Transgender Rights Around the World

Personal Statement

I’m a non-binary Agender individual who cares deeply for my fellow transgender people, our shared history, and the ongoing fight for our collective rights on a worldwide scale. With the recent Presidential election, I chose to write my final essay for English 102 on the current and past states of transgender rights around the world, using both historical and scientific data as the foundation of my argument. Through doing the research, I gained a better perspective on how much our rights can fluctuate, and while things feel dire right now, I still feel hopeful for the future.

Transgender Rights Around the World: A Brief Glimpse at Where They’ve Been, and Where They Are Going

Abstract

This paper explores the current state of transgender rights around the world using a wide array of information both historical and data-driven. While it is by no means comprehensive, it shares insights on recent gains and losses in terms of legal rights for transgender people in a number of countries. After observing some of the arguments made against the transgender identity, the paper then deconstructs and counters these arguments with historical accounts and scientific data. The historical sources used show that gender-nonconforming people have existed worldwide for thousands of years, and the scientific data provides a small look into some of the various struggles that transgender people deal with on both a personal and societal scale. Further, this paper argues that despite all the harm inflicted on transgender people in the past and at present, they have continued to persevere and will continue to do so in the future, regardless of whether they shall do so easily or with much hardship.

Note

In this paper, I will be using the word “transgender” as an umbrella term for those who exist outside of the societally imposed gender binaries that are present throughout the world. While this is the largely accepted term in much of the world, especially in Western countries, not every culture or individual identifies with this term, and if a specific person is mentioned who uses a different descriptor term, I will use that instead. I use “transgender” for the sake of brevity and cohesion, but I firmly recognize that the gender-diverse community is not monolithic, and that my use of “transgender” here comes from my identity as a white transgender person living in the Western world.

Transgender Rights Around the World

Although the word “transgender” was created by Dr. John F. Oliven in 1965 (Bevan, 2014), there have been people who exist outside of the gender binary throughout the history of the world, in many different places, cultures, and time periods (Independent Lens & Bear, 2023). With the invention and widespread use of the internet, transgender people have seen the largest amount of recognition in history, which has been a positive in some ways, and a negative in others (Burns, 2019). Many factors contribute to the societal feelings surrounding transgender people, leading to a wide array of differences in the amount of rights afforded to them from state to state and country to country. As conservative ideals surge in some places, and more equitable and accepting ideals rise in others, one thing remains true: transgender people have always and will always exist, for as long as humanity exists.

The Current State of Transgender Rights

Even though there has been documented evidence of transgender people throughout history, the scale of laws and rights around the world that provide protection for transgender people are not only vastly different, but fluctuate often — and sometimes quickly — from one extreme end of the spectrum to the other. One of the earliest laws comes from Sweden, which in 1972 began legally allowing transgender people to be recognized as the binary gender other than the one they were assigned at birth (Cornell Law School, n.d.). This particular law has been in effect since then, only having been amended once in 2013 to remove the requirement of sterilization, and now two new laws will replace it, making it easier to change one’s legal gender and undergo medical transition; though, non-binary Swedes have unfortunately been left out again, even with the updated laws (Hofverberg, 2024).

According to a report published by the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association that looked at the both the achievements and regressions of LGBTQ+ rights worldwide, five UN Members enacted laws that allow for legal gender recognition based solely on self-determination, meaning that one doesn’t need to medically transition to be legally recognized in their transgender identity. Likewise, at the time this report was written, eight UN Members were in the process of enacting laws specifically recognizing “non-binary” as a legal gender identity (Mendos et al., 2024, p. 184). The most recent country to recognize non-binary as a legal gender identity is Germany, whose Self-Determination Act went into effect on November 1st, 2024, and allows anyone over 18 to legally change their name and gender without the need for psychiatric assessment or a court hearing (Myers, 2024).

Unfortunately, the hard-fought wins in the legal sphere don’t always stick, and in many places the transgender community is seeing sudden and sharp backslides in terms of rights. As I write this paper, changes are happening around the world, but especially in America, where it seems as if one can’t go a day without either a federal or state government removing protections and repealing laws that affect transgender people. On February 26, 2025, Darin Selnick of the US Department of Defense released a memo stating that all service members and recruits who have a “current diagnosis or history of, or exhibit symptoms consistent with, gender dysphoria are incompatible with the high mental and physical standards necessary for military service” (p. 1). While this order will affect only a small portion of the roughly two-million U.S. service members, it is just one of many blows dealt to transgender Americans since the second inauguration of President Donald Trump.

Throughout 2024, several regressive laws were passed in a number of countries, affecting not only transgender rights, but LGBTQ+ rights as a whole. For example, Iraq officially codified the illegality of both homosexuality and transsexuality, making those found guilty of liable to a maximum of 15 years in prison, while the country Georgia passed a bill that not only bans legal recognition of gender transition and gender-affirming surgeries, but also bans freedom of expression for all LGBTQ+ individuals (Hansford, 2024).

Sometimes, You Must Focus on the ‘T’ Alone

Those with genders and sexualities seen to be outside the “norm” of their societal system have been fighting for similar kinds of rights throughout history. Yet, these two groups have not always been a singular cohesive group, and in some places, they still aren’t — even though the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement wouldn’t exist without transgender people. Most people credit the Stonewall Riots as the start of the gay liberation movement in Western society, but as Susan Stryker (2017) lays out in her book Transgender History, “gay, transgender, and gender-nonconforming people had been engaging in militant protest and collective actions against social oppression for at least a decade,” by the time the Stonewall Riots happened in 1969 (p. 106). These protests include those at Cooper Do-Nut, Dewey’s, and the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, all of which occurred in California in the 1950’s and 1960’s (p. 81-87).

While in many conversations on a worldwide scale, most speak of the LGBTQ+ community as an all-encompassing term for one group, it is important to remember that it is made up of many subgroups. Further, alongside those subgroups reside each individual person’s lived experiences, and their own intersecting identities, which influence how they interact with others who fit under the umbrella term of “queer.” Yet, while it is essential to recognize the individual identities of those who make up the LGBTQ+ community, those in the community must also remember their connected history, and stay connected so that everyone can access equal rights. In an analysis by Myles Williamson (2024), it is highlighted that much of the research published concerning the LGBTQ+ community focuses more heavily on the sexual orientations of the acronym, or acts as if gender identity and sexual orientation are one and the same. Because of this, many of the specific political concerns faced by transgender people that don’t apply to cisgender LGB individuals are often forgotten or completely ignored; and even then, adequate data concerning the needs of the transgender community is hard to come by, as the worldwide transgender population is rather small and yet highly marginalized, which can limit the reliability of the data available (para. 11-13).

Since the idea of a cohesive LGBTQ+ community is held primarily in Western countries, or those with Western influence, there seems to be a much more stark disconnect between those who are LGB and transgender in other countries. In one of her many studies on Central Asian transgender rights, Yana Kirey-Sitnikova (2023) speaks on how much of the other works focusing on the region highlight only the needs of cisgender LGB individuals and ignore the “distinct needs in the medical (hormone replacement therapy, surgeries) and legal (legal gender recognition – LGR) spheres” that transgender people have (para. 4).

A Look Into the Mind of the Gender Critical

As more transgender people have come out, and some have subsequently been highlighted in the news and media on a worldwide scale, a new wave of anti-transgender rhetoric has arisen as a result. Much as with any group seen to be breaking societal norms, there are a great number of reasons as to why people don’t respect — or even believe — that transgender people exist, with many in Western media calling the transgender identity “indoctrination” (Abels, 2024). In a 2018 study by Dr. Lisa Littleman, the idea of “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” among young children, caused by so-called “social contagion,” was first introduced, and spread like wildfire through the assistance of influential individuals, like author J.K. Rowling and podcaster Joe Rogan. Even when the publisher issued corrections after the study’s publication, and further studies disproved the findings of the original, the damage was already done (Riedel, 2022).

Not only is transphobia coming from those outside of the LGBTQ+ community, but it is coming from inside the community as well. The LGB Alliance (n.d.), a UK-based charity and advocacy group, was created in 2019 to promote the rights of lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals — but only if they are also cisgender. On their ‘About’ page, they speak on some of the campaigning they have done to tackle discrimination, but with items such as the “campaign to protect gender non-conforming young people from the scandal of unnecessary, experimental medicalisation,” they show themselves to be practicing discrimination as well.

Arguments like these are heavily based on misinformation, and come largely from a deep sense of fear and misunderstanding. Additionally, many arguments are made to such an extreme scale that they seem to only serve to undermine anti-trans rhetoric entirely. One such example of this is the recent statement made by President Donald Trump, claiming that millions were spent by the Biden administration to make mice transgender, when in fact the experiments he referenced were done to study how certain hormones can affect other diseases, like asthma and breast cancer, and the word used in said studies being “transgenic,” not transgender (Klee, 2025).

Transgender People Have Existed for Millennia

An oft-used phrase by those who are anti-trans is: “When they dig up your bones in 100 years, they’ll know you were [individual’s assigned gender at birth]!” — this argument is not only immediately invalidated by those individuals who choose cremation as their future disposition option (Kristjönudóttir Jónsdóttir, 2024), but also comes from outdated and biased beliefs surrounding gender and sex used in the field of archeology (Steinmark, 2022). And while, yes, there is documented evidence of what appear to be transgender people found through skeletal remains dating back to at least 2500 B.C.E (“First homosexual caveman,” 2011), the phrase just isn’t the “gotcha” that gender critical people seem to think it is. This is because the history of transgender people is not only found in remains, but also in a multitude of written accounts, with one of the earliest coming from Hippocrates (ca. 400 B.C.E/1849), where he describes that “there are many eunuchs among the Scythians, who perform female work, and speak like women. Such persons are called effeminates” (Part XXII).

One of the longest documented populations that could be considered transgender is that of the hijras of the Indian subcontinent, who appear in the holy texts of Hinduism. Often referred to as a “third gender,” these individuals can also fall under the other umbrella terms  of “transgender” and “intersex,” yet many do not identify with these Western-introduced terms. While the hijras were primarily respected and revered for much of their history, the colonization of the subcontinent by the British brought along Christian ideas about binary gender, and thus, the criminalization of the hijras. Although most hijras were able to continue living as they were, and their rights have since been mostly restored, the gender ideals brought by the British still permeate within the countries of the Indian subcontinent, leaving many hijra today living in poverty (Rhude, 2018). These are just a few short examples, and there are thousands of transgender individuals who have lived throughout history, with many of their lives having been thoroughly and comprehensively detailed in other works.

Being Transgender is Not a Mental Illness

It seems that much of the current anti-trans rhetoric, especially in the United States, stems from old, outdated, or even disproved medical and psychological research. Alongside that, much of the information in those categories that the LGBTQ+ community as a whole could have benefitted from today was lost in the destruction of Magnus Hirshfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, which saw its entire library burned by the Nazis in 1933, as they saw the work done by the institute as being “un-German” (Rosenthal, 2024).

Another oft-used argument is that of “transgender people are just mentally ill!” — again, this idea stems from a couple different places, with two of the most prominent being that “gender identity disorder” and “transsexualism” were both previously included as mental illnesses in the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases, and the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Both have since changed this language, with the ICD-11 now calling it “gender incongruence,” and moving it to the “conditions related to sexual health” chapter (WHO International, n.d.), and the DSM-5 now referring to the mental toll of being seen as a gender other than the one you know yourself to be as “gender dysphoria” (Basu, 2012). Unfortunately, neither of these are perfect terms, as they still can be utilized in discriminatory ways, or completely ignored when they do not fit a particular narrative (American Psychiatric Association, n.d.).

Even with these updates and the supporting data therein, many cisgender individuals still believe that transgender people are inherently mentally ill. It is a fact that many transgender people — including myself — struggle with mental health issues, but that does not mean being transgender is itself a mental health disorder. In fact, many transgender people struggle with their mental health because of how society and its systems interact with their transgender identity; this includes more than just gender dysphoria, with things like a lack of support from friends and family, and inability to access healthcare, being large contributors to states of depression, anxiety, and suicidality among transgender people (HealthPartners, n.d.).

Finally, one thing that few cisgender people realize is that laws surrounding transgender healthcare can be — and often are — beneficial to them as well. Two recent reports have shown that, in fact, cisgender people are more likely than transgender people to utilize surgeries and other forms of healthcare that are considered to be “gender-affirming.” For example, Theodore Schall and Jacob Moses (2023) found that several healthcare treatments and procedures — like hair removal, breast augmentation, and hormone replacement therapy, among others — are given to cisgender individuals more readily, and without the myriad of hoops to jump through. These results were further backed up by a recent study, which showed that not only are cisgender individuals more likely to receive gender-affirming care, but that 80% of breast reduction surgeries were performed on adult cisgender males with gynecomastia (a condition of overdevelopment or enlargement of the breast tissue), and 97% on cisgender males ages thirteen to seventeen (Dai et al., 2024).

The Fight for Rights Continues

Although things are dire for transgender people in many countries right now, and are getting better for them in many others, the fight must continue for everyone. Transgender people have existed throughout the history of humanity, and have persevered consistently, never backing down from the fight for their rights, and the collective rights of the many other marginalized communities that they belong to, or find common ground with. Until all transgender people can be recognized and not persecuted for being nothing more than their true selves, everyone must keep up the fight for those who do not yet have those rights and protections.

The Fact Remains – Transgender People Deserve Rights

While many people throughout the world will continue to work as hard as they can to erase transgender people, their rights, and their history, transgender people will always exist. While there is rapid regression of transgender rights in some countries, and in others, both minor and major wins, the fact remains that transgender people deserve rights. And as the worldwide fight for equality for all LGBTQ+ people continues, those of us who are transgender must also remember to occasionally focus solely on the ‘T’ part, lest the specific needs of transgender people as a whole get lost among the rest of the acronym. It must also be remembered that even when those who oppose the transgender community try to tear them down, all queer people remember their shared collective history, wherein people of all different kinds of genders and sexualities have existed throughout time and across the world. Alongside the long and storied history of transgender people, the argument for their right to exist has also been backed up numerous times by science, and has never truly been a mental illness. In the end, transgender people have persevered against many of the odds thrown their way, and in ways both big and small, each individual who has come before has created a brighter future for all transgender people to come.

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