Jim Beaux
10-09-2008, 11:06 PM
A judge in the Argentinian province of Mar de Plata has ruled in favor of a 25 year old transgender woman and allowed her to officially change her name to Tania without requiring gender-reassignment surgery.
Tania ... said that she always felt like a woman and had been using her chosen name since she was sixteen. She said that she would not mention her name of birth because it did not represent her but said that she had always counted with the full support of her parents, her three sister and a brother.
She began hormone treatments at fifteen and underwent silicone injections at eighteen. As a gift for her 21st birthday, her family pulled together enough money for her to be able to get breast implants but she has yet to undertake gender-reassignment surgery for which she says she is unprepared. "Before I felt ashamed of my body as if I was wearing a disguise, but these changes allow me to like the way I am," she said.
In the ruling, Judge Pedro Hooft specifically stated that gender-reassignment should not be a requirement for transgender individuals seeking to legally change their name and called it a "serious incongruence."
To date, says Clarin, transgender women had been able to change their birth certificates and ID cards if they underwent gender-reassignment surgery in Argentina or in the exterior. Pedro Paradiso Sottile, from the CHA's legal department, explained that the desicion puts Tania and other women on equal ground. "For example," he said, "she can marry through the Civil Matrimony Law even if she does not seek gender reassignment surgery."
Tania ... said that she always felt like a woman and had been using her chosen name since she was sixteen. She said that she would not mention her name of birth because it did not represent her but said that she had always counted with the full support of her parents, her three sister and a brother.
She began hormone treatments at fifteen and underwent silicone injections at eighteen. As a gift for her 21st birthday, her family pulled together enough money for her to be able to get breast implants but she has yet to undertake gender-reassignment surgery for which she says she is unprepared. "Before I felt ashamed of my body as if I was wearing a disguise, but these changes allow me to like the way I am," she said.
In the ruling, Judge Pedro Hooft specifically stated that gender-reassignment should not be a requirement for transgender individuals seeking to legally change their name and called it a "serious incongruence."
To date, says Clarin, transgender women had been able to change their birth certificates and ID cards if they underwent gender-reassignment surgery in Argentina or in the exterior. Pedro Paradiso Sottile, from the CHA's legal department, explained that the desicion puts Tania and other women on equal ground. "For example," he said, "she can marry through the Civil Matrimony Law even if she does not seek gender reassignment surgery."