The first Finnish Trans Act was passed in 2002, came into force the next year, and gave legal recognition to transgender people and standardized their treatment by public authorities.
In 2021, an initiative to reform the law, but with a lower age limit, was started by the transgender advocacy organization Trans ry [fi].
From the 1950s to the 1970s, psychiatrists were supportive of transgender patients' identities but were reluctant to provide somatic treatments like hormone therapy or gender-affirming surgery.
In 1882, the Proceedings of the Finnish Medical Association (Swedish: Finska Läkaresällskapets Handlingar) published a case study of a patient who was assigned female at birth (AFAB) but identified as male.
During this period, transgender people were diagnosed with transvestitismus, classified as a "sexual anomaly" in the Finnish version of the ICD-6 diagnostic system.
In the following decades, better information about transgender people became available through the work of Harry Benjamin in the United States and Jan Wålinder [sv] in Sweden.
The draft received heavy criticism, and according to anthropologist Veronica Pimenoff [fi] was deemed contrary to human rights, and never made it to parliament.
This unified and standardized common procedures from the preceding years, but according to anthropologist Pimenoff, it actually made changing one's gender marker harder than it had become in the 1990s.
However, the act and decree also made it harder to get hormone therapy, requiring a psychiatrist's recommendation for a treatment which previously could be prescribed by a doctor unconnected to the transgender health system.
[11] In 2012, after a visit to Finland, the Council of Europe's Commissioner for Human Rights, Nils Muižnieks demanded that the provisions about infertility and being unmarried be removed.
Though its conclusion was criticized as lacking by Seta and Trasek, it proposed abolishing the Trans Act's controversial requirements, as well as suggesting that gender self-determination be looked into.
[13] Reforming the Trans Act to allow adults to self-determine their gender was part of the Rinne and Marin Cabinets' government programmes.
[18] It was first debated by the Social Affairs and Health committee; while the bill was successfully sent to the plenary session, the Centre Party voted against it, prompting Prime Minister Sanna Marin to accuse them of violating the government's agreed-upon rules.