Transsexuals lined up Monday to be the first to take advantage of Argentina's groundbreaking gender-identity law, which enables people to change their names and sexes on official documents without first getting approval from a judge or doctor. 
 
 Transsexual Taira Tolaba arrives at the civil registry looking to get information on the process to change gender identity, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Monday, June 4, 2012. Argentina's gender identity... (Associated Press) 
 
 Transsexual Sandra Gonzalez holds her passport as she waits for documentation in the legal process to change gender, outside the civil registry, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Monday, June 4, 2012. Argentina's... (Associated Press) 
 
 Transsexuals Maiamar Abrodos, right, and Maria Laura Aleman pose for a picture as they arrive at the civil registry to begin the legal process to change their gender, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Monday,... (Associated Press) 
 
 Transsexual Silvana Daniela Sosa holds a form after beginning the process to change gender, outside the civil registry, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Monday, June 4, 2012. Argentina's gender identity law... (Associated Press) 
 
 Transsexual Taira Tolaba, left, arrives at the civil registry looking to get information on the process to change gender identity, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Monday, June 4, 2012. Argentina's gender... (Associated Press) 
 
 No other country in the world allows people to change their official identities based merely on how they feel. 
 
 Many other countries, including the United States, require people to pass barriers that sexual identity experts describe as painful or humiliating, such as hormone therapy or surgeries to physically change their sex organs and psychiatric visits to demonstrate they have "gender identity disorder" or other abnormalities. 
 
 Argentina's gender identity law won congressional approval with a 55-0 Senate vote last month and took effect Monday. A small group of transsexuals chose to assert their rights immediately at a civil registry in downtown Buenos Aires. 
 
 Silvana Daniela Sosa, who was born Miguel Angel Sosa, emerged with a form showing her new identity card is being processed. 
 
 Another transsexual, Maria Mara Brodos, said, "It's important to have the freedom to decide by myself and not have anyone deciding it instead of me." 
 
 She said she had struggled for years to persuade judges to allow her to get documents reflecting her change in gender. 
 
 "I had many legal experts, and every time it was them talking _ I wasn't able to say who I was," she recalled. "It was both funny and painful, because no one is authorized to say who I am, but me." 
 
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 Associated Press journalists Gustavo Munoz and Natacha Pisarenko contributed to this report. ||||| The move comes two years after Argentina became the first country in Latin America to legalize gay marriage. It is the latest in a spate of liberal rulings on civil rights issues, including a law that decriminalizes abortion in rape cases and gives the terminally ill the right to die. 
 
 The measure, which was first introduced in 2007 by Silvia Augsburger, a deputy in Argentina’s lower chamber, defines gender identity as “the inner and individual gender experience as each person feels it.” President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner is expected to sign it into law this month. 
 
 Leaders of Argentina’s transgender community consider the identity law an important step toward self-determination. 
 
 “I couldn’t use public services because the name on the documents, the name my parents gave me, wasn’t me, and a person who doesn’t have an identity doesn’t have rights,” said Marcela Romero, the president of Attta, an activist group that promotes the rights of people who are transgender, transsexual or transvestites in Argentina. 
 
 Ashamed to be called by a name out of sync with the gender they present, transgender people in Argentina frequently drop out of school early, avoid hospitals and struggle to find gainful employment, activists say. 
 
 Such people are often the target of violent crime, according a January report by Inadi, Argentina’s antidiscrimination agency, which also documents that most of those surveyed had not completed primary school and had become prostitutes. With about a third of the country’s transgender people having contracted AIDS, Argentina’s Health Ministry puts their average life expectancy at 35 years. 
 
 The gender identity law offers another path to Argentina’s roughly 22,000 transgender people, said Silvana Sosa, 35. 
 
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 “We can be more than beauticians or whores,” she said. “We don’t have to spend our lives standing on street corners in high heels and bright lipstick, in the rain and cold. Enough of that.” 
 
 Born a biological male, Ms. Sosa started taking female hormones, with her parents’ permission, at age 13, and later injected her chest and thighs with inexpensive silicon from which she said she almost lost a leg to infection. She said she started a 20-year career as a sex worker that year to support her parents and siblings. 
 
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 After her father lost his job at a factory, the family moved to a homeless encampment under a bridge, surviving on food scraps salvaged from a municipal landfill. 
 
 Ms. Sosa began working two years ago as a sex counselor in the emergency wing of a Buenos Aires hospital that specializes in infectious diseases. She is among the thousands of people expected to take advantage of health coverage under the law to pursue gender reassignment surgery. 
 
 “When the day comes, I will cry out with happiness,” said Ms. Sosa, whose name had been Miguel Ángel Sosa. “I am Silvana Daniela Sosa. I’m no longer the person I was.” 
 
 Under current law, Argentines who feel the names on their national identification cards do not reflect their true gender have to receive a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria and bring a case before the courts — standard protocol in many countries, including the United States. 
 
 “It’s unusual and deeply progressive,” Katrina Karkazis, a bioethics expert at Stanford University, said of Argentina’s new law. 
 
 “The law is saying, ‘Not only will we give you the right to self-identify, but for those who want medical intervention, we’ll require public and private providers to cover procedures for self-actualization.’ ” 
 
 Nevertheless, some transgender activists said the law would not solve all their woes. 
 
 In a darkened corner of Casa Brandon, the gay club founded 12 years ago and named for Brandon Teena, the transgender teenager from Nebraska raped and murdered in 1993, Mia Benítez, a 29-year-old security guard, said the law was not a panacea for homophobia. 
 
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 “People’s perceptions don’t change overnight,” she said. 
 
 “It’s a bit deceptive,” said Melisa Ingelozzi, 25, a philosophy student at the University of Buenos Aires, who described her sense of gender as fluid. “It only lets me change from a man to a woman, but what if I don’t identify with either? It makes invisible the trans identity.” 
 
 Sexual repression is still widespread in Argentina, where 80 percent of the population is Roman Catholic and homosexuals were regarded as subversives during the dictatorship, said Graciela Balestra, a psychologist and the co-founder of Open Door, a therapy center for gay men, lesbians and transgender people. 
 
 “There is still a great deal of discrimination,” she said. “Very few people are totally out of the closet, in part because of internal homophobia.” 
 
 A week after the congressional vote, the Catholic Church condemned the law in a statement signed by four of the country’s monsignors. 
 
 “Sexual diversity doesn’t depend only on a cultural decision or construction, but rather has its roots in a fact of human nature which presents its own language and meaning,” the May 16 statement said.
– Argentina introduced the world's most liberal law on transgender rights yesterday, giving people the freedom to change their gender legally and physically without the approval of a judge or doctor. The law—which passed the country's Senate last month 55-0 despite firm opposition from the Catholic Church—has removed all the hurdles blocking the country's estimated 22,000-strong transgender community from changing gender, and is the first in the world allowing people to change their legal gender without changing their bodies, reports the AP. "This law is saying that we're not going to require you to live as a man or a woman, or to change your anatomy in some way. They're saying that what you say you are is what you are," notes a Stanford University bioethicist. "And that's extraordinary." The law also requires public and private medical practitioners to provide free hormone therapy and gender reassignment surgery to those who desire it, notes the New York Times.