Surgery will no longer be a condition for official sex change. The current legislation did not stand up to the Constitutional Court (ÚS), which annulled two disputed provisions with effect from mid-2025. The demand for surgery and castration due to a “status” change of sex is contrary to human dignity, the ÚS said. He considered the current state to be unsustainable, and drew attention to the long-term inaction of politicians. Now they have to discuss and accept the new arrangement. Until then, the current conditions apply, as the enforceability of Tuesday’s award is postponed.
The SC recognized that the current regulation can pursue a legitimate goal, i.e. ensuring legal certainty and stability. “According to the ÚS, however, the legal requirements for the surgical transformation of the genitals and the disabling of the reproductive function are in direct conflict with the basic right of trans people to protect their bodily integrity and personal autonomy, primarily because they violate their human dignity,” reads the verdict of reporter judge Jaromír Jirsa.
A person who is officially registered as a woman, seeks to change gender, but does not intend to undergo surgery, contacted the ÚS, which is why he was unsuccessful in the matriculation and in the administrative courts. One of the three-member senates of the ÚS forwarded his initiative to the plenary session, i.e. the body of all constitutional judges. The plenum agreed with him by a significant majority. Different opinions were expressed by two judges out of 15, namely Josef Fiala and Milan Hulmák.
The writer of the draft welcomed Tuesday’s finding as hope for others as well. “The positive decision of the court could perhaps be a hope for those who are not sure whether they want castration, or do not want it or cannot undergo it. That the situation is moving somewhere and they could hopefully also change the documents in the foreseeable future without the need for the said discriminatory conditions,” he said in a press release.
About ten years ago, he realized that he did not want castration and hoped that the situation could change. “That didn’t happen, and in the meantime countries on the map of Europe were gradually increasing that removed this condition. I didn’t particularly want to go to court, but it was an opportunity to contribute to the change and experience it. It’s unpleasant for me to constantly solve some situations with documents and having to talk to a stranger, for example, just to open a bank account, because that person will either notice that I am listed as a woman or that I have a five in my birth number, which women have after all,” he said.
From the Civil Code, the ÚS deleted the sentence that “the change of a person’s sex occurs through a surgical procedure with the simultaneous inability of the reproductive function and transformation of the sexual organs”. In the law on specific health services, he canceled the sentence according to which “for the purposes of this law, the change of sex of transsexual patients means the performance of medical procedures, the purpose of which is to perform a change of sex by surgical intervention while at the same time impeding the reproductive function”. He did not comply with the rest of the proposal.
“The task of the ÚS is, among other things, to ‘catalyze’ the democratic discussion in situations where it has not yet taken place or when it has been dysfunctional for a long time. This is exactly what the ÚS is doing in the case currently under discussion, giving the legislator enough space for more than a year to adjust the conditions of gender change in the Czech Republic to a dignified and in a constitutionally compliant manner,” Jirsa said in the ruling. According to the ÚS, politicians have, using the available knowledge of science, solved a sensitive social problem related to the gender change of trans people at the legislative level.
Tags: Gender change Czech Republic surgery Constitutional Court decided
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