(LifeSiteNews) — On March 12, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) issued a landmark judgement ruling that all 27 EU member states must now create a functioning process for so-called “Legal Gender Recognition” (LGR) so that citizens exercising their EU right to move to a different country can be issued identity documents that match their “lived gender.” The judgement asserts the supremacy of EU law over national laws.
Specifically, the judgement targets countries such as Hungary, Slovakia, and Bulgaria, which do not permit the changing of sex on official IDs and reject the premises of gender ideology.
The case, C-43/24 Shipova, was brought by a transgender-identifying man in Italy, who has been trying for a decade to get his name and gender changed on official documents. The Bulgarian courts have denied this requests. In 2023, the Bulgarian Supreme Court issued a binding interpretation stating that lower courts cannot permit LGR; this followed a 2021 Constitutional Court ruling affirming that “sex” is biological and that the LGBT concept of “gender” does not exist in Bulgarian law.
The CJEU, however, claimed that this violates the EU right of freedom of movement within the 27 member states, and that denying citizens the right to change their sex on official documents creates “considerable inconveniences” while traveling and attempting to live out their “gender identity” in other countries and demanded that member states submit to demands of transgender activists. The judgement further stated that laws banning LGR is a denial of the “dignity and freedom” of gender-confused Europeans.
The CJEU also ruled that Bulgaria’s ban on LGR was a violation of the “right to private life” upheld by Article 7 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, even though the case in question was not about how a transgender-identifying person lived his or her life in private, but rather whether the government accepted the premises of gender ideology and formally recognized people’s chosen identity on official documents.
The ruling comes as no surprise; the European Court of Human Rights has been targeting Bulgaria’s national laws for years, most notably in 2020 in the “Y.T.” case and in 2022 in the “P.H.” case, both of which stated that Bulgaria was in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights for refusing to facilitate LGR. Additionally, in September 2024, Advocate General Richard de la Tour stated in an opinion that EU member states are obligated to provide LGR to gender-confused citizens.
LGBT groups are pleased with the decision. ILGA Europe noted that the CJEU “also updated its earlier interpretation of EU gender equality law and its applicability to [so-called] trans people. The Court said that ‘to tolerate discrimination based on the difference between biological sex and gender identity’ would violate [gender-confused] persons’ respect for their dignity and freedom, which the Court has a duty to safeguard.” It is not yet clear how this might apply to other national laws that reject the premises of gender ideology.
LGBT activists are already working to build on this decision.
“As a result of today’s ruling, all pending cases in Bulgaria must be resumed without delay, and courts and authorities must issue judgements in accordance with EU law and the CJEU’s ruling in the Shipova case, said Denitsa Lyubenova of the LGBT organisation Desytvie.
At the same time, a serious legal gap remains. Bulgarian citizens who have not exercised their right to free movement are still left without an effective legal pathway to change their personal data. This highlights the urgent need for legislative reform to ensure effective protection of trans people living in Bulgaria.
“For the first time, the CJEU has interpreted EU law as requiring Member States to legally recognise ‘lived gender identity,’” stated Adina Portaru, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom International. “In doing so, it sidelines national constitutional protections of biological sex and narrows Member States’ competence over their own civil-status laws.”
In a statement posted to X, ADF International called the ruling “yet another attack on national competence and sovereignty” and noted that “When courts use back-door arguments, such as free-movement law, to reshape national civil-status rules, as they did in this case, it raises serious concerns about both democratic accountability and the protection of biological sex in law.”
