Transgender Healthcare in Post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe

On the basis of the largely incomplete – and at least to a certain degree possibly unreliable – information that is available on trans issues in a post-socialist Eastern European context transgender citizenship is far from being fully acknowledged and recognized. Most countries of the region can be characterized by the lack of – transpositive or in fact any other – protocols for official gender change (in birth certificates, IDs, passports and other documents), and there are no guidelines, measures and procedures defining the standards of healthcare for transgender persons, either. In places where trans people are able to gain a certain level of social visibility, they can be seen as questioning or even threatening the traditional scope of gender role behaviour by their mere existence, and thus they can encounter hostile interpersonal and social reactions. Similar to the previous treatment of homosexuality and the present pathologization of trans issues, medicalization seems to provide an evergreen solution to deal with potentially problematic social issues in many Eastern European countries. The paper will provide a state-of-art review of at least ten post-socialist Central- and Eastern-European countries (including Croatia, Georgia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia) regarding transgender healthcare and recognition on the basis of available official and scientific sources as well as information gained from and/or interviews conducted with representatives of local NGOs and community members.