H U M A N
II. Right to Health ... 15
III. Right to Work ... 24
IV. Economic Rights ... 28
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In February 2022, the constitutional chamber of El Salvador’s Supreme Court ruled that discrimination based on gender identity is unconstitutional and gave the legislature one year to create a procedure allowing transgender people to change their identity documents to reflect their gender identity. This was an important recognition of the human rights violations trans people in El Salvador too often experience due to a mismatch between their legal documents and their gender identity.
“We Just Want to Live Our Lives” documents the harms related to lack of legal gender recognition in El Salvador. Based on interviews with 43 transgender people in San Salvador, San Luis Talpa, Santa Ana, Santa Tecla, La Unión, and Zacatecoluca, as well as remotely, Human Rights Watch and COMCAVIS TRANS found that trans people experience discrimination in health, employment, voting, and banking linked to inaccurate identity documents.
Trans people told researchers that when they visited public healthcare facilities, clinic staff humiliated, mocked, and exposed them as transgender by calling out their legal names in waiting rooms. Others said that potential employers realized the interviewees were trans when they looked at their documents and denied them employment. Many recounted that they faced obstacles accessing their own money, citing examples in which bank workers did not believe the identity documents they presented belonged to them. Several trans persons said they were allowed to vote but faced humiliating questioning about their identity documents.
Human Rights Watch and COMCAVIS TRANS call on El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling and international human rights standards and allow trans people to modify their names and gender markers in their documents via a simple, efficient, and inexpensive administrative procedure based on self-declaration.
