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Category: Interventions

Ruling allows transgender minor to correct gender on documents

Paola* is a young minor who identifies as a trans woman and who, with the help of her mother, decided to correct the sex component of her birth certificate. That is, she no longer indicated M (for male) but F (for female). Getting her document to reflect her gender identity became an ordeal after the entities in charge of this process refused her request because, in order to make such a change, they stated that she had to be over 18 years old. Faced with this refusal, Paola and her mother decided to fight for her rights and filed a tutela that did not bear fruit, neither in the first nor in the second instance. This is how the Constitutional Court chose the case. In the midst of this process, Colombia Diversa intervened in order to provide the Court with legal arguments to protect the fundamental rights of the girl, pointing out that in this case and in the case of any trans child "(...) the life project of the plaintiff requires that in her identity documents the sex component corresponds to the identity construction she has made". After taking into account this consideration, among others, it decided to grant Paola the possibility of changing the sex component in her identity document, this for her particular case; however, it also issued an order to the Superintendence of Notaries and Registry in order to inform the notaries of the country about this sentence and the possibility that trans children have to modify their sex component in their documents and that for this, among other conditions, it must verify the existence of an informed consent. It is worth noting that this is the second time that the Court protects the rights of a minor trans person and that it reiterates "the right to free development of personality" of this population, recalling that they have "the right to recognition of their particularity and the requirement to establish their own identity before themselves and others" and adding that this necessarily requires that, according to the gender identity of each person, they have the "legitimate power to determine the externalisation of their way of being, according to their intimate convictions". Click here for the full Constitutional Court ruling on this case. *Name changed to protect the identity of the minor girl.

Paola* is a young minor who identifies as a trans woman and who, with the help of her mother, decided to correct the sex component of her birth certificate. That is to say, that it would no longer indicate M (for male) but F (for female). That her document should reflect her gender identity [...].

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