Being able to legally change one’s legal name and gender can be key for trans people, and many laws have rapidly changed in the last few years, especially in South America. Read more to learn about current scholarship on the topic.

Photo by Jessie Floyd of Marcha de Las Putas in Quito, Ecuador, November 2019.

For many trans people, changing their legal name and sex is a key part of transitioning. Not only does it allow their paperwork and legal ID to reflect their actual name and gender; it also provides safety by not outing their trans status to employers, landlords, and other places where being trans often leads to discrimination. Changing legal name and gender helps trans people to live their lives with privacy and dignity.

Laws pertaining to transgender people have changed rapidly in the last few years around the world, especially in Latin America. Here, I focus on a person’s ability to change their legal name and sex/gender.

I distinguish between sex and gender here because some countries, states, provinces, and/or municipalities distinguish between them in their policies.

As I was doing research for this post, it became clear that my original goal was a lot more complicated than I had realized. One cannot easily define the legal experience of a transgender person in an entire country. Upon reflection, this is obvious–of course it’s more difficult, if possible at all, to change one’s legal name and gender in different parts of a country. Countries are often broken down into states or provinces, which each have their own laws, and cities often have their own policies as well.

Beyond laws and policies, experience of exercising one’s legal rights vary as well, depending on the municipal office, the judge presiding over a case, or a plethora of other variables which can determine if a trans person is able to change their legal name and sex/gender.

As such, this post presents some research on the experience in different countries, with some recent academic research on the matter.

Recent research

Research from Baird Campbell published in May 2019 indicates that in all Latin American countries except for El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, and Nicaragua, trans people are able to change their legal name. Venezuela, Paraguay, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic in addition to the previously listed countries are not able to change their legal sex.¹

This already shows a dramatic change in comparison to 2014, where research by Jacob R. Longaker and Donald P. Haider-Markel indicated that only Uruguay, Panama, Ecuador, and Argentina allowed their citizens to change their legal names, and Argentina, Cuba, Panama, and Uruguay allowed changes to legal sex.²

Even though Campbell’s research was published recently in 2019, it already can be out of date. Additionally, reporting the laws for an entire country oversimplifies the reality for many trans people in many countries, since laws and lived experiences vary greatly between rural and urban areas and across different regions of each country. Here’s a handful of recent sources to better understand laws pertaining to trans people’s legal name and gender/sex in a few different countries.

Mexico

In Mexico, there is not currently a national policy, but many states and some cities permit trans people to change their legal name and gender.

In 2004, Mexico City began to allow trans people to change their legal name and sex on their birth certificates.³ As of 2015, more than 3000 people had done so.⁴

In 2018, a landmark ruling by the Mexican Supreme Court said that a transgender person’s civil rights were violated by the Civil Registry of Veracruz when they were not able to change their legal name and gender.⁵ However, despite the national court’s ruling, this did not signify a national right for transgender people in Mexico due to the filing nature of the case.

Many Mexican states now also allow trans people to change their legal name and sex, with many law changes happening in 2018 and 2019. For a full list of states, check out this Wikipedia article and follow the linked sources.

In this recent news article from El Milenio, Jorge Marínez reported that as of 2020, citizens in coastal town Puerto Vallarta can change their legal name and sex on their birth certificate.⁶ Marínez noted that Puerto Vallarta is the only municipality in the state of Jalisco to allow legal name and sex of transgender persons to be changed.

Ecuador

I studied abroad in Quito, Ecuador in Fall 2019, so I know this from my research while I was there, and from my FTM Ecuadorian friends. Technically, the Ecuador Constitution of 2008 prohibits discrimination by gender identity. However, this right is only granted to those who live in Quito or Guayaquil, two of the major cities in Ecuador.

Currently in Quito, changing legal name and gender is a fairly simple administrative process, but like any administrative process, there can be hiccups in the process. Also, it’s worth noting that while technically Ecuadorians can change their gender on their government ID (their cédula), their updated ID is different than IDs of their cisgender counterparts. After updating their cédula, it reads Gender: masculine _instead of _Sex: male, like it does for cisgender citizens (translated from Spanish). Therefore, their IDs outs them as trans to someone who recognizes the difference.

In addition, their legal sex does not change, meaning that when a trans man marries a cisgender woman in Quito, they are married as “wives.”

How does this affect transgender people in Quito? Among my friends, most still choose to change their gender on their cédula, because it was something. One refused until the policy changed, since he didn’t want to officially be recognized as a second-class citizen by having a “second-class” marker on his cédula (género).

Argentina

Argentina has been known to be a world leader in transgender rights. In 2012, Argentina passed a gender identity law permitting trans people to legally change their gender without requiring medical treatment or diagnoses or a specific gender presentation.⁷

Further resources

This article is by no means comprehensive, but there are many more sources to learn more. Here are some websites to check out:

• Outright Action International: view articles and overviews for different countries
• Wikipedia: while Wikipedia gets a bad reputation, it’s “LGBT rights in <country>” pages provide quick overviews of a country’s situation, with linked sources.
• Human Rights Watch
• Equaldex: map of different LGBT rights with linked sources. I’d highly recommend this resource for getting quick answers about different legal rights, but make sure to follow sources since the information is crowd-sourced (like Wikipedia).

Notes