TGEU's 2026 Trans Rights Index: Albania Climbs, Belarus and Slovakia Plunge, and Courts Are Doing the Work

The 2026 edition of TGEU’s Trans Rights Index and Map went public this week, landing in the same news cycle as ILGA-Europe’s Rainbow Map. Read together, the two rankings tell the same story from slightly different angles: 2025–2026 was a year in which most of Europe’s progress on trans rights came from courts and activists, not legislatures, and the countries that moved hardest in the wrong direction did so deliberately.

TGEU (Trans Europe and Central Asia) scores 49 countries across more than two dozen legal and policy indicators — legal gender recognition, healthcare access, anti-discrimination protections, hate crime law, asylum, and family rights. The 2026 subtitle is unusually direct for a human rights ranking: “Movements and courts hold the line despite political threats and inaction.”

That framing matters. The biggest gains on the map this year came from court decisions or activist-led legal reforms, not from governments waking up to the issue.

Where the map moved up

Several countries notched real gains. Czechia and Latvia both abolished sterilisation requirements for legal gender recognition — a baseline that should never have existed, but that European countries spent decades treating as normal. Austria introduced an alternative gender marker for non-binary people. Croatia and Poland improved their administrative procedures for trans people seeking to update documents.

Albania moved up two places to 24th, with a 41% score. The jump reflects the country’s new Law on Gender Equality, which for the first time explicitly names gender identity and gender expression as protected grounds against discrimination, and amendments to the Law on Protection from Discrimination that broaden the scope of covered sectors. Both reforms were adopted last year as part of Albania’s EU accession trajectory.

The Albanian gain is real, but it sits on shaky ground. A conservative coalition is currently collecting signatures for a referendum to repeal the gender equality law, framing it as an attack on traditional family values. As we reported yesterday, the constitution may make that referendum legally impossible — but the political damage is happening regardless, and the trans community has been the most visible target of the disinformation campaign.

Where the map moved down

Three countries take the bulk of the bad news in this year’s index.

Belarus drops one place to 46th, with a score of 7%. President Lukashenko signed a sweeping anti-”propaganda” law in mid-April that, among other things, criminalises information that promotes gender transition. The legislation also reinstates compulsory medical requirements for any legal gender recognition that might still be available in theory — which TGEU now classifies as a de facto ban. The law explicitly groups LGBTQ+ identities with paedophilia and “refusal to have children.” UN human rights experts called it a “dangerous escalation.”

Slovakia drops two places to 35th, scoring 25%. Constitutional amendments passed earlier this year formally recognised only “two sexes,” restricted adoption rights to married heterosexual couples, and explicitly undermined the supremacy of EU law. The amendments were tailored to make legal gender recognition impossible — and they succeeded. Slovakia is now the fifth country in the region with a de facto ban on legal gender recognition, joining Russia, Belarus, Hungary, and Bulgaria.

The Slovak case is especially consequential because Slovakia is an EU member state. The CJEU’s Shipova ruling from March told Slovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria to recognise the gender of their citizens who have exercised free movement. Slovakia is openly defying that judgment.

Hungary remains near the bottom of the index even with Viktor Orbán out of office. Trans rights repeal was on the new government’s first 100 days agenda, but practical implementation has been slow — the old recognition system was destroyed in 2020 and rebuilding it requires legislation that has not yet passed. People who transitioned before 2020 still cannot regularise their documents.

Courts have become the only reliable engine of progress

The TGEU report calls out a pattern that has been getting harder to ignore. Most of 2026’s positive movement on the map traces back to court rulings or to civil society organisations pushing through reforms that governments would not have pursued on their own. The Czech and Latvian sterilisation reforms followed years of strategic litigation. Austria’s non-binary marker was a constitutional court decision being implemented administratively. The CJEU’s Shipova ruling forced movement in Bulgaria. The CJEU’s April 21 ruling on Hungary’s 2021 anti-LGBTQ+ law established, for the first time, that Article 2 TEU — the values clause — can be breached on its own terms.

What is harder to find on the 2026 map: a national government that decided, on its own initiative, to expand trans rights through new legislation.

The Balkans picture

For the broader Balkans, the 2026 map is mixed. Albania climbed. Croatia made gains. Serbia, North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro mostly held steady — none of them have functional legal gender recognition procedures, and TGEU continues to note this as the region’s most pressing gap. Kosovo’s score reflects the country’s ongoing inability to pass civil unions or trans-inclusive legal reforms despite repeated political pledges.

Two things stand out for the region. First, every Western Balkans country with EU accession aspirations is being judged not only on its written law but on whether trans people can actually get documents that match their identity. That hurdle is now widely recognised as part of the Copenhagen Criteria. Second, the bar is rising. The Council of Europe’s case law and the CJEU’s recent free-movement jurisprudence have established a floor that several countries in the region are sitting beneath.

What to watch next

The 2026 index reads as a stress test of an obvious question: how much further can European trans rights progress go when most governments have stopped trying? The honest answer in this year’s data is “further than you’d expect, as long as courts and movements keep doing the work — but not indefinitely.” Slovakia’s constitutional amendments are designed precisely to neutralise the court route. Belarus’s new law is designed to criminalise the activist route. The countries doing the most damage are doing it on purpose.

The countries climbing the map are mostly climbing in spite of their politics, not because of them.