TGEU publishes Know Your Rights: How EU Directives Protect Trans People. Second Revised Version
This guide provides a basic overview of EU directives in which trans people are protected from discrimination, including through the explicit inclusion of the grounds of ‘gender reassignment’, ‘gender identity’, or ‘gender expression’. As such, it helps trans people to better understand and claim their fundamental rights. It also helps legal professionals, equality bodies, and policymakers to understand their legal obligations to ensure equal protection.
What are EU directives?
EU directives are a type of EU law that sets goals Member States must reach through their own legislation. However, EU directives do not prescribe how Member States should implement them. In other words, EU directives set a common minimum standard but leave Member States flexibility in how they achieve it.
All EU directives must be ‘transposed’, a process that incorporates an EU directive into national legislation. Once a directive is adopted, transposition begins, and the directive itself sets a deadline for completion.
Objective of the guide
Since TGEU published our first Know Your Rights guide in 2015, additional EU directives have been adopted and are entering into force. These newer directives, which extend protections for trans people across a broader range of areas, form the focus of this guide.
What does this guide cover?
- Equality Bodies Directives: Standards on the mandate, independence, resources, tasks, and powers of Equality Bodies to prevent discrimination, promote equality, assist victims of discrimination, and promote equal treatment (Directive (EU) 2024/1500 and Directive (EU) 2024/1499)
- Pay Transparency Directive: The principle of equal pay for equal work or work of equal value between men and women. Employers must be transparent about pay, and workers can enforce their rights if they are paid unequally (Directive (EU) 2023/970)
- Directive on combating violence against women and domestic violence Directive (EU) 2024/1385)
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