Europe’s top rights court held Tuesday that Romania violated the human rights of two transgender men by requiring sex reassignment surgery before recognizing their gender identity. The European Court of Human Rights found that requiring the men to undergo surgery before legally changing their gender violated their right to privacy. “The national courts placed the applicants…in an impossible dilemma: either to undergo this intervention despite their own wishes … or renounce the recognition of their gender identity,” the Strasbourg-based court wrote in an opinion that has only been released in French. The men, identified as X and Y in court documents, had petitioned the Bucharest District Court to change their names and update their birth certificates to accurately reflect their gender. Both were told that to change their identity documents, they had to undergo sex reassignment surgery, where a person’s physical appearance is altered to reflect their gender. Neither X nor Y wanted the operation.