For nearly six months, a transgender woman in Ukraine has been trying to have herself removed from the military register after officially changing her documents. The TCC refused to resolve the matter, citing the lack of an appropriate procedure. Now the court will have to settle the issue.
The applicant is around 30 years old. According to her lawyer, Roman Likhachev, they initially tried to resolve the issue without going to court: they submitted appeals and formal requests from counsel and contacted the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights and members of parliament. For some time, the TCC did not respond at all.
When an official response finally arrived, the woman was advised, among other things, to see doctors to determine her fitness for military service.
But this is where the central contradiction in the case arises.
A military medical commission determines a person's health status and fitness for service. It does not establish a person's legal sex. Nor does a change of sex in itself—whether legal or surgical—automatically make someone unfit for service. In other words, according to the lawyer, the problem does not lie with the body to which the TCC is referring the woman.
Her documents have already been formally amended. But the military registration system continues to operate according to its own logic.
And this is not an isolated case.
In February, ZMINA reported on a transgender woman from Kharkiv who found herself in a similar situation. Her passport and birth certificate listed her sex as female, but the TCC refused to remove her from the military register and also required her to undergo a military medical examination.
The woman then went to court—and won.
The Kharkiv District Administrative Court ruled that the refusal was unlawful. One of the ruling's key conclusions was quite simple: the absence of specific regulations cannot, in itself, serve as grounds for denying a person's request. The court ordered that the applicant be removed from the military register and that the Oberih registry be updated accordingly.
The current story is therefore more interesting than yet another individual dispute with a Territorial Recruitment Center.
Lawyer Roman Likhachev says he is handling several similar cases and receiving virtually identical rejections. According to him, the problem is no longer limited to the conduct of individual officials: Ukrainian law lacks a properly defined mechanism for such cases, while the necessary functionality in the Oberih system has not been fully implemented on the technical side. There are also no overall statistics on such court cases.
The result is a rather strange situation: the state can officially issue a person new documents, but another state system does not know what to do with this information.
At the same time, it is important not to draw an overly simplistic conclusion from this story.
This is not about being transgender automatically exempting a person from military service or meaning they are medically unfit. The lawyer specifically emphasizes this point. The dispute concerns something else: how the state should maintain a person's military registration after an official change of legal sex, and whether the absence of a procedure established by officials can justify leaving everything as it was.
One Ukrainian court has effectively already answered this question: no.
Now another woman is seeking the same answer.
And if the lawyer is right that there are already several such cases, the question going forward will be less about how many more transgender people can win cases against Territorial Recruitment Centers and more about when the state will finally have to establish a procedure that currently forces each person to go to court individually.
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