MADRID - The Spanish government on Thursday approved a law allowing people aged 16 and older to change their legally registered gender without undergoing psychological and medical evaluations to show gender dysphoria, becoming one of the few countries to allow such gender change by self-declaration.

Spain’s Equality Minister Irene Montero said on the Parliament floor on Thursday that the new law recognised transgender people’s right to free determination and prevented being transgender from being treated as a pathology.

“Trans people are not ill people,” she said. “They are people, full stop.”

Spain is among the first countries to pass such a law, following countries like Denmark and Argentina. Similar proposals have divided public opinion elsewhere.

In January, Britain’s government overruled Scotland’s Parliament for the first time, blocking legislation that would have allowed transgender people to have the gender with which they identify legally recognised by making a declaration.

The plan would have removed a requirement for “evidence of a diagnosis of gender dysphoria”.

The gender law has created friction between the right and the left but also within the Socialist Party, Spain’s biggest liberal party.

Mr Victor Gutierrez, the LGBT secretary of the Socialist Party, praised it, writing on Twitter that it was a “law that improves the life of millions of people”.

But Ms Carmen Calvo, a prominent Socialist politician and the former deputy prime minister, abstained from voting on the law, and a Socialist senator said on Twitter that lawmakers should reject it in the name of feminism and socialism.

But for transgender rights activists, it was a belated victory.

“The Calvary is over,” transgender rights activist Mar Cambrolle Jurado wrote on Twitter. “Today is a historic day for trans people.”

Under the new law, children between 14 and 16 will be able to legally change their gender in the civil registry if they are accompanied by their parents or a legal guardian, and those between 12 and 14 will need a judge’s authorisation.

After the initial request for a legal gender change, the applicant will need to ratify their decision within three months.

The law also banned conversion therapies intended to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. NYTIMES