How Uruguay Is Leading on Trans Rights

From rolling back Title IX protections that allow transgender students to use school bathrooms that correspond with their gender identities, to enacting anti-trans military policies, transgender Americans have suffered plenty of blows to their rights over the past few years. To improve the U.S.’s policies on this front, their government can look to a perhaps surprising place for a model for how to better support trans citizens: Uruguay. Specifically, they can look to Uruguay’s Integral Law for Trans People, which was passed in 2018.

This “Trans Law,” as it has become known to Uruguayans, brought the inequality the trans community faced in the country to light, and established the legal rights for trans Uruguayans to combat discrimination and improve their quality of life. While legislation related to freedom on gender identity rights was first passed in the country in 2009, it only allowed citizens to change their names and gender identities registered in official documents, and recognized the freedom that every individual has to develop their own identity, even if it's different from their biological sex. The 2018 “Trans Law” goes further, and states that the rights of trans people in Uruguay should guarantee “a life free of discrimination and stigmatization, and for that mechanisms, measures and policies for the prevention, attention, protection, promotion and reparation should take place.”

The Trans Law also includes 24 articles; a first set of articles are dedicated to identity freedom, and establish that trans people should be able to easily change their names and gender identities in official documents, even if they are under 18 years old. The following articles guarantee rights in different areas of life, from cultural spaces to health institutions, and focus on the recognition that under no circunstances should discrimination against trans people be accepted.

Besides condeming discrimination, the law also states the importance of promoting opportunities for trans people and incorporating the trans identity and the free gender identity in society in general. The law’s articles state that trans people should have equal opportunities to participate in governmental programs for housing solutions, professional training, educational initiatives, and other governmental programs. The legislation also provides for the state to guarantee 1% of their professional formative opportunities for trans people and reserve 2% of vacancies for all educational initiatives, such as grants and student support, for them.

The law also guarantees the right of trans people to take hormonal treatments and have surgeries such as mastectomies and gender reassignment. Minors, under the law, can also access medical treatments for irreversible body changes, but only with the authorization of their parents or legal representatives.

Uniquely, this law also provides for reparative financial aid for trans people who suffered abuse during the military dictatorship that began in the 1970s in Uruguay. To receive this aid, which is a lifetime pension, a qualifying person must present their case to a special commission composed of representatives from several ministries as well as the Social Welfare Bank and civil society. Today, around 60 people receive the benefit.

Alejandra Collette Spinetti Nuñez, a dance and school teacher who is also part of Uruguay's Trans Collective since 2017, told the FBomb that during dictatorship, and even in the democratic governments that immediately followed, trans people were commonly arrested and brutalized simply for their identity. And, Colette adds, the trans community still faces hardships today. According to a 2020 World Bank report, trans people in Uruguay are still one of the most excluded groups facing unequel opportunities and discrimination. They "tend to be more concentrated in the informal sector, have higher rates of unemployment and are less likely to have support from the social security programs." The same report says that about 45% of trans people in Uruguay say they have suffered violence due to their gender identity. They have the worst labor market indicators in the country, and only 25% completed primary education.

The trans movement in Uruguay worked for many years to visibilize and criticize all the inequality, discrimination, and stigmatizations that the community has faced over the years. Collette was just one activist who participated in the commission that presented the Trans Law proposal to Congress. She told the FBomb that the commission not only consulted with the trans communities about their needs, but also studied other countries’ legislation related to trans rights, and other progressive laws already in place in Uruguay, to give them context for writing their legal proposal.

"The discussions took a whole year, there were a lot of debates. The whole topic on the minors took a lot of conversations. We all wanted the same goal, but we had different opinions on how to get there," said Collette. Finally, in May 2017, the legal proposal was presented, and soon after, discussions about it began in Congress. Almost one and a half years later, in October 2018, the law was finally passed.

But even with this legislative victory, Collette warns that Uruguay still has a lot to work on when it comes to ending discrimination against trans folks. "In Uruguay trans people don't have work opportunities, they continue to be bullying victims, they are discriminated against and violated," she said. While, on the one hand, she says more people than ever before are opening their minds about the trans experiences (especially parents of trans kids), at the same time, she has seen more conservative groups, most of them supported by religious movements, reject all kinds of rights for trans people.

In fact, a few weeks after the Trans Law was approved, conservative groups, religious affiliations, and right-wing politicians started an initiative to revoke it. One of the movement’s main arguments was that doctors may not follow appropriate criteria around medical procedures related to gender reassignment surgeries — even though the U.N. released a testimony supporting the law and several medical institutions in Uruguay guaranteed the medical treatments would follow the legislation.

In Uruguay, civil society can demand a change to the constitution by calling a plebiscite, which is a vote by which the people of an entire country or location express an opinion for or against a proposal, especially on a choice of government. The first step in this process is for citizens to vote on whether or not they want to have a plebiscite, and in August 2019 there was a vote for a possible plebiscite on the Trans Law. Fortunately, the votes supporting this move didn’t reach the necessary amount — 25% — for calling the plebiscite. In fact, supporting votes barely got to 10%.

So while Collette agrees that there have been many positive changes for the trans community in the last 15 years, and the approval of other progressive laws in Uruguay certainly paved the way for the Trans Law, the trans community must still fight to make sure the law is actually enforced in the country. "It doesn't guarantee that everything is going to be perfect and that the law items are going to be followed,” Collette said. “Therefore, we must be alert."