Defeat of Swedish Transgender Sterilization Requirement Shows Potential of Rhetorical Strategy

Swedish Transgender Actress, Aleksa Lundberg (Photo: city.se)

I’m happy to be able to provide you with an update to a story I posted in January on the sterilization requirement for Swedish transgender people to change their legal gender marker.  The Christian Democrats, who were holding up a move to reverse the ban, have decided to allow it to go through following an online petition that garnered 77,000 signatures.  Swedish activists have been opposing the sterilization requirement for years, and the international pressure of what is reportedly the largest online movement so far to protect transgender human rights ultimately caused supporters to back down.

AllOut.org, which is an LGBT-focused website similar to Change.org, focuses on targeted campaigns to end anti-LGBT practice through online petitions and other social strategies.  Other current campaigns focus on censorship in Russia, violence in Cameroon, “gay cure” clinics in Ecuador, and anti-LGBT bullying in Brazil.  You might also remember All Out from its campaign against the “Kill the Gays” bill in Uganda.

It is difficult to measure how successful these websites are on their own, but clearly they are a powerful tool when combined with active work to gain media attention and notify decisionmakers of the public opinion shown through social media.  All Out has noted that it will continue to fight these laws throughout Europe, as sterilization requirements also exist in sixteen other European countries.  Only a few European countries (UK, Spain, Germany, Austria, and Hungary) let transgender people change their legal gender market without any surgery requirement.  Though many transgender people wish to have sex-reassignment surgery, not all do, and many cannot access it do to cost or some other reason.  It seems clear that the humane thing to do is follow WPATH’s Standards of Care, which do not support surgery requirements.

I find this framing of surgery requirements around sterilization to be particularly clever, given the history of forced sterilization in various world contexts and the valuing of reproductive capacity in conservative circles.  While the term “sex reassignment surgery” might be easier to argue with, using “forced sterilization” is an interesting rhetorical technique whereby transgender people take the conservative family values line and run with it, pointing out that an SRS requirement for trans people takes away their right to reproduce–something conservatives tend to defend.  Supporters of the requirement are then forced to justify allowing some people, but not others, to reproduce, an argument that too easily reminds us of sterilizing poor women, women with disabilities, and women of color.  This might be a successful argument in other parts of Europe as well.

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