Trans Woman Sues Israel over Requirement to Keep Birth Name on ID

An Israeli transgender woman has petitioned Israel’s highest court to change a 66-year-old law requiring people to keep their birth names for seven years on their national ID, the Haaretz daily reported this week.

“It’s like a stain from the past, a wound, a symbol of what I once was,” Nofar Morali, 22, told the newspaper about how she feels when she sees her old name on her ID.

Although Morali officially changed her name, and was recognized as female by the population registry, the 1956 law stipulates that her ID also bears a copy of her previous name for seven years.

“It feels like a mark I’m stuck with for seven years,” Morali told Haaretz.

She called on the High Court of Justice to order the law amended so “she and other transgender people can live their lives without a constant reminder of the sex, and name, assigned to them at birth,” the report said.

The petition argues that the regulation violates Morali’s rights to personal autonomy and privacy as well as the right to equality and personal security.

“Certainly it was not the intention of the legislator to cause such grave harm to rights protected by the constitution and to force transgender people out of the closet. Under the circumstances, in which the rule in the majority of cases causes no problem but whose application in exceptional and unusual circumstances causes a serious violation of constitutional rights, a legal remedy must be given,” it states.

Morali has also launched a crowdfunding campaign to fund her gender confirmation surgery.

Morali’s friend, Or Aviv, 21, cited the same problem.

“I had a name that was really not appropriate for me – very male and old-fashioned. I had to change it as quickly as possible, even before I began to transition,” she said.

“I worked in a place where if they asked me to, I had to answer the telephone. I would answer in a woman’s voice, but with my old name. It wasn’t comfortable,” she said. “I didn’t know it would remain there in my papers. Only later did I discover that my old name was there. I was a little in shock. They told me that that’s the way it has to be, so I couldn’t change my identity completely.”

“Thousands of transgender people shouldn’t be suffering because of an obsolete law,” Aviv said.

Morali agreed: “If I have to give someone my ID as a guarantee” – for example, to obtain a visitor pass in a secure facility – “I don’t want anyone to see my old name. I didn’t commit a crime. It hurts me personally all the gender dysphoria that I had to go through. As a transwoman, I know subconsciously that an official document with my old name leaves me no way to escape from it.”