Transgender EuroStudy – Legal Survey and Focus ... - ILGA Europe

9 April 2008
Recommendations are that:
The European Commission as guardian of the treaties should ensure that EU directives on
equal treatment of women and men and gender equality are implemented to include
protection of trans people against discrimination.
Legal action based on EU directives needs to be revisited to ensure accessibility for ordinary
people in a manner which is quick and at minimum cost, particularly when Member States have
not implemented EU directives. 2
Funding is needed to ensure that trans people throughout Europe are made aware of their
rights contained in the EU directives and the European Convention on Human Rights.
States need to provide gender reassignment treatment without excessive restrictions.
Methodology
The analysis for this report focuses on 615 (female to male) trans men, and 1349 (male to
female) trans women, who were the survey respondents as of 1 December 2007 after incomplete or
duplicate responses were removed.
In total, the focus group respondents were 12 trans men, 24 trans women and one nongendered
person.
We devised an Acceptable Baseline (AB) system for the analysis of survey responses. This was
the bare minimum standard of treatment that trans people should expect to receive in terms of:
clinical need and acceptable treatment of patients by health care professionals. This was then
compared across the experiences of respondents who belonged to different categories:
Respondents who transitioned less than 5 years ago compared with those who transitioned
more than 10 years ago.
Respondents who earned less than €20,000 per year compared with those who earned more
than €50,000 per year.
Respondents who were in skilled occupations compared with those who were in unskilled
occupations.
Clinical Need Met
State funding for hormones
The majority of respondents were refused State funding for hormones – more than 79% consistently
across all the different categories, with a maximum of 5% difference between each group category.
State funding for surgery
More than 82% of respondents of all the categories were refused State funding for the
acceptable baseline surgeries – these were the minimum required for trans people to live in their
acquired gender. There was only a maximum of 6% difference in figures across the group categories.
2
Francovich v Republic
of Italy ECJ (1995) ICR
722, ECJ Cases C-6 and
9/90 (also reported at
[1992] IRLR 84 and
[1993] 2 CMLR 66).