5 - Finland: Silence

Summary

This chapter focuses on how the Finnish 1935 and 1950 sterilisation and castration acts were established, implemented and abolished. It also describes the formation of an infertility requirement in the 2002 law which still regulates legal gender recognition for trans people today. The chapter also recounts how some victims, mainly trans people and organisations, are continuously mobilising to eliminate the requirement and restructure the law. It compares the mobilisation and non-mobilisation of the groups and the persisting refusal of the Finnish state to acknowledge the violations, accept state responsibility for them, and provide related remedies for the victims. In terms of grievance formation, the chapter outlines a stalled process. Therefore, victims have generally refrained from mobilisation due to a missing common identity and sense of wrong to be remedied. The chapter signals a prevailing absence of a socio-cultural rights frame recognising harms of victims and public responsibility in Finland. In this sense, the lack of remedial culture is more evident and the structural impediments to grievance formation are higher in Finland than in its Nordic neighbours.