Brazil: in order not to displease trans people, the ID card will have a social name

By Edilson Salgueiro

The government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is about to announce changes in the “social name” and “gender” fields on the National Identity Card (CIN).

The document should replace other forms of identification for Brazilians, such as Identity Registration (RG).

According to the Federal Prosecutor for the Rights of the Citizen (PFDC), an agency linked to the Federal Public Ministry, the inclusion of the registered name in the CIN – as occurs in the RG – would be a “flagrant violation of the right to self-determination of the trans person and invalidates its very necessity of use.”

The agency also claims this measure would set a “dangerous precedent for the vexatious exposure of a name that does not represent the person one wishes to identify.”

But it doesn’t stop there.

According to the PFDC, the requirement for including biological sex in the CIN has no administrative or bureaucratic necessity.

The prosecutor says such a measure “encourages human rights violations of people who present registered sex different from their gender identity and expression.”

A draft to amend the provisions on the fields “sex” and “social name” in the CIN should be presented within 60 days.

The information is contained in a resolution published this Monday in the Official Gazette of the Union.

The Federal Executive Chamber for Citizen Identification, the Internal Revenue Service, and the National Council of Directors of Identification Bodies make up a working group that intends to put the new suggestions into practice.

The previous rules had been established during Jair Bolsonaro’s government.

With information from Revista Oeste