Spanish soldiers have exposed the flaw in gender self-ID

Dozens of male Spanish soldiers have legally changed their gender, allegedly to claim benefits intended for women. In doing so, the soldiers have exposed the vacuity of Spain’s so-called ‘trans law’, passed last year by its Socialist-led government.

Under Spain’s self-ID law, approved in February 2023 despite objections from the conservative opposition, feminist groups and elements of Spain’s ruling leftist coalition, anyone over the age of 16 can change their legal gender without psychiatric or medical evaluation. According to the Daily Telegraph, which reported the story, soldiers in Spain’s north African enclave of Ceuta are already taking advantage of its loopholes: 41 men have switched their legal gender to female, and four of have also changed their names. The majority of these men are believed to be in the military or police, where they may be eligible for benefits such as increased pensions and salaries. 

One of the men who now says that he is a woman is Roberto Perdigones, a corporal who admitted that ‘positive discrimination’ provided the incentive for his gender switch last summer. Perdigones now receives 15 per cent more on his salary, a bigger pension and a private, en suite room in his Ceuta barracks. ‘On the outside I feel like a heterosexual man’, Perdigones said, ‘but on the inside I am a lesbian. And it is the latter that counts’. The paper added that the corporal ‘continues to sport a beard’, although he has grown his hair slightly longer and now wears earrings.

Whether or not Perdigones is exploiting Spain’s trans law for personal benefit, the very possibility that he might be doing so highlights the legislation’s flaw: that simply altering the terms you use to refer to yourself, and requiring others to make the same alterations when they address you, is seemingly all that’s required to confer legal status on your gender switch.

This is why several feminist groups in Spain opposed the trans law from the outset. Coming together to form the ‘Alliance Against the Erasure of Women’, they expressed fears that attempts to discard sex as a biological designation ‘renders invisible the main element on which structural inequality against women is based’ and dilutes the efficacy of measures aimed at women. The Socialists were also initially sceptical of the need for a trans law, although the legislation has always been championed by the leftist party Podemos, their coalition partner. ‘The so-called right to sexual self-determination lacks legal rationality’, said the PSOE in a statement in 2021.

Corporal Perdigones draws attention to the problem when he states that his inner lesbian should be given legal and professional ascendancy over his outer heterosexual man simply because he says so. The ‘Razor’ rule, formulated by Christopher Hitchens, springs to mind: ‘What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence’.

That the gender ID law is in essence virtue-signalling, like so much of the legislation passed by Pedro Sanchez’s government, is evident from its content. It waives the requirement that men and women experiencing ‘gender dysphoria’, defined by the NHS as ‘a sense of unease that a person may have because of a mismatch between their biological sex and their gender identity’, undergo psychiatric evaluation before being allowed to legally switch their sex. Advocates of the Trans Law present this in a positive light, claiming that the previous stipulation implied that all transgender people are mentally ill. That stigma should indeed be shaken off and any resulting discrimination combated; but in waiving the requirement that gender changes be discussed in advance with healthcare professionals, the new law glosses over the fact that these are complex psychiatric and emotional issues. This, in turn, accounts for the loopholes that are already being exploited. Spain’s gender ID law has the odd distinction of going both too far and not far enough.