Argentina’s Gender Identity Law, adopted in 2012, lets a person’s legal gender rest on their own declaration and nothing else. Any adult can change the gender or first name on their official documents without first getting sign-off from a doctor or a judge. The same law makes sex-change surgery a legal right, paid for by public and private insurance.
What the law covers
Two things, and they sit side by side. The first is paperwork. Legal recognition turns on self-determination, so the state does not ask for a doctor’s or a judge’s approval before it updates a record.
The second is medical care. JURIST, reporting the Senate vote in May 2012, said the measure puts both surgery and hormone therapy on public and private health plans for people who want them.
How did it pass?
The Argentine Senate approved the bill by 55 votes to none, with more than a dozen senators recording themselves as absent. Senator Osvaldo Lopez, then the only openly gay member of Argentina’s legislature, spoke in its favour. The bill then went to President Cristina Fernandez for her signature.
The changes that came before it
The law followed a run of earlier changes. Buenos Aires legalised same-sex unions in 2002, the first Latin American city to do so. In July 2010, Fernandez signed a same-sex marriage bill, which made Argentina the first nation in Latin America to recognise such marriages.
How is it seen abroad?
Six years after the vote, the American Civil Liberties Union put the law first on a list of foreign measures it said the United States might consider. The ACLU added a caveat. The list, it wrote, was no endorsement of any country’s record on equality, and some of the laws on it might work less well in practice than on paper.
For an adult in Argentina, changing the record needs no doctor or judge.
