Transgender families

Support the project and read the overview of transgender family statuses

Here is a systematized overview of the status of transgender families around the world. Its scope encompasses the details of legal regulations in different countries, remarkable court cases and positions of international organizations on the status of such families, social studies among the families experiencing gender transition, and, naturally, voices of the people in the trans community.

The information is presented in three sections: trans relationships and their regulation (Trans marriage), trans people’s right to have a child and possibilities for its upholding (Trans parents), and the situation of children expressing transgender features (Trans children).

Initially, I took an interest in trans families for personal reasons—I’m a trans person myself.

However, I soon realized that this topic rarely becomes the focus of research or human rights advocacy. It has its white spots, and some people are hardly aware of it. Having worked with the trans issues for 10 years already, I decided to gather and streamline the information myself. Instead of limiting myself to the formal texts of regulatory documents, statements, and cold figures from the studies, I endeavoured also to include the opinions and aspirations of trans people themselves in the context of the family relationships. I worked on this material at the turn of 2019–2020, and I am excited to share its result with the English-speaking readers

Inna Iryskina

the publication’s author and coordinator of the trans program of Insight NGO

To read the whitepaper in full, please, donate to help us make its printed version. We want to educate as many people as we can!

In the discourse around LGBT+, the “family issue” has always been one of the critical issues. In fact, achieving marriage equality, i.e., the ability to enter into marriages and receive the same rights that heterosexual couples have, is often the primary goal of LGBT movements, which is sometimes equated to achieving equality in general.

However, most of the discourse, both from supporters and opponents of equality, focuses by default on cisgender LGBT+people.

Trans people and their needs and problems in the family context often fall out of this focus and end up in a particular blind spot. Therefore, when the issue of family rights comes to the political agenda level, only a few voices can be heard for trans people.

On the one hand, since the concept of sexual orientation as such is built around relationships, it is not surprising that it also implies urgent needs for the settlement of these relationships. On the other hand, the fact that any sexual orientation can be combined with any gender identity and transgender status, and that adds up to its features, can also not be denied or rejected. And when people start talking about such features, it sometimes causes no less contradictory reactions in society than the question of same-sex relationships. An example of this is the recent attempt to remove from Ukrainian legislation a ban on the adoption of children by people with medical diagnoses related to gender dysphoria, which has not yet succeeded.

Transgender families are defined here as any families in which at least one person is transgender

So, this text is explicitly dedicated to transgender families considering their current situation in different countries of the world and amplifying the voices of people from the trans community.

Types of trans family statuses

Each of these statuses is dedicated to a separate detailed section

Marital status. a trans person is in an established relationship with another person. In this perspective, the key issue is the legal recognition of such a family unit as a marriage or a partnership.

Parental status. a trans person, usually in a relationship with another person, has or wants to have children, there may be questions about reproductive rights and opportunities, as well as matters related to raising a child.

Child status. the issues of needs and opportunities for transition for such a child and, in general, its socialization come to the fore.

Let’s look at how the legislation of different countries currently regulates these issues and the positions of international institutions, what concerns arise in society, how trans people themselves identify their needs – and, in the end, what can be the ways to solve existing problems to achieve true equality.