The “Stuttgart Declaration”, which was adopted on May 28, 2015, includes treatment recommendations to enable the human rights-compliant treatment of people with gender norm deviations without gender interpretation. It is an agreement to allow people to know their gender and to recognize this knowledge as true. The Humanist Association of Germany supports the call to sign the declaration.
The “Stuttgart Declaration” demands, among other things, that treatments and therapies for trans/intersex people may only take place with the express consent of the people to be treated. “No person should be forced or in any way pressured or coerced to undergo medical, psychotherapeutic or comparable treatments or therapies on the basis of their self-determination of their gender,” the declaration states. A person’s self-determination of their gender should never be considered to be in need of treatment. The focus of any support and medical or psychotherapeutic treatment should be “the cure or alleviation of suffering, not conformity to gender stereotypes or social norms”. The aim should be to enable the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, which is recognized by the World Health Organization as a fundamental right of every human being. The declaration therefore demands that all measures necessary to realize this human right should be taken over by the responsible funding bodies without delay. It also calls for the establishment of counselling centres “that specialize in people of all ages who have questions and/or problems and are looking for help because of their gender or because of their officially determined gender.” The “Stuttgart Declaration” was drawn up at the beginning of the year on the initiative of the Transsexuality and Human Rights Campaign (ATME) in cooperation with the Eberhard Schultz Foundation for Social Human Rights and Participation. Institutional supporters also include the Weissenburg Gay and Lesbian Center in Stuttgart and, as part of the “Action Plan for Acceptance and Equal Rights”, the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, Family, Women and Senior Citizens of the State of Baden-Württemberg. In addition to renowned medical professionals and ethicists, the 500 or so individual signatories of the “Stuttgart Declaration” include numerous members of parliament at EU, federal and state level as well as the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief Heiner Bielefeldt, former Federal Minister of Justice Herta Däubler-Gmelin and educationalist Micha Brumlik. Frieder Otto Wolf, President of the Humanist Association of Germany and also one of the signatories, commented on the appeal on Thursday afternoon in Berlin: “Self-determination is one of the fundamental principles of our humanist view of life. This must also be fully granted to people who do not correspond to the heterosexual identities of the majority society. Paternalism, discrimination or coercion – whether of a medical or legal nature – must be rejected in relation to all gender identities and self-perceptions. That is why we, together with many other forces in civil society and politics, support the goal of treating transsexuality and intersexuality in accordance with human rights.”
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Background
A human rights trend is emerging worldwide to legally recognize people with so-called “gender deviations”, such as transsexual and intersex people, in their actual gender, which may differ from their registered gender. Denmark was the first country in Europe to follow Argentina’s example of no longer making legal recognition dependent on medical conditions. In 2011, the Federal Constitutional Court in Germany also deemed parts of the “Transsexuals Act”, which stipulated physical requirements for a change of civil status, to be unconstitutional. The “Stuttgart Declaration” aims to help ensure that people are able to change their legal gender in future without medical preconditions and that people who wish to do so can receive medical care and diagnostics that do not involve gender interpretation and focus on what it should actually be about: Helping people and giving them the treatment they need.
