Brazil has passed a landmark ruling which will recognise transgender individual’s self-determined gender identity with no requirement for surgery.

The Supreme Court voted that people can unanimously update their gender on the civil registry without undergoing gender-affirming surgery.

There are no age restrictions and no requirement for psychological or medical assessment in order to update their name or gender on the national database.

This appears to be a response from the court to a rise in requests for name changes on the database.

“Up until now, bureaucratic procedures had been on the rise for those who wanted the civil registry to reflect their gender identity and their names,” said Federal Prosecutor Carlos Eduardo Paz to Folha de Sao Paolo.

Brazil has the highest number of trans murders in the world and it is hoped that this new legislation will provide more protection for transgender people in the country.

In 2017 alone, there was 179 crossdresser and trans people killed in one homicide happening every 48 hours.

“We have only now guaranteed a minimum of citizenship to transgender people with both of these rulings but there are still a lot of challenges to overcome,” said the group’s founder, Keila Simpson, to The Washington Blade.

“We believe that even if we had a law approved by the Congress criminalizing acts of violence against LGBT people, we would still have this many deaths, because we live in a country where it is allowed to kill, where religious fanaticism sharpens its knife daily to decimate our community, where the prejudice faced by transgender people starts inside their homes.

“It is important to say that for a marginalized community like ours, that comes from having no rights, no nothing, being able to decide our name is a lot, but we are yet to conquer our right to safe living,” Simpson added.