The Czech Republic is one of the few European Union countries to continue to require a sterilisation procedure before a trans person can legally change their gender.
This, despite the European Court of Human Rights officially declaring such state-imposed requirements to be a form torture.
Leaders of the country were largely undisturbed by this comment, believing that legalising registered partnerships – as well as an interrupted attempt to legalise same-sex marriage – were more important to the LGBT community.
But with more and more European countries lifting the sterilisation requirement over the years, the Czech Republic remains the westernmost EU member state to still officially demand the procedure.
A bill has now been proposed by the Ministry of Justice to change this, despite the government’s strong conservative leanings. The draft still needs to be passed by both houses of parliament and be signed by the president before it can be enforced.
“As far as I was told by insiders, there is support for this change in this government,” said Lenka Králová, an activist who also hosts a YouTube program on trans issues.
The sterilisation procedure requires the total surgical removal of sexual glands as a precondition for the legal change of one’s sex in personal documents.
Králová said that lawmakers are unlikely to have proposed this bill if it had not been “discussed first with the government’s coalition partners.”
