male party leadership at the grassroots level. Networks of influence are inaccessible to newly joined women members. Without access to institutional knowledge, limited resources, few role models and sometimes even limited family and community support, women’s participation in political parties has remained well below that of men. While women morchas play a significant role in rural politics through outreach, their contribution to policy development, promoting women’s interest in policy platforms or as an advisory to party leadership remains unexplored. Women leaders at the grass roots level are often used as mere tools for mobilising other women as a show of strength.

How far do quotas go?

Although as a nation we have seen women as heads of state, ministers and leaders of political parties (many have family lineage/dynasties) their presence has not necessarily improved women’s access to decision making positions within political parties. Nor has it spilled over into voluntary party quotas and nomination of women candidates as was perhaps expected in Assembly and Parliamentary elections, where there is no gender-based reservation.

In the 2014 Parliamentary elections, out of 11,311 nominations filed, only 8.75 per cent nominations were those of women. Trinamool Congress gave 15 per cent of its tickets to female candidates in the 2016 Assembly elections, up from 14 per cent in 2011. Contrast this with the 50 per cent reservation for women mandated by the 2012 amendment to the West Bengal Panchayat Act, 1973 brought in by the same party. The absence of critical mass of women in the state and national legislatures makes them ineffective.

At a micro level, while reservation has led families to push and encourage a large number of married women to become part of the political process in rural governance, the same family has not been supportive enough to let these women assume active roles. Sita Natua adds how, “the husbands come to the Gram Panchayat, understand issues in their own capacity and take a decision. How can women protest against their own family members?” Chhanda Ganguly, a member of Jamna GP Birbhum was forthcoming in saying that even though the government has thought of a 50 per cent sharing of work load in the Panchayati structure, the same has not translated to sharing household chores and responsibilities. Hence most women feel that dual responsibility and lack of family support pulls them behind. “We are unable to separate social and familial responsibilities. The biggest problem is what do with your kids? I bring my small child to the Gram Panchayat and have to constantly ask someone to hold him. It is embarrassing.”

Self and socially imposed stereotypes also adversely influence the performance of women who believe they are expected to do worse than males and hence feel safe to leave decision making in the hands of men. It is also observed in general that elected women representatives do not represent the “gender” constituency. Their politics is appropriated by caste and community leaders.

Gender is not always the driving force

The same is true for gender issues that are often considered “soft issues” and are at the bottom of the priority list for political parties. Recounting her experience, Bharati Ghosh, a leader in the Panchayat Samity, Labpur recounts how she faced challenges from within the party for standing up against gender crimes. The average allocation of funds for women’s issues through the Sub Committee on Women and Child Development and Social Welfare in the annual budget of the Gram Panchayats in West Bengal is less than 2 per cent on an average. The gender-based issues that women voters may face like violence, lack of economic independence, lack of support for child care etc are not considered important enough to find solutions for. Hence gender responsive budgeting remains non-existent and women voters continue to remain in the fringe of political influence oblivious of their entitlements.

Politics continues to be a male domain and reservation of seats is often looked upon as usurpation of male entitlement to power positions. The need of the hour is to lay bare the inherent patriarchy within the system; work with the gender trappings of both men and women as individuals and as political leaders. Only then can we hope for transformation of power relations starting with the family to the political party.

#GenderAnd is dedicated to the coverage of Gender across intersections. You can find our reportage here.
The Parliament of Portugal passed a new law, by a 109 vote margin, making it easier for people to change their legal gender. Portuguese citizens from the age of 16 will now be able to change their gender and name in documents without the need of a medical report.