What do trans people want?
- River Champeimont
- Sep 27, 2025
- 5 min read
Updated: 16 hours ago
Here I want to talk about why legal transition is so important for transgender people!
Indigenous Peoples got it before us
The Navajo had a transition ritual for transgender women. During a specific ceremony, the trans* woman would dance in a circle in front of the other members of the tribe. She would then leave the circle, put on feminine clothes, and return wearing her new outfit. She would announce her new feminine name and dance once again. From that moment on, she was considered a woman, despite the absence of hormone therapy or genital surgery [1, 2].
The West still has a long way to go
It took Western societies centuries to reach this level of inclusion. Even today, many Western countries require medical transition or even surgery before allowing someone to change their legal gender. Even within the European Union, only a minority of countries allow legal gender recognition without medical requirements [3]. And even then, the procedures for changing one's legal name and gender can still be very complex, like the one I'm currently going through in France (putting together a legal case with a lawyer and collecting dozens of pieces of evidence).
It's important to understand that the decision to undergo genital surgery depends entirely on each trans person's individual needs. Within the trans community, people are not viewed differently based on whether or not they have had this surgery (besides, it's completely private information—it's generally inappropriate to ask unless you're very close to the person!).
Making genital surgery a requirement for legal gender recognition is just as absurd as if I proposed that the criterion for being legally recognized as a woman should be having a feminine hairline—which happens to be the surgery I personally chose. Requiring surgery in order to change one's legal gender is therefore fundamentally transphobic and reflects a complete misunderstanding of what it means to be trans.
The curse of written misgendering
In many businesses and government services (both in France and Canada), it's rare to be able to use a preferred name, and even when you can, it's often unreliable, with your legal name still being used in practice. In my personal experience, for example, it was impossible with three different banks, and although it was theoretically possible with my dentist and my pharmacy (in Canada), it wasn't reliable.
In France, I was systematically misgendered in every communication from my bank. Formal French correspondence very often uses "Mr." or "Ms.", whereas in Canada people usually just write your first and last name. The only way to stop this was to prove that I had legally changed my gender (and even then, I was treated disrespectfully during the process).
Legal recognition of our identity, gender, and name is therefore essential to avoid experiencing gender dysphoria with every interaction. Countries that impose lengthy procedures tied to medical requirements are, in practice, forcing trans people to live with constant distress in many of their interactions with businesses and public institutions.
A model to follow
Ontario, the Canadian province where I live, is one of the few places in the world with administrative procedures that truly respect trans people. The legal name change process takes about five months, and you don't have to prove that you've already been using your new name (so you can apply as soon as you've chosen it), unlike the French procedure.
Changing your legal gender from M to F only requires a simple medical certificate (with no requirement to undergo hormone therapy or surgery). Changing your legal gender to X (non-binary) requires no justification at all. Ideally, it should be the same for M and F, but it's already among the best legal systems in the world for trans rights. From start to finish, it only took me a few weeks to have an ID with F in my pocket.
What about the medical side?
People sometimes wonder whether trans people should also have their biological sex recorded, particularly for medical purposes. For example, in Ontario, ever since I legally changed my gender, I've been receiving letters encouraging me to get screened for cervical cancer (which obviously makes no sense in my case). Shouldn't our birth sex remain in our medical records so healthcare professionals know what sex we are?
Like many trans people, I'm opposed to such a practice. We know when it's necessary to disclose our birth sex to healthcare professionals depending on the situation. In fact, there are also cases where it makes more sense to treat trans people according to their gender. For example, trans women can develop breast cancer if they take hormones, so in that case it's more appropriate to treat them like cis women. More generally, once you're not talking about reproductive organs, hormones have a much greater influence on human biology than chromosomes, so our gender is usually the more relevant piece of information.
In my case, the clinic I go to is explicitly designed for trans people, and I felt comfortable telling them that I'm a trans woman. But it should be my choice to disclose that information, not the government's.
A guarantee for the future
Finally, when someone legally changes their gender, it's far better for the gender assigned at birth to be simply replaced in official documents (such as birth certificates), rather than added in the margin as it is in France, or stored as a separate field (for example, having both a "sex" field and a "gender" field).
As trans people, we cannot trust future governments. Our rights have repeatedly been taken away by hostile ones (and we're seeing this happen right now in the United States and the United Kingdom). A future government could very well decide that only a person's birth gender matters and ignore their legally updated gender. Keeping a record of our birth gender therefore creates the possibility that our rights could be revoked in the future, unlike for cis people. It's a bit like the difference between becoming a citizen of a country (which can't be revoked) and becoming a permanent resident (which can be revoked if government policy changes).
Conclusion
As binary trans people, when we say we want equal rights, we mean that we want to be legally recognized in the same way as cis people of our gender: as women for trans women and as men for trans men. We do not want to be treated according to our "biological sex", whether legally, medically, socially, or in the gendered spaces we use. On the contrary, we want to be treated according to our true gender.
On the other hand, non-binary people may want to be recognized as belonging to a separate gender, and their legal recognition is in an even worse state worldwide than that of binary trans people. Very few countries recognize a non-binary gender. In Europe, for example, only three do: Germany, Iceland, and Malta [4].
References and notes
* Note that I have used the term trans woman to mean a person who was born with male genitalia and is recognized as a woman in her social life, which corresponds to the usual definition of the term trans woman. Among Indigenous Peoples, however, the term Two-Spirit is more commonly used. It encompasses not only trans people, but also non-binary people and, in some cultures, people who are not heterosexual.
[1] Walter L. Williams, 1992, The Spirit and the Flesh – Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture, p.24, 98
[2] William Roscoe, 1998, Changing Ones - Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America, p.31-35
Comments