Negotiating Legal Gender Recognition in the Post-Yugoslav Space

Abstract

Legal gender recognition has emerged as a pressing human rights concern across Europe. Trans rights face barriers in the post-Yugoslav space, including medicalized legal procedures, anti-gender opposition, and linguistic exclusion. From a social constructivist perspective, this ethnographic research examined how trans activists from Serbia, Montenegro and Croatia navigate these complex landscapes. The study is based on 17 interviews, campaign observations, and legal analysis. The findings revealed that the existing gender recognition procedures violate human rights to dignity, legal recognition based on self-determination, respect for private life, bodily autonomy, non-discrimination, and the highest attainable standard of health. In addition, I found that societal ideas of cisheteronormativity and the gender binary create harmful and dehumanizing barriers to the realization trans rights. Lastly, while professionalized NGOs predominantly employed assimilation strategies framing trans rights as social inclusion, a minority of trans activists advocated removing gender markers from public documents. Overcoming divisions will necessitate the articulation of counter-narratives, linguistic subversion, and the formation of broad intersectional coalitions that will advocate for human rights from marginalized perspectives within this regional context.