Almost all gender change requests in Malaga are from male to female

At least a hundred people have applied to the various civil registries in the province of Malaga to change their gender - since the 'Trans law' came into force at the beginning of March. These applications, as established by law, must subsequently be confirmed three months after the start of the procedure.

Although the full figure has not been released, in Malaga city alone there are reportedly 40 cases, while in Torremolinos the number is similar: 36 at the beginning of this week. Sources consulted by SUR put the number of requests in Fuengirola at around ten, and a few less in Estepona. For the moment, exact figures have not been provided for places such as Mijas, Marbella and Vélez-Málaga, but these same sources from the Administration of Justice say that the number of cases in the large municipalities alone will exceed one hundred in just the three and a half weeks since the regulation was passed.

The entry into force of the 'Trans law' has not been without controversy. To understand it as a whole, one has to travel back to 2007. Zapatero's government then approved a pioneering law in the world that allowed people who did not identify with the sex they had been assigned at birth to change their name and sex, but without the need to have undergone surgical sex reassignment. The condition imposed in this regulation was that there had to be a psychological report diagnosing the so-called 'gender dysphoria', as well as proof that some kind of treatment had been followed for at least two years.

Since then, different regions (including Andalucía in 2014 by unanimous vote) have passed transgender laws in their own areas extending these rights. In the case of Andalucía, a person can change the name on their health card without having to present any kind of accreditation that they suffer from gender dysphoria. Even so, the big change came in 2018, when the World Health Organization stopped considering transsexuality as a pathology, which opened the door for the collective to demand the elimination of the medical report to change the registered sex in legal terms.