My Guide to Trans Rights Under New EU Directives
A massive thanks to TGEU for hosting a “Know Your Rights: How EU Directives Protect Trans People” webinar in October 2026, helping attending activists continue the fight for transgender rights in Europe and Central Asia. TGEU was founded in 2005 as transgender Europe e.V. Since then, they’ve worked tirelessly to support the transgender community and, in 2018, expanded their regional scope to include Central Asia. This blog post is about new EU directives that affect transgender people in particular.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and this blog post is not intended to act as or replace legal advice. Please speak to a transgender rights charity or a lawyer in your country if any of the topics covered may affect you. I am not associated with TGEU, and this blog post is my understanding of what was shared with us and what I have read about the directives.
EU Directive Basics: Transposition
EU directives set binding minimum standards for member states but do not automatically become national law; each country must pass domestic legislation (transposition). Unlike directives, EU regulations apply directly as law upon adoption without transposition. Transposition is where the real battle for transgender rights happens: governments can do the bare minimum or go further to protect gender identity and expression. Deadlines for the Equality Bodies and Pay Transparency directives have already passed (June 2025); the Violence Against Women Directive deadline is summer 2026, and as of October 2026, most member states are expected to be late. The member states being late is a good thing in this case because it gives activists additional time to campaign or more than the bare minimum set out by the directives. We just don’t want member states to be so late that they actually try to resist transposition.
One of the EU directives is particularly useful for activists as well as individuals: the Equality Bodies Directives (2024/1500 & 2024/1499). This gives national equality bodies more independence and stronger powers to investigate and support victims of discrimination. Currently, equality bodies can have their hands tied and only act as mediators in a lot of countries; this new Directive (as to my understanding) will allow Member States to set consequences such as fines, and allow victims of discrimination to be supported better with such things as legal advice paid for or provided by the equality bodies (potentially, this would depend on each Member State’s interpretation of the Directive).
Commission vs Hungary: The CJEU Ruling
Hungary passed laws restricting LGBTQIA+-related content in media and education, so the European Commission brought an infringement proceeding. This is the first time it has been done for LGBTQIA+ rights in the EU (Commission v Hungary (C-769/22)). The case resulted in the following clarifications in law:
Article 2 (EU founding values: dignity, equality, rule of law, non-discrimination): Previously considered abstract and political, the court confirmed it is now enforceable against all member states
Article 21 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights (non-discrimination): Does not explicitly name gender identity, but the court held that discrimination based on sex includes: Discrimination arising from a change of gender and Discrimination based on deviation from self-identity corresponding to sex assigned at birth. They deliberately drew a broad formulation from Hungarian legislation itself , which provides the greatest protection for transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming people.
This interpretation goes beyond the earlier, more medicalised concept of gender reassignment and is broader than the 2025 Moose case ruling on gender identity under the Goods and Services Directive.
Because this interprets primary EU law (the Charter), it applies across all EU secondary legislation, so every directive using sex in a non-discrimination context should be read expansively.
Caveat: Whether this broad interpretation applies universally across all EU acts regardless of context remains to be tested through future litigation, which will surely be tested at some point given the uprise of fascism and transphobia in many Member States.
Pay Transparency Directive
The purpose of the Pay Transparency Directive (2023/970) is to force employers to establish pay structures based on objective, gender-neutral criteria (skills, effort, responsibility, working conditions) and close the persistent ~11% gender pay gap. The directive uses the term sex but explicitly extends pay discrimination protection to gender reassignment, and (building on the Commission vs Hungary case) this now broadly covers gender identity.
Under this Directive, a transgender woman has a clear legal basis to claim pay discrimination if paid less than a cisgender man or cisgender woman performing equal work. A transgender man also has a legal basis to claim pay discrimination if paid less than a cisgender man. Non-binary people may have a legal basis to claim pay discrimination if paid less than a cisgender man or cisgender woman (though this would need to be tested).
This is the first EU law to require member states to address intersectional discrimination as well!* Workers can bring claims where pay discrimination occurs at the intersection of sex and another ground:
race
age
disability
sexual orientation
*Trans people are protected under the sex category for intersectional claims regardless of whether they have undergone medical interventions
This Directive also includes:
Data collection limitation: The directive only mandates data disaggregated by the binary legal categories of women and men; non-binary identities may not be captured unless a member state legally recognises non-binary genders or an employer voluntarily collects broader data. (This would be a good place for activists to fight for non-binary rights!)
Requesting pay information: Any employee can formally request their individual pay level and average pay levels broken down by sex for colleagues doing equal work; employers must respond in writing within two months (member states may shorten this, e.g., Lithuania shortened it to one month)
Employers who breach these rules face financial fines and potential exclusion from public contracts or state funding
What this Directive means for transgender people:
Transgender women: can compare against men (sex ground) or cisgender women (gender identity-based discrimination)
Transgender men: can compare against other men where discrimination stems from their transgender identity
Non-binary people: can use either men or women as comparators using CJEU jurisprudence
Violence Against Women Directive
The purpose of the Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence (2024/1385) Directive is to address widespread violence in EU states. 31% of women have experienced physical or sexual violence, and half of domestic violence victims never report it.
The Directive Criminalizes at the EU level:
Female genital mutilation
Forced marriage
Cyber-stalking
Cyber harassment, and online incitement to violence or hatred (closing gaps in countries lacking specific cyber violence laws )
The Directive also addresses the forced medicalisation of transgender people, though forced sterilisation was not included! So this is another area for activists to address at a local level with their Member States!
The legal definition of victim covers all persons suffering harm regardless of gender, which (per CJEU jurisprudence in the Commission vs Hungary case) should be read as regardless of gender identity. Violence targeting someone for being transgender or for defying gender norms must be prosecuted as gender-based violence.
This Directive also sets a floor, not a ceiling, which means Member States with stronger existing protections cannot lower them!
This Directive also includes:
Access to justice: Authorities must offer accessible reporting routes, act quickly on restraining orders, handle investigations sensitively (including not disclosing a person's trans identity), and take down non-consensually shared intimate images
Victim support: Member states must fund specialised support organizations providing medical care, counseling, and safe housing; gender identity must be considered when assessing a victim's safety needs
Prevention: Mandatory public education on consent, perpetrator intervention programs, and training for police, judges, and healthcare workers
Transposition deadline: 14 June 2027; only a handful of countries (Austria, Romania, France, Czechia) have submitted official notifications; many submissions reflect pre-existing frameworks rather than newly drafted laws. Check your country’s transposition progress!!! because we are now at a critical window for civil society to engage national lawmakers to ensure inclusive language, cyber violence protections, and explicit gender identity safeguards are embedded in domestic bills
A question I was left with regarding the Directive on Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence (2024/1385) was whether the mandatory reporting of statistics will be skewed and further hide the violence committed against transgender men if their ID card still states “Female”. The TGEU said that whether police would record the crime using his gender identity or his legal ID marker likely depends on the country's legal gender recognition framework and data collection practices; the directive itself uses the term transgender rather than gender identity and does not address data gathering explicitly, so the impact of this directive might need to be tested out in the “real world” to see the implications in statistical data from each country, as well as whether a transgender man could request that the data be corrected to match his gender identity.
Resource for activists
So that activists know what is happening in their country, you can track the progress of transposition on the EU “EUR-Lex webpage; you just need the directive name and the name of the country you wish to look up. By looking at the progress, activists can know where they need to apply local pressure to their governments in order to push through the transpositions and to have the time to ask for more than the minimum set out in the directives. TGEU recommended that we all focus on legislation dated between March 2022 and June 2027, and look for recent laws rather than pre-existing frameworks submitted to meet formalities to gain maximum timeframes for campaigning.
