РАДНОПРАВНЕ ПОСЛЕДИЦЕ ТРАНСРОДНОСТИ
THE CONSEQUENCES OF TRANSGENDER IDENTITY IN LABOUR LAW

Summary/Abstract: In this paper, the author examines the position of transgender people, i.e. individuals of different gender identity, through the prism of exercising and protecting the fundamental human rights in the field of labour rights and the rights arising from employment. The author’s starting point is that most modern societies are organized on the basis of a generally accepted binary concept of gender, which implies that the gender of all individuals is rigidly (strictly) determined according to the male/female dichotomy, due to fear of stigmatization and in order to avoid departing from commonly accepted social and moral norms. A certain number of people experience difficulties in identifying with the sex assigned at birth, thus encountering a problem of the internal sense of gender that differs from their own sex. Such individuals are described as transgender people. The issues pertaining to transgender people should be approached in terms of protecting the fundamental human rights, which is also the standpoint of the European Court of Human Rights. The Court requires from states to ensure the continuity of their transition by providing legal recognition of the newly acquired gender and allowing a legal change of name. The guiding principles should be the legal continuity of the identity, rights and obligations of a transgender person both prior to and following a hormonal-surgery procedure of gender reassignment, as well as the relevance of a newly acquired gender of transgender individuals. The first step in this process is allowing transgender individuals to obtain personal identity documents consistent with their gender identity since these documents play a key role in exercising the basic human rights, such as: the right to education, the right to health and health care, the right to work, the right to pension (in accordance with gender identity), the right to housing, and a number of other rights consequently causing problems especially in relation to social services staff, police, border authorities, registry offices (e.g. issuing personal documents, employment records), military authorities, etc. According to almost all reports on human rights in Serbia, both from the country and abroad, transgender people fall into one of the most vulnerable groups in society. An estimated number of transgender people in Serbia is between twenty thousand and twenty-five thousand.

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