Abstract

The article focuses on the evolution of gender recognition in Italian law, which seems now to having abandoned the requirement of surgical reassignment, to rely more (but not entirely) on self-identification. The resulting discipline still requires psychiatric and hormonal treatments and is ambiguous about the need for transformation of secondary sexual characteristics. Nevertheless, this «partially medicalized» model is still worrisome, for it threatens some essential human rights, such as autonomy, health, freedom from inhuman and cruel treatments, and equality. The Authors, relying on comparative material, propose a new model e for gender classification, which, still framed in the gender binary, is totally de-medicalized and confers central weight to self-identification.