Since the Amsterdam Treaty in 1997, the European Union required Member States to make targeted improvements in gender equality in all areas of life. Legislative instruments such as the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (chapter III, art. 21-23, 25, 26 (2009)), Article 19 of the Lisbon Treaty (2009), as well as several directives support this project. According to Article 19 of the Lisbon Treaty, ‘the council (of the European Union) may take appropriate action to combat discrimination on the grounds of gender, race, ethnicity, religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation’.

In a resolution of 2015, the Council of Europe, which consists of 47 member states and includes all member of the EU, calls on member states to prevent discrimination against trans* people and to specifically include this in future anti-discrimination laws. Furthermore, the paper suggests that states officially recognise the third gender as an additional option.

EU member states have implemented the measures and requirements to varying degrees. For example, some countries (Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom) have already added anti-discrimination legislation to their own national legislation prior to the entry into force of a wide range of EU legislative measures. However, those were mainly about the protection against discrimination on the ground of ethnical characteristics. This dossier offers a closer look at the situation of trans* people in the EU countries of the Netherlands, Belgium and Sweden.