Communicated on 6 September 2018
FIFTH SECTION
Applications nos. 57864/17 and 79087/17
A.D. against Georgia
and A.K. against Georgia
lodged on 1 August 2017 and 10 November 2017 respectively
STATEMENT OF FACTS
1. The applicants are Georgian nationals. They are represented before the Court by Ms K. Bakhtadze, a lawyer practising in Tbilisi.
2. The facts of the cases, as submitted by the applicants, may be summarised as follows.
3. The applicants identify themselves as female-to-male transgender people.
4. On 29 May 2014 and 22 January 2015 the Civil Registry, granting the applicants’ requests, assigned them new masculine surnames in all their official identity documents.
5. On 11 October 2014 and 15 April 2015 psychologists in Tbilisi issued medical certificates diagnosing the applicants with “gender identity disorder” or transgenderism.
6. On 9 December 2014 and 24 April 2015 the applicants requested the Civil Registry to change the gender marker in their birth certificates from female to male. The authority rejected the requests on the ground that the applicants did not show that they had undergone biological sex reassignment procedures.
7. The applicants complained to courts. On 8 December 2015 and 11 May 2016 the Tbilisi City Court dismissed their actions, reasoning that, despite the applicants’ gender self-identification, a precondition for changing the gender marker was a biological sex change. However, as the applicants had never undergone any sex reassignment procedures, their request for change of the legal gender could not be allowed in the interest of the reliability and consistency of the civil-status records.
8. The domestic proceedings were finally terminated with the Supreme Court rejecting the applicants’ appeals on points of law.
9. Thus, so far as application no. 57864/17 is concerned, a written copy of the Supreme Court’s final decision of 24 November 2016 was served on the applicant on 1 February 2017.
10. As far as application no. 79087/17 is concerned, a copy of the Supreme Court’s final decision of 9 March 2017 was served on the applicant on 10 May 2017.
COMPLAINTS
11. The applicants complain under Articles 3 and 8 of the Convention, cited separately and in conjunction with Article 14, about the inability to have the gender markers changed from female to male in their birth certificates.
QUESTIONS
Has the respondent State’s refusal to grant legal recognition to the applicants’ gender identity amounted to a violation of either Article 3 and/or 8 of the Convention (compare, mutatis mutandis, with A.P., Garçon and Nicot v. France, nos. 79885/12 and 2 others, 6 April 2017 (extracts)) or to discriminatory treatment in breach of Article 14?
When the domestic courts held in their decisions that the applicants ought to change first their biological sex in order to be able to claim legal recognition of their gender identity, which medical procedures exactly were the courts referring to? Was the courts’ position based on the relevant legal regulations? Can the requirement of changing the biological sex for the purposes of changing the legal gender be equated with the requirement to demonstrate “the irreversible nature of the change in appearance” (see A.P., Garçon and Nicot, cited above, §§ 116-120)?
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