Bulgaria’s Supreme Court of Cassation has ruled that the government must allow transgender-identifying individuals to change their name and gender on official identity documents — capping a decade-long legal battle driven by EU court pressure rather than any democratic mandate from the Bulgarian people.
The ruling follows a March 2026 decision by the EU Court of Justice in the “Shipova” case, involving a Bulgarian trans-identifying woman who relocated to Italy and sought to change gender markers on Bulgarian documents. Bulgarian courts had denied those requests for nearly ten years. The Bulgarian Supreme Court’s own 2023 ruling had effectively prohibited such changes. The EU court’s March decision overrode it, and the Bulgarian Supreme Court has now aligned its position with that ruling.
The July 22 decision was welcomed by two Bulgarian LGBT advocacy groups — Bilitis and Deystvie — alongside the pan-European lobby groups TGEU and ILGA-Europe, who noted in a joint statement that the ruling “aligns Bulgarian practice with the Court of Justice of the EU.”
The groups immediately called on the Bulgarian government to go further — codifying the ruling into legislation and establishing a legal gender recognition procedure without any requirement for medical, surgical, or hormonal treatment.
Bulgaria has been an EU member since 2007. Its constitution does not provide for legal gender recognition, and parliament has not passed any legislation on the matter. The ruling is driven entirely by EU court precedent rather than by any Bulgarian legislative or democratic process — a pattern now repeating across Eastern Europe as the EU’s judicial machinery systematically overrides member states’ domestic legal frameworks on gender identity, regardless of what those countries’ citizens or parliaments have decided.
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