A Swiss man changed his gender in order to retire earlier, the local press writes.
On January 1, 2022, a law came into force in Switzerland that allows citizens who are “deeply convinced” that they do not belong to the gender listed in the civil register to change their gender administratively. To do this, you need to go to the civil status office, be interviewed for 10 minutes and present several documents.
A 64-year-old man from Lucerne took advantage of this. He has applied for a gender reassignment to retire – the retirement age for women in Switzerland is only 64, while for men it is 65. The procedure took him four days and cost 75 francs.
The man is now registered as a woman in the civil registry. The reason for the gender reassignment is purely financial, as the Lucerne resident in question admits. Because: Women can receive their AHV pension, which is currently 28,680 francs a year, a year earlier than men.
The facilitated gender reassignment has been in force since 2022 and aims to enable transgender people to change their gender and name in the civil register quickly and easily – without prior medical examinations or other requirements. Fearing that this would lead to abusive abuses such as the case of the Lucerne man, Justice Minister Karin Keller-Zutter, 58, objected in June 2020: “No one is doing this just like that.”
The Federal Office of Justice also believes that abuses are unlikely, as evidenced by a twelve-page directive to civil registry officials. It states that officials “are not obliged to actively seek abuse” and “have no obligation to verify the internal convictions of the persons concerned.” Abuse is only present if it is obvious.
However, it is difficult to judge what is considered obvious. According to Corinne Hodel, head of the regional civil service in Hochdorf, abuse is “possible if the person states orally or in writing that he wishes to make a declaration of gender reassignment for fun, fraudulently or otherwise in a frivolous manner.” In such a case, civil status officials are obliged to refuse to accept the declaration of gender reassignment.
