Category: Women and people of diverse genders

The Lambda Warsaw Association is preparing for litigation in Poland related to data protection and data transfer issues experienced by transgender people in the process of and after getting their legal gender formally changed.

According to the Lambda Warsaw Association, Polish legal gender recognition procedure relies on Supreme Court decisions and is not comprehensively regulated by any legal act. Successfully completing the legal gender recognition process means that the person’s birth certificate is amended by adding an annotation about the sex marker change. The person then receives a new personal identification number (PESEL), as the sex marker is coded in the penultimate digit. However, changing the PESEL means that the data gathered by various state institutions regarding the person are not transferred to a new number.

Various databases and public services in Poland are now available online and many of them rely on automatisation of the data. It is especially difficult to continue medical treatment, as prescribed medicine, doctor’s referrals, vaccination history and information about past or future medical services are now digitised under one government-run service. The change of PESEL affects not only data gathered by the state institutions, but private ones as well.

The current practice, which requires trans people after LGR to individually go to the state agency office or a local bank with a court verdict and amended birth certificate, results in the serious breach of privacy and data protection, forcing a person to disclose their gender identity. The lack of automatic data transfer, available to all cis people, makes the transgender community especially vulnerable to discrimination. The transgender community is deprived of equal access to state-run digital databases.

Through litigation, the Lambda Warsaw Association will seek a court verdict stating that the personal rights of the claimants, including the right to privacy, equal access to state-provided digital services, and their gender identity, were violated by the practices of the state. The verdict orders the state agency to apologise, to refrain from further harm (which could mean that they have to tackle the issue systematically) and to pay monetary compensation.