Patreon-exclusive TWiG segment: "Last Month in the Czech Republic"

Hey everyone,

You'll see another newsletter from me later this week, but I wanted drop in with a special Patreon-only This Week in Gender segment for you. 

Friend of the show Em Solarova wrote and recorded a great 5-minute segment about what's been going on re: gender in the Czech Republic. (Spoiler: it's not great!) Read the essay below, or let Em read it to you via the audio above. 

By the way, I also really recommend Em's YouTube channel, Person Who, for more about being nonbinary and Czech.

ttys,
tuck

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This week in gender, we wanted to address a new Czech ID law that gives women more agency over gendering their last names, but keeps the gender marker on IDs with only binary gender options available. But while we were preparing it the Czech president has gone on record twice with shockingly bad and frankly dehumanizing comments about transgender people, so we felt like we couldn’t talk about the Czech Republic and *not* address that.

In a televised interview, President of the Czech Republic Miloš Zeman commended the new law in Hungary that bans depicting or promoting homosexuality to minors, saying that if he were younger, he’d organize a protest for heterosexual rights and would charter buses and trains to bring millions to Prague for this. However, he said, he can understand “homosexuals, lesbians, and so forth but not …..those transgenders.” He elaborated that he finds transgender people “utterly disgusting” and called gender affirming medical care a form or self harm.

A few days later, he doubled down on his claim, saying that he will be happy if his “criticism of transgender can deter at least one person from having such an operation.”

He went on to say that gender affirming surgery is worse than female genital mutilation and medical providers who perform it are breaking the Hippocratic Oath.

In light of these statements that make most online comment sections pale in comparison, ID reform feels very insignificant but it will have lasting material effects on how Czech people move through the world and it is less thoroughly bad, so here we go:

A new law has just passed the Czech Senate last week after being discussed and approved in the Lower House in early June. The Parliament decided NOT to drop gender markers from IDs or make them optional. Both options were on the table in the lower legislative house as they negotiated all the details for ID reform mandated by the EU in order to add biometrics. Ondřej Profant of the progressive Pirate party, who proposed these changes, argued that gender markers are not only unhelpful when it comes to identifying someone, but can in fact lead to confusion. He noted that IDs in Germany do not show this info and it’s being dropped in the Netherlands.

The comments uttered on the Parliament floor by elected officials were the usual unoriginal cesspool bio essentialist nonsense and as such utterly gross and beyond dehumanizing. Jaroslav Foldyna, a member of a right wing nationalist party blames too much prosperity for this suggestion, which he called cuckoo bullshit. “The taxpayer has other worries, he has other concerns. He doesn't care if he has a penis on his back or armpits or a vagina. Don't bother the Parliament with that.” (This flamboyant display of the generic masculine suits the legislator well.)

Dismissing the proposal as frivolous is notable as the IDs are already getting an overhaul, so it would have been quite simple to include this change, which is in fact, the case for two other changes not directly related to the biometrics mandate.

One of them is the omission of academic titles–not so much because they also don’t help identify someone (which they don’t), but because of the administrative burden they currently pose with over 300 recognized options and counting. The contrast here is almost as deeply comical as it is infuriating. Sadly, the Czech Republic recognizes only two genders, but trying to imagine the bureaucratic systems admin side of having an exhaustive list of gender options available is quite hilarious and would definitely make civil servants remember the days of 300 academic titles fondly.

Another change implemented by this new law is giving women the choice of opting out of the feminine version of their family name without having to jump through hoops. Czech family names exist in feminine and masculine forms, most commonly formed by adding the suffix -ová for women, such as Novák--Nováková. At birth, babies are given the version that matches their assigned gender and this then tells everyone else how to gender the person. Yes, it works well with the Czech syntax but also to reinforce the gender binary. Previously women who did not want the feminine version had to justify themselves to the authorities with recognized reasons such as being foreigners or living abroad.

Besides lofty ideas about self-determination and freedom, a big selling point of this change is lowering administrative burden as state officials will no longer have to check all those--sometimes dishonest--declarations about plans to move abroad. This is a welcome change, but it is not expected to be widely used, at least not at first. After all, cultural and legislative change are two different things. While this provision is made with cis women in mind, it is one tiny nice thing that assigned female at birth trans and nonbinary people will be able to take advantage of. As such, it is worth celebrating.

Now the law just needs to be signed by the president--yes, the very same one. If approved, new IDs are expected to be issued as early as this August.