In April 2021, a 15-year-old Australian teenager committed suicide in the city of Perth. His parents, separated, did not agree on the details of his funeral or his burial, just as they had disagreed on almost everything during the boy’s life. A family court ultimately agreed to divide the teen’s ashes into two piles. The father organized a funeral in which he referred to the boy with his necroname (the official name that a trans person leaves behind in some cases during their transition and with which they do not wish to be named) and in the feminine gender, and the mother with the the boy’s meaningful name, which they had not been able to make official while he was alive precisely because Australian law requires that both parents sign that consent.
If Australia had had a law in force at that time like the one on the table in Catalonia, perhaps this atrocious scenario would not have come to pass. The teenager would have had access to a mediator who would have interceded between him and the father in the matter of registration and his wishes would have been heard in an official body. Maybe, just maybe (it’s painful to wonder about this, but not gratuitous), the boy wouldn’t have taken his own life. According to a Felgtb study, more than 60% of trans young people have suffered from suicidal ideation and their suicide rate worldwide is disproportionately higher than among cisheterosexual people.
The same happens with homelessness, another aspect that the law also addresses. According to the FRA, the European Agency for Fundamental Rights, 10% of trans women have been forced to sleep on the street.
Those who read the draft law and are surprised by the scenarios it proposes and think that legislation is being legislated in the air, in the face of somewhat bizarre assumptions, perhaps it has been a long time since they visited a school or institute. Or they have done it with their eyes very closed. Because, fortunately, there are more and more minors who are reading the signs of destigmatization around the trans issue and dare to start their own exploration of identity. Something that, on the other hand, is substantial to the fact of being a boy (or girl). Perhaps these people to whom all this seems so difficult, so strange and abstruse, have also not managed something as simple as registering a minor for a summer camp for a long time. For years now, many of them have asked that the creature be identified by its felt name, which is still its real name, by which its friends and family call it, if it is lucky enough to have fallen into one that listen. That is what the new law would take care of, ensuring the rights of those who are that lucky and those who are not.
