A trans woman living in Italy wanted something most people never think about. She wanted her identity documents to match who she is. She is Bulgarian, and the papers she carried still recorded her as male, the name and gender she was assigned at birth. The mismatch followed her everywhere.
“She said she faced a lot of difficulties, especially when getting a job, but also even in crossing borders,” says Emilia Vrahimi, a researcher in the EUI Department of Law who analysed the case, known as Shipova, for the legal blog EU Law Live.
As Emilia explains, the obstacle was a gap in Bulgarian law. To change the gender on her documents, she first had to change it on her birth certificate, and Bulgaria had no proper legal route for doing so. Its constitutional court had ruled that gender in the civil registry could only mean biological gender. When she asked the courts to recognise her as a woman, they refused.
In March 2026, the Court of Justice decided she was right and Bulgaria was wrong. The absence of any way to change her gender on the registry, it held, was contrary to EU law. And it went even further. Even a national constitutional court, it said, does not get the final word where EU law is concerned.
“They asserted the supremacy of EU law,” Emilia explains. “Even if the Bulgarian constitutional court said that her gender could not be changed because the documents record biological gender, you have to disregard what it said, because EU law supersedes it.”
It is a result Emilia welcomes but she has a reservation in the route the Court chose. The applicant’s lawyer had argued the case on two grounds, discrimination and free movement, and the Court decided it almost entirely on free movement. That choice ties the right to the act of crossing a border, rather than to the person.
“For example, even if I’m trans and I live in Cyprus, and I want to travel to Italy just on vacation, and I present myself as a woman but my documents say male, I still face difficulties and discrimination at the border,” she says. The judgment hints this might one day be enough on its own. However, for now, recognition reaches those who move, and leaves a question hanging over everyone who does not.
There is something telling, in Emilia’s reading, about how queer people end up asserting their rights through a ruling that is primarily about movement.
“The EU was meant to be an economic union, and you can see that a lot in its law,” she says referring to mobility as a catalyst to such union. “A lot of queer people, when asserting their rights, need to rely on this market logic, which is strange in a way. It’s good, because it gives people avenues to assert their rights. But it’s a strange dimension of the EU as an organisation, that you have to rely on this economic perspective.”
That gap, between the rights the law sets out and the people they actually reach, is the question at the centre of her doctoral research. Shipova is one sharp instance of it. Her thesis is another, and she found it almost by accident.
“Somewhere hidden there was the EU Victims’ Rights Directive, and I thought, this is interesting, what is this?”, Emilia says, recalling a moment in which she scrolled an EU Commission webpage on the rights of LGBTIQ+ people. “I started looking into the Directive and I realised that not a lot of people were talking about it or writing about it. It was passed in 2012, and by that point was 2023 – almost ten years later. I thought: Why isn't anyone paying attention to this?”
The fact that she was drawn to a neglected directive rather than the well-trodden parts of law fits a pattern going back to her student days. “In the bachelor’s you have two formats of exam questions. One is a problem question, very practical, and you need to apply the law. I always disliked those,” she says. “I was always more inclined to the critical aspect of it.” What drew her to a doctorate was the chance to work on something barely studied that might still matter to people’s lives.
The Victims’ Rights Directive she stumbled onto is one of the few binding pieces of criminal justice law in the EU. It sets out victims' rights when they report a crime, such as the right to give a statement to an officer of the same sex; the right to not physically face the perpetrator in court; the right to be shielded from a second round of harm. Buried inside it is a category of victims with specific protection needs – precisely the heart of her research. When victims come forward, someone has to decide whether they qualify for that extra protection. What makes the category interesting, she says, is that the law refuses to spell out in advance who exactly receives the protections.
“Any one victim can be particularly vulnerable, and you need to individually assess this. It’s a case-by-case assessment,” she explains. The open design is deliberate, and in her reading it reflects something legal scholars have long argued: that vulnerability is not a fixed trait of certain groups. “You shouldn’t assume that just because a person is queer, or a woman, for example, they are particularly vulnerable.”
The trouble is that someone still has to make the call, and people with decision-making power have pre-conceived assumptions. “Who carries out these individual assessments? It’s your police officers, your judges, who internally might have their own perceptions,” Emilia notes. Here she reaches for an older idea, one criminologists have studied for decades and almost no one has carried into EU law: the ‘ideal victim’.
“Think about rape myths: The idea that what a woman was wearing plays a role in the fact that she was raped, whether she was walking alone at night, whether she was drunk, and they ascribe culpability to the victim,” she says. The ‘ideal victim’ is the flip side of that, the figure who reads as innocent, blameless, worthy of protection. “It has to do with how much culpability you can ascribe to the victim. Innocent versus culpable.”
The paradox is important for her work. A category built to sidestep these assumptions ends up leaning on them. “When you try to ascribe vulnerability, you fall back a bit into ideal victimhood,” she says. “The question then becomes: Are you vulnerable ‘enough’ to warrant further protection? And this often relies on the perceived legitimacy or illegitimacy of a certain victim.”
To see whether that holds up in practice, she turned to Cyprus, her home country and, as she puts it, a telling place to look. Her fieldwork follows three kinds of victims. Those who experience hate crimes targeting LGBTIQ+ and queer people, those who face domestic violence, and those who face sexual violence. Reports of all three have risen in Cyprus in recent years.
The clearest place the paradox shows is the one closest to her queer focus. The Cypriot domestic violence law, she points out, explicitly refers to a man and a woman.
“You have queer couples that have no recourse, and they’re not viewed as vulnerable because they’re queer. So, you again fall into this trap of idealising who is vulnerable,” she says. The individual assessment, by contrast, tends to be reached readily in one kind of case. “What I noticed in Cyprus is that they mostly carry out individual assessments for women who have experienced domestic violence. There’s a big push to protect these women.” A queer victim of the same violence may never be seen as vulnerable at all.
The distance between the law’s promise and a person’s experience can be heard in a single exchange. Emilia recounts a story of a woman who went to report that her partner had slapped her.
“The police officer said something like, but aren’t you sure it was one of those ‘normal’ slaps? And I was like, what’s a normal slap? What does that even mean?”
This is the texture of what she studies. The law sets out rights meant to stop precisely this kind of encounter, but whether they reach people, she argues, depends on who is standing on the other side of the desk.
What makes work like hers feel urgent, in her view, is the current world we are living in. Across Europe, including in Cyprus, she sees pressure on queer rights rising alongside the far right. In moments like this, the European courts can feel like one of the few places left to turn. She thinks of something a student said during a guest lecture she gave at the University of Cyprus, where she taught the Shipova case.
“A student said these cases show that it’s about recognising that these people also exist,” she recalls. “They also live in this society. They struggle, they have certain rights, and it’s important that they are equal to all other people.”
Emilia has been at the EUI since 2024, and when asked about her experience, she speaks about 'freedom': to shape her own project, to cross from law into sociology and critical theory, to engage with feminist and queer scholarship she had not had room for before. This is a freedom she measures against what she has seen elsewhere.
“I never feared about my research, or what I’m doing. But from colleagues who work in the US, their reality is very different,” she says. “I’m genuinely very glad I have the chance to live in a very different reality. To research what I think is important without fearing it’s going to be looked down upon.”
That sense of where Europe stands, and what it is willing to defend, is where the two halves of her research finally meet. Whether the subject is a crime victim in Cyprus or a trans citizen at a border, the same question keeps surfacing. Not only what EU law permits, but what it stands for. On that note, she says she believes the Court and the Commission have started to answer.
She points to Hungary. When the country moved to restrict how queer lives could be spoken about in front of children, justifying it as the protection of minors, the European Commission took it to court. What struck Emilia was the ground the Commission chose to fight on: rather than a narrow technical provision, it was Article 2 of the Treaty, the article that sets out the Union’s founding values.
It was, she says, more than a legal argument.
“They really made a statement, even a political statement, that queer people and queer rights are part of EU values, and you cannot undermine them for whatever reason.”
Emilia Vrahimi is a researcher in the EUI Department of Law. Her thesis, “How Perceptions Shape Reality: Victims’ Rights in Cyprus under the EU Victims’ Rights Directive”, is supervised by Gráinne de Búrca. Her commentary on the Shipova judgment was published in EU Law Live in March 2026.
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