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Colombia’s Interior and Justice Ministers signed an executive order Tuesday allowing transgender people to modify their name and gender identity on official documents.
Any public notary can execute the change, without other types of examination proving gender identity.
Once modified, the person will not be allowed to change it again within the next ten years and can only change it only twice in their life.
“Judges used to order bodily inspections to determine if people had physically changed their sex, or demanded a psychiatric exam to know if the applicant had gender dysphoria [when gender identity deviates from the sexual anatomy],” Justice Minister Yesid Reyes told El Espectador. “Both exams were profoundly invasive of privacy rights and were rooted in unacceptable prejudice. The construction of sexual and gender identity is an issue that doesn’t depend on biology.”
The government's move follows a local court's ruling rejecting the relevance of tests preceding a change of gender identity.
A special event celebrated the new bill in Bogota, Colombia’s capital, where 10 people received from state officials their new documents.
President Juan Manuel Santos repeated during the ceremony his commitment to defending equality rights and non-discrimination to the LGBT community.
Despite the government’s efforts, however, 70 transgender people have been murdered in Colombia in the last eight years, according to Todd Howland, the U.N. human rights representative in Colombia.
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