On 16 February a public event on 'Gender in the law: need for legal reform of recognition and protection of gender diversity' took place at the German Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth in Berlin/Germany. The Ministry presented two reports it had commissioned to the public (available for download in German). The first report, written by a team of the Humboldt University Berlin, specifically examined the legal status or transgender persons and the need for reform in Germany. The second report, written by the Deutsche Institut für Menschenrechte e.V. (German Institute for Human Rights) took a broader approach and looked at gender in the law generally, but specifically focused on intersex persons and persons with a non-binary gender identity.
In the reports, Scherpe’s work on ‘The Legal Status of Transsexual and Transgender Persons‘ was referred to several times, and Fenton-Glynn was thanked expressly for providing additional information that had supported the research. Members of the German Institute for Human Rights had attended the workshop organised by Scherpe on ‘The Legal Status of Intersex Persons’ and the results of the workshop, including a paper by one of the authors of the report, will be published towards the end of 2017.
Scherpe was invited as the only international expert to speak as a panellist at the event, and was asked specifically to comment on the position of children in this context. As in his previous publications, he took the clear position that ‘parents are parents’, and that ideally the legal terms of mother and father should be replaced by ‘parent’ in all relevant statutes. However, as long as the terms father and mother continue to be used, he recommended that the legal gender of a person should not affect the legal relationship with the child, and that when public information on the matter such as birth certificates is recorded or changed, this should be done in accordance with the preference of the parent concerned.