Bulgaria's Supreme Court of Cassation has allowed four trans applicants to change the sex, the name and the personal identification number recorded in their civil status documents. Bulgarian media reported the first of the decisions on 22 July 2026, and ILGA-Europe, TGEU, Bilitis and Deystvie set them out in a joint statement on 1 September 2026. They are the first decisions of their kind since 2020.
The position until then was the opposite one. An interpretive case referred to the court in 2020 and decided in 2023 held that sex, in the sense the Bulgarian constitution uses the word, is biological, and courts were left with no route to grant a change at all. The Court of Justice of the European Union described that reasoning in its press release of 12 March 2026: the public interest, resting on the moral and religious values of Bulgarian society, was held to outweigh the interests of transgender people.
That judgment is what moved things. In Case C-43/24, known as Shipova, the Court held that legislation of a member state which does not permit the amendment of the gender data of one of its nationals who has exercised the right to move and reside freely in another member state is contrary to EU law. The applicant is a Bulgarian citizen who lives in Italy, who had begun hormone therapy there, and who had been asking the Bulgarian courts for recognition for close to a decade. Hers is one of the four cases the Supreme Court of Cassation has now decided.
The court found that everyone has the right to determine their own gender identity and that this cannot be called into question, citing the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. It ruled out any requirement of surgery. It kept a requirement of hormone treatment, alongside a medical diagnosis and evidence of a settled intention to live in the gender claimed, and the four organisations note in their statement that the hormone condition falls short of European human rights standards.
What has not happened
There is still no law. The rulings decide four cases and give the lower courts a precedent to follow, but Bulgaria has no statutory procedure for legal gender recognition, so the next applicant goes to court rather than to a registry office and pays for the privilege in time and legal fees. The four organisations have asked the government to write one, with civil society involved.
What it means for travellers
Nothing about entering Bulgaria changes, and the immediate effect falls on people holding Bulgarian documents rather than on visitors carrying somebody else's. The broader point is the one the Court of Justice made, and it reaches every member state: a country that refuses to amend its own registers makes free movement harder for its own citizens, and after Shipova that refusal is unlawful.
The rest of the legal picture has not moved. Marriage is limited by the constitution of 1991 to a union of a man and a woman, there is no recognition of same-sex partnerships, and our Bulgaria country page sets out the discrimination law and the travel advice. In Sofia we list Club Barcode and Garage Sauna, and in Plovdiv the Pogled community centre.