As the first country in the world, Austria wants to provide six different options for specifying one’s own gender when reporting to the authorities.
Austria wants to be the first country in the world to provide six options for specifying one’s own gender when reporting to the authorities. According to the draft for an amendment to the registration law, in future it should be possible to choose between the designations “male”, “female”, “diverse”, “inter”, “open” and “no information”.
However, the new options are only available to people who can prove on the basis of an expert opinion that they are physically not clearly male or female.
Austria’s previous regulation violates EU law
With this measure, the government in Vienna is complying with a ruling by the Austrian Constitutional Court in 2018. This had ruled that people whose gender is not clearly male or female had a right to a corresponding registration with the authorities.
The recognition was won by the intersex born Alex Jürgen and the “Lambda Legal Committee”, an association that campaigns in Austria, among other things, for equal rights for homosexual and transgender people.
Article eight of the European Convention on Human Rights, which regulates respect for private and family life, requires that the identity, individuality and integrity of the human personality is to be protected – thus there is a “right to individual gender identity”, stated the Austrian Constitutional Court clear. The “Kleine Zeitung” sums up the 2018 judgment by saying that people only have to accept gender attribution through state regulations that corresponds to their identity.
However, the newspaper “Die Presse” pointed out that the validity of the amendment was not final. So far, it has only been an internal instruction to authorities and has no binding legal effect.
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Source: Stern
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