We thought everything had been settled in Sweden.
Apparently we were premature.
Two members of the Swedish Parliament are warning the government that forced sterilization of transpeople must continue, else the government will have to recognize a third gender or third sex.
And everyone knows it would be wrong to have three because…THREE!
Conservative MPs Tuve Skånberg and Annelie Enochson, Christian Democrats, have written an op-ed in the Christian newspaper Dagen in which they offer a counter-proposal to the government plan to remove requirements that transpeople be sterilized before undergoing gender reassignment procedures.
The [government] proposal would have far-reaching consequences. The key consequence being that Sweden would introduce the possibility of creating a third gender, called ‘person’ in the law books – men who give birth.
–Tuve Skånberg and Annelie Enochson
The current sterilization law is unenforceable since a Stockholm administrative court ruled the practice violated the European Convention on Human Rights this past December.
The court also ruled that the law did not respect civil liberties as guaranteed by the Swedish Constitution…and that it was discriminatory since it it’s only target was transgender people.
The two lawmakers are asking that the government’s proposal be voted down in order to wait while further research is conducted.
It was also pointed out that…
…patients who move on from the psychological evaluation and hormone therapy to undergoing gender reassignment surgery have faced de facto sterilization as their ovaries or testicles were removed in addition to the outer genitalia being taken away and, as far as possible, re-sculpted.
The two MPs interpret that as meaning that transpeople do not wish to have children…a conclusion which does not necessarily follow.
There are a small number of transgender Swedes who have chosen to keep their ability to procreate after gender reassignment.
Supporters of the law don’t want the sterilization referred to as ‘forcible,’ but they didn’t want to call it that in the past either.
–Pär Wiktorsson
The Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights (RFSL) has promised to file a complaint on behalf of transgender Swedes who have been sterilized seeking payment of damages, like Sweden did in response to the outrage over the government’s Eugenics program which was carried out from 1935 to 1996. In 1999 the parliament allotted 175,000 kronor ($27,000) to each of the victims of that atrocity.
Sterilization was an unnecessary price to pay but if you indicated that you weren’t willing to do it, that could have put an end to the [sex change] procedure, which was a matter of survival.
–transwoman Nova Colliander, who was sterilized in 2010
2 comments
Author
…love to have been able to give birth to a child. Interpreting our desire to have corrected bodies as a desire not to have children is just plain erroneous.