Tag: LGBTİ+

Meet the people making healthcare more accessible for trans kids

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From Ireland to Spain, access to trans healthcare varies dramatically for young people, depending on where in the European Union they live. In some countries, it is virtually impossible.

Just two months shy of turning 18 years old, and over a year after he started questioning his gender, Alex became the youngest person to access trans healthcare at his health clinic in France.

“I was very happy and relieved because it was a crucial moment. I’d just ended high school … and the timing was very important to me,” Alex told Euronews. “Because my voice was starting to change about three months after the first term [of University].”

“And I was very relieved that I could try to live without people noticing that I’m trans.”

The process for Alex — whose name has been changed for this article — to access hormones was a relatively straightforward one.

In France, minors can access gender-affirming care, such as puberty blockers or hormone replacement treatment (HRT). But the vast majority of healthcare officials require a psychological assessment to be carried out, a process that could take up to several years.

In Alex’s case, he was able to move through the requirements quickly because of his parent’s support and his age. But others may find it more difficult to gain access to the same route.

“I just talked to my endocrinologist, and she said that they were forced to shut down the system because there weren’t enough people who want to [provide gender-affirming care]. And because the public hospital in France doesn’t consider it a priority.”

“Now, the wait list is very, very long – between eight months and a year for the first appointment, when for me it was just one or two months.”

Deadliest year for LGBTQ+ people in Europe in a decade

For other young people across the European Union, the experience of being transgender varies dramatically depending on where they live.

In February, Spain passed legislation allowing anyone over the age of 16 to self-declare their gender. That same month, Sweden moved to block hormone therapy for people under the age of 18, except in rare cases.

And while Finland removed its requirement that adults be sterilised before changing their gender markers, Croatia was debating if gender-affirming care should be limited to people older than 21.

Last year was also one of the most violent in almost a decade for Europe’s LGBTQ+ community, particularly for trans people, “both through planned, ferocious attacks and through suicides in the wake of rising and widespread hate speech,” according to ILGA-Europe, one of the continent’s largest LGBTQ+ rights organisations.

In 2022, a trans man was killed during a Pride event in Germany. That same year, a trans woman was murdered in Estonia. And a cis woman (a person who identifies with the gender they were assigned at birth) was killed in Georgia because she was mistaken for a trans man.

There were also at least two attacks on LGBTQ+ bars: one, which killed two people and injured 20 in Oslo; and another in Bratislava, in which two people were killed.

“This phenomenon is not only in countries where hate speech is rife, but also in countries where it is widely believed that LGBTI people are progressively accepted,” said Evelyne Paradis, the executive director of ILGA-Europe.

The organisation added that Ireland, Spain, Norway, Poland, the UK and Switzerland were just some of the countries that reported a rise in hate speech against trans people last year.

Worst country to access trans healthcare in Europe

Access to transgender care — particularly for minors — varies depending on where in Europe a person lives.

In Ireland, it is nearly impossible for anyone under the age of 17 to access trans healthcare, even though they are legally able to do so. This is despite it being one of only 11 countries in Europe that allow people to self-declare their gender. It also provides a procedure for minors to have their gender legally recognised.

It is also ranked as the worst place to access trans healthcare in the European Union, listed under Hungary and Poland, according to Transgender Europe [TGEU], the largest trans rights group in Europe.

At the heart of this contradiction is the country’s medical backlogs. While young people have the right to access care in theory, in practice those trying to enter the healthcare system are faced with a seven-year waiting list. This means access for many people is practically cut off until adulthood.

“There really isn’t any gender-affirming healthcare for trans kids in Ireland,” Moninne Griffith, the CEO of Irish LGBTQ+ youth organisation BeLonG To, told Euronews.

“I have heard that some young people and their parents, out of sheer desperation, are trying to access healthcare abroad and online.”

She added that they regularly go to either Poland or England for treatment, “but without adequate medical supervision here in Ireland, which is something that’s very dangerous and something that we wouldn’t recommend.”

The reason for the backlog, Griffith said, is a combination of Brexit, transphobia and the country’s healthcare system, among other things.

Before the UK left the EU, Ireland heavily relied on UK-based clinics through its Treatment abroad scheme (TAS), a programme in the European Union that allows patients to seek treatment in another member state and still get covered for it through their national insurance. With Brexit, that pathway has now been cut off.

Griffith added that because the trans community in Ireland is so small, it isn’t a priority in a medical system “that is focused, unfortunately, on the acute side of medical care and intervention.”

Access to gender-affirming care in Spain

For young people in Spain, the situation is very different. In February 2023, the country passed legislation that greatly expanded rights for its LGBTQ+ community, particularly its trans community.

The so-called ‘transgender law’ streamlined the process for anyone older than 16 to change the gender marker on their identification documents: for example, changing their gender from male to female. 

Prior to this, people were required to undergo medical treatment for two years and have a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria before they could change their gender marker.

Spain is also ranked as the second-best place to access trans-healthcare in Europe, after Malta, according to TGEU.

According to Uge Sangil, the president of FELGTBI+, Spain’s largest LGBTQ+ organisation, the protocol for a young person in most parts of the country to access care is relatively straightforward. Their family doctor can refer them to a clinic that will help them gain access to the care they want, be it puberty blockers or hormones.

And if they are very young, they can also easily change their name on their school’s register, even before they are allowed to legally change their identity documents. 

But despite this, some people — particularly young people — can still face challenges to access healthcare, depending on which part of the country they live in.

Healthcare in Spain is a devolved power, meaning rules around trans healthcare vary depending on the region. And in places such as Castilla y León, which is partially controlled by the radical-right Vox party, access is not guaranteed. 

According to Sangil, “Castilla y León is one of the worst places in Spain to access gender-affirming healthcare. And that is because it does not have a protocol in place for people to access care.”

So, in theory, people in Castilla y León have “access to a general practitioner endocrinologist and they can do the treatments, but there is no guarantee that this will actually happen.”

That is because, according to Sangil, access to healthcare for young people in this region depends on if individual doctors want to treat them.

And this is a problem because “we can’t rely on the goodwill of medical professionals.”

‘It’s not about hormones’

Across the European Union — and the United States — transgender minors are becoming a major talking point in the media and the focus of new legislation restricting their access to healthcare.

But according to Alex, while a lot of that conversation is about HRT, people also regularly ignore major parts of the lived experience of trans youth. And, while access to hormones is important, there are also other ways to help young people.

“Most of the time we feel bad because people don’t recognise us as what we are,” he said. “And I think that is the biggest part about being trans. It’s not about hormones.

“I think if people could just say, oh, ‘I’m a man’, [and other people could respond] ‘you’re a man’. I think it would make it […] way easier for us to live.”

“For me, I think when my family started to accept [my gender] and call me by the right pronouns and name, I think that did half or more of the job. It was great.”

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Czech Republic considers ending ‘barbaric’ trans sterilisation law

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Czech lawmakers have launched a proposal to remove the sterilisation requirement for legal gender transition, but progress to lift society-wide prejudices is slow.

The Czech Republic is one of the few European Union countries to continue to require a sterilisation procedure before a trans person can legally change their gender.

This, despite the European Court of Human Rights officially declaring such state-imposed requirements to be a form torture.

Leaders of the country were largely undisturbed by this comment, believing that legalising registered partnerships – as well as an interrupted attempt to legalise same-sex marriage – were more important to the LGBT community.

But with more and more European countries lifting the sterilisation requirement over the years, the Czech Republic remains the westernmost EU member state to still officially demand the procedure. 

A bill has now been proposed by the Ministry of Justice to change this, despite the government’s strong conservative leanings. The draft still needs to be passed by both houses of parliament and be signed by the president before it can be enforced.

“As far as I was told by insiders, there is support for this change in this government,” said Lenka Králová, an activist who also hosts a YouTube program on trans issues.

The sterilisation procedure requires the total surgical removal of sexual glands as a precondition for the legal change of one’s sex in personal documents.

Králová said that lawmakers are unlikely to have proposed this bill if it had not been “discussed first with the government’s coalition partners.”

‘Sexual activity is not our main motivation’

However, for her, the possible legal change will not change the biggest misconception about trans people in the Czech Republic – that they are “spurred by sexual desires,” rather than wanting to transition because they feel inadequacy in the gender they were assigned at birth. 

“In my opinion this goes down to a historical misunderstanding, that gender dysphoria is mainly motivated by sexual desires,” she tells Euronews.

Transgender people are widely misunderstood throughout the world, with even some allies of the lesbian and gay communities opposing more trans rights. The far-right has often portrayed the community as pedophiles or oddities who should be banned from most social activities.

“Traditional Czech views presented trans people as those who desire the surgical modification of their genitalia. Being trans on the other hand is all about life and sex is just one part of it,” says Králová.

While surgery is important for some, others would forego it entirely. “We are such a marginalised minority that up to recently our human rights were not an issue for politicians. Now that there are only a few countries in Europe that still require sterilisation, it gained their interest,” she explains.

In the Czech Republic you have to go to a sexologist if you want to start transitioning.

Kryštof Stupka, an activist and member of the government’s LGBTQ+ committee, says sexologists have existed in the country for decades and are “a combination of a doctor and a psychiatrist, but more generally they are a group of traditionally-minded people who believe sexuality has to be regulated.”

“And they played a key role in the process until now,” he continues, saying that while sterilisation has often been a requirement in the past “it began being reinforced in the new civil code in 2014.”

So when most countries in Europe began dropping the sterilisation rule, the Czech Republic rewrote their legal code to include more limitations on legal gender reassignment.

‘They do not want trans people to reproduce’

Stupka explains that “most people in the Czech Republic assume that transitioning is getting plastic surgery to remove your penis or vagina. When in fact, what the sexologists care about is making sure you can’t reproduce.”

Once they are sure, as the law states, that you are “disabled from reproducing, once your body is destroyed, then you can have your papers,” he tells Euronews.

An average Czech citizen is required to show their ID regularly when they go about their daily lives – from buying alcohol to renting a car, to going skiing or signing a contract.

“You will be revealing your gender identity to people all the time, exposing yourself to their reactions or even harm,” exclaims Stupka.

Continuous hurdles

In 2017, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in the landmark Garçon v France case that “forced and permanent sterilisation” violated the inalienable right to self-determination, and that the requirement by the state to undergo these procedures is a violation of Article 8 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which protects the sanctity of private life.

Following the Garçon case, The International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA) and Transgender Europe (TGEU) launched a complaint against the Czech Republic at the European Committee of Social Rights. The body found that the Czech Republic was in violation of the European Social Charter.

A bill was launched at the time to reverse the requirement – much like the one currently being discussed – but got shot down due to a technical issue, namely, the inability of the Czech citizens registry to process or implement this change.

“So the Minister of Internal Affairs at the time blocked it with an idiotic argument that the matrix within which we keep all the records of Czech citizens would not be able to process the legal gender change,” explains Stupka.

The previous Czech government was led until 2021 by the ANO or YES movement led by controversial media owner and populist oligarch Andrej Babiš.

“When Babis was elected he was initially pro-equal marriage, but then he turned into a Czech version of [Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor] Orbán,” Stupka explains.

While many welcomed Babiš being replaced by PM Petr Fiala and the center-right Spolu coalition, Stupka says there is even less support for LGBT+ issues and trans issues in particular in the new legislature, and that there is a lack of consistency from several consecutive governments.

The Czech Republic is widely considered one of the more progressive Central European countries, and its politicians and intellectuals played a leading role in the pro-democracy revolutions that led to the fall of communism.

This is why the sterilisation requirement sticks out like a sore thumb.

It is unclear how the trans bill will fare in parliament, but based on support for marriage equality Stupka believes that only “about 40 of them would support same sex marriage, while around 80 supported in the last parliament” of the 200 deputies of the lower house of parliament.

“But now that people finally see it as a gross human rights violation, maybe it the bill can pass and things will actually change,” he concludes.

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Meet the women leading the way in Europe

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Gender equality is still “300 years away:” the stark warning from the United Nations, as International Women’s Day comes around once more. 

On Monday, during the opening session of the Commission on the Status of Women, UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, also said that women’s rights are also being “abused, threatened, and violated around the world.”

“Women and girls have been erased from public life.” 

But, despite what the odds suggest, there are still many women who are leading the fight for what they believe in and hoping for a better world. 

Here are just a few:

The fight for abortion rights in Poland

One of “the most dangerous places for a pregnant woman in Poland is the hospital.” That’s according to Marta Lempart, an activist who founded the All-Poland Women’s Strike.

She is just one of the thousands of activists in Poland trying to make reproductive healthcare more accessible. The country is often ranked among the hardest places to get a legal abortion in the European Union.

And why does she consider hospitals so dangerous? “The doctors will put [the mother’s] life and her rights below the rights of the foetus,” Lempart said. 

“They won’t even provide her with a legal abortion.”

In the eastern European country, the procedure has been almost completely outlawed. And some pregnant women in extreme situations have been denied effective treatment, in order to protect the foetus.

But, Lempart argued that because of the work done by her other activists, there is still hope in Poland.

When she started her work in 2016, support for legalising abortions stood at around 37%. But that figure has since grown to 70%, polls suggest.

And she added that there are “now two worlds” for people who want to access abortions in the country.

“We have this [underground] system, a system that has always been there,” she said.

“But it’s not even underground anymore. It is a fully working system that provides women with reproductive care […] After the protests in 2020, everybody knows the number for Abortions Without Borders.

“It became like a national sport to put its number everywhere.”

Supporting Ukraine’s trans community

When the war in Ukraine started, Anastasiia Yeva Domani’s apartment became a humanitarian hub for the country’s trans community.

“Our goal was not to mobilise the community, not to advocate or change legislation, but to help people first, with food, money, hormones and medications,” Domani, the co-founder of Cohort, told Euronews.

For some trans women living in Ukraine, help can also mean legal support. That is because many members of the trans community have gender markers on their documentation that do not match their actual genders – such as trans women who have male gender markers on their papers. 

This can cause problems for trans women trying to flee Ukraine because of a ban on military-aged men leaving the country. And it can also create challenges when it comes to mobilisation orders to join the army.

“There are cities where a lot of mobilisation orders were handed out. And so people are afraid to even go out onto the street or in any public place,” she said.

Because of this, her organisation is helping these women get legal support to remove their names from Ukraine’s military registration or to obtain the right documents to move abroad.

Domani is also helping to train the next generation of trans activists in public speaking, advocacy fundamentals and legal support. 

At the start Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, between 1,000 and 2,000 members of Ukraine’s trans community were able to leave the country. But, many of them were human rights activists themselves, leaving a hole that needed to be filled.

To do this, Domani is helping organise two conferences in Kyiv and Lviv later in March. “Under blackouts from rocket attacks, we are trying to invest in children and train not only the trans community but also our allies,” she said. 

‘Standing up’ for the climate

Like many people of her generation, Zanna Vanrenterghem first became interested in climate activism when she watched An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary spearheaded by former US vice president Al Gore.

She then joined a climate activist group in Belgium called Climate Express before becoming a project leader at Greenpeace Belgium – a group that is trying to move the country away from fossil fuels.

The effects of climate change have increasingly become more obvious in Europe, sparking more and more people to get involved in activism. “I have never seen so many people stand up for the climate,” she told Euronews.

“I’ve never seen so many grandparents and young people and teens actively trying to change something.”

Over the past 40 years, climate-related events have caused more than €487 billion in losses in the bloc, according to the European Union. And in the past 40 years, more than 138,000 people are thought to have died because of climate-related extreme natural events in Europe. 

“There are very few people that are now alive in Europe and that haven’t experienced a massive amount of heatwaves, forest fires or drought,” she added. “You just have to [loosen] the noose and see that climate change is happening, and this is affecting the livelihoods of every European to some degree.” 

But, she stressed, it is also important to have an intersectional approach to climate activism. 

“Our economic system is built on structural inequality, inequality between men and women, inequality between richer classes and poorer classes.

“And that structural inequality is something that we need to dismantle because as long as that is part of the system, there’s no way that we can get everyone aligned to tackle [climate change]. 

Changing attitudes in Ukraine

For many activists in Ukraine, such as Taya Gerasimova, the war caused a drastic transformation in both the way they work and in public attitudes towards women. 

Gerasimova is one of the members of Women’s March Ukraine, a group that regularly organised women’s rights marches before the full-scale invasion. Their main goal at the time: getting Kyiv to ratify the Istanbul Convention, an international treaty requiring nations to actively combat domestic abuse

Once the war started, it quickly transformed into a humanitarian hub, responding to over 35,000 requests for aid, creating three new shelters and helping some 7,000 people find housing abroad.

But while Gerasimova described women as “the most vulnerable group in Ukraine” – especially if they are taking care of a lot of children, the elderly or people with disabilities – she added that she has also witnessed a shift in sexist attitudes over the past year. 

In 2018, 29% of people responding to a survey by the Ukrainian NGO Insight agreed with the statement: “Women should always obey their husbands.”

In 2022, that number dropped to 8%. A similar thing happened when it came to other questions, such as “A woman should perform all domestic work and be a good housewife in any case” – with 43% of respondents agreeing to the statement in 2018 and just 2% doing the same in 2022.

That change, according to Gerasimova, is in part because “women became a little bit more visible in social life [during the war]. There are a lot of women volunteers now, women joining the army and volunteering for humanitarian aid,” she said.

Another reason, she argued, is that organisers started to say, “if we oppose Russia, we have to also oppose these old traditional values.”

And she added that instead of moving towards “Russian values,” the public should move in the opposite direction towards “gender equality and European values.”

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