Compulsory divorce for trans people is abolished
Before "marriage for all": in 2009 a trans woman in Germany was allowed to stay married instead of having to divorce.
On 23 July 2009, a change in the law came into force in Germany that for the first time allowed married trans people to continue their marriage, even though this meant that two people of the same legal sex remained married. It had been preceded by a decision of the Federal Constitutional Court of 27 May 2008: under the Transsexuals Act then in force, a person's gender marker could only be officially changed if they were not married. Anyone who, after decades of marriage, underwent gender-affirming surgery in order to be legally recognised in their gender had to divorce first, regardless of whether the relationship was intact.
The specific case concerned a Berliner aged almost 80 who had been married for 56 years. She had used a female first name since 2001 and had undergone gender-affirming surgery in 2002. She and her wife wanted to stay together without either of them having to feign a broken marriage in court just to make the divorce formally possible. The Federal Constitutional Court declared compulsory divorce unconstitutional and gave the legislature until 1 August 2009 to change the rule.
The Bundestag then deleted the relevant passage from Section 8 of the Transsexuals Act. The amendment was promulgated in the Federal Law Gazette on 22 July 2009 and, as provided for in the law, came into force a day later. For the first time, Germany thus had a state-recognised marriage between two people of the same legal sex, eight years before "marriage for all" enabled same-sex couples in general to marry. In the 2017 bill on "marriage for all", the legislature later referred explicitly to this precedent as evidence that the legal understanding of marriage in Germany had already changed.