Spain’s ‘trans equality’ law is a predator’s charter

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Barely a year after Spain passed its ‘trans equality’ law, gender self-identification is wreaking havoc across the country. To almost no one’s surprise, the law that makes it significantly easier for anyone to legally change their gender has turned out to be a predator’s charter.

Since early 2023, it has become astonishingly easy to change your legal gender in Spain. All you have to do is make two official declarations at a registry office, three months apart. There is no medical consultation or intervention needed, nor do you need to show proof that you actually intend to live life as your chosen gender. You don’t even need to be over 18. Sixteen-year-olds can legally change their name and gender, while 14- and 15-year-olds can do so with parental consent. Even children as young as 12 can legally make the switch with a judge’s approval.

The new law has taken a shredder to women’s rights. As anyone could have predicted, single-sex spaces have been all but abolished. And many other legal protections that women once fought for have disappeared overnight.

Last week, Ana Dávila-Ponce de León, councillor for family, youth and social affairs in Madrid, sent a letter to Spanish equality minister Ana Redondo García denouncing the new law. She had been made aware of a number of cases in Madrid in which men accused of crimes against women have abused the self-ID rules.

These cases, detailed in El Mundo and reported on in English by Reduxx, are truly chilling. According to records, there have been six known cases so far in Madrid of men accused of violence against women legally changing their gender. In three of these cases, the men went on to apply to stay in women’s shelters. So far, it appears that shelter staff have refused them entry. But this is technically illegal under the trans-equality law. It is only a matter of time before a woman’s shelter is punished simply for doing its job – namely, for protecting women from predatory men.

In one particularly disturbing case, a woman reported a man to the police for allegedly drugging and raping her in front of her young daughter. She later found out that he had legally changed his gender. This meant that a number of protections she would ordinarily be entitled to have now been taken away.

Under Spain’s gender-based violence laws, women who accuse men of gender-based violence can access benefits such as emergency accommodation and preferential treatment in gaining child custody. You can also have an aggressor evicted from a shared home or prohibited from living in a certain area. The catch is that only men can be accused of gender-based violence. If an accused man legally changes his gender, then he has no longer committed a so-called gender-based crime. As a result, the woman loses all her rights as an alleged victim.

We saw examples of this happening even before Spain introduced self-ID. In 2022, a man was able to avoid charges of gender-based violence by changing his ‘gender identity’. A woman in her sixties claimed that she was being abused at the hands of her long-term male partner, after he had revealed his crossdressing fetish to her. Upon trying to file a report with the police, the woman was informed that her partner could not be charged with gender-based violence because he was legally a woman. That meant she had no special protections and could not even remove him from their home. Her allegedly abusive partner even filed a criminal complaint against her, for ‘misgendering’ him.

Now that self-ID is entrenched in Spanish law, cases of bad actors abusing the system have exploded. It is not just that men dressing as women are able to legally redefine themselves as women. Men who make no effort whatsoever to pass as the opposite sex are just as entitled to legally change their gender. This has led to a phenomenon known as ‘non-normative trans’.

The prime example of these ‘non-normative trans’ people can be seen in the apparent mass transitioning of Spanish soldiers and police officers. In the tiny Spanish enclave of Ceuta on the Moroccan coast, almost 50 people have legally changed their gender since 2023. The vast majority of them work in the military or police – and 39 of them have changed from male to female. Only four of them have even bothered to change their names.

As reported by the Telegraph earlier this month, being a female soldier in the Spanish army can be very lucrative. As one Ceuta-based army corporal, Roberto Perdigones, explained in El Español: ‘For changing my gender, I have been told that my pension has gone up because women get more to compensate for inequality. I also get 15 per cent more salary for being a mother.’ Aside from growing his hair slightly longer and wearing earrings, Perdigones has apparently made no effort to present as a woman. He hasn’t even bothered to shave his beard.

All of this is perfectly legal. According to David Peralta, secretary and co-founder of the Non-Normative Trans Association, who is also a police officer in Madrid: ‘There can be no fraud in the law, since the law is based on self-perception and contains no requirements. Those who question the gender condition I claim should be careful.’

In some ways, you can hardly fault the likes of Peralta and Perdigones for gaming what is obviously a nonsensical and unfair system. Indeed, nothing that is happening in Spain should surprise us. Self-ID was always going to be a boon to perverts and chancers – and a disaster for women. Spain’s reckless experiment has now proven this beyond all doubt.

Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.