Bulgaria's Top Court Just Granted Legal Gender Recognition for the First Time Since 2020

For six years, transgender Bulgarians who asked a court to change the gender marker on their ID had one predictable outcome: no. Last month, that finally changed. Bulgaria’s Supreme Court of Cassation approved legal gender recognition for four transgender applicants — the first such rulings since 2020, and the clearest sign yet that a March ruling from the EU’s top court is starting to move through Bulgaria’s judiciary.

What happened

Different panels of the Supreme Court of Cassation’s Civil Chamber issued four separate decisions allowing transgender applicants to change their gender marker and legal name in civil status records. The court’s reasoning leaned directly on a March 2026 judgment from the Court of Justice of the European Union, which found that Bulgarian law could not block a person from updating gender-related personal data when doing so conflicted with EU free-movement and privacy rights.

One of the four cases belonged to a man identified in court records as K.M.H., whose fight began in 2017 when he asked a municipal office in Stara Zagora to update his birth certificate. Refused at every level for years, his case became the reference point that eventually reached the CJEU as what’s known publicly as the Shipova ruling. Three more cases — involving applicants identified as R.H.Y., P.M.M. and A.D.K. — followed the same path: years of rejection, then approval once the CJEU precedent was on the books.

The court’s language was direct. Judges wrote that “the right of a person to feel, live and express himself socially in accordance with his gender identity cannot be questioned,” and that this holds regardless of whether someone has undergone medical transition. In one ruling, the panel stated plainly that “the public interest in the accuracy of the registers cannot serve as a refusal, but rather for a correct and up-to-date reflection of the legal and social identity of the person.”

Why it had been stuck

Bulgaria’s courts have gone back and forth on this question for years, and not in a straight line. In 2021, the Constitutional Court ruled that “gender” in the Bulgarian constitution should be read in strictly biological terms, limiting civil-registry changes to intersex people. In 2023, the Supreme Court of Cassation itself ruled that without a specific law from parliament, courts had no authority to approve gender marker changes at all — effectively freezing every pending case.

Parliament never passed that law. What broke the freeze instead was Luxembourg, not Sofia. When the CJEU ruled in March that EU member states cannot block a person who has exercised free movement rights within the bloc from updating their gender data, it gave Bulgarian courts something to work with that didn’t require waiting on the National Assembly. TrueQueer covered the immediate aftermath of that ruling in May, when Bulgaria, Hungary and Slovakia were all sitting on the judgment without a functioning process. Bulgaria is now the first of the three to show its courts actually granting relief.

What it doesn’t fix

These are four individual rulings, not a change in the law. Bulgaria still has no statute governing legal gender recognition, which means every future applicant is, in theory, relying on courts to keep applying the same CJEU-driven reasoning rather than on a guaranteed administrative process. The four decisions “restore the approach previously followed by the SCC before the 2023 interpretative ruling,” as the court put it — a reversion to a workable precedent, not a legislative fix. Advocates in Sofia have said for years that only a law, not case-by-case litigation, will make the process accessible to people without the resources for a multi-year court fight.

There’s also the European Commission to watch. The CJEU gave Bulgaria, Hungary and Slovakia a compliance clock, and Brussels can open infringement proceedings against any of the three if it decides the response isn’t adequate. Bulgaria reopening cases and issuing favorable rulings is a meaningfully stronger position than Hungary’s, which has done close to nothing, or Slovakia’s, which has signaled it doesn’t intend to comply at all. But “stronger than Budapest” is a low bar.

The regional picture

Bulgaria ranks near the middle of ILGA-Europe’s Rainbow Map, well behind Spain and Malta but ahead of most of its Balkan neighbors on paper. This ruling doesn’t move that ranking on its own — legal gender recognition access is one line item among dozens the index tracks — but it matters for a simpler reason: four people who spent years, in one case nearly a decade, fighting for documents that matched who they are now have them. Whether the next applicant has to fight that hard again depends on whether Sofia’s parliament ever gets around to writing the law that’s been missing since before any of these cases started.

Sources: Novinite, Strasbourg Observers on the Shipova judgment, Courthouse News Service