The Constitutional Court (CC) has dismissed a motion to repeal parts of the Civil Code and other laws that make surgery a condition for official sex change. The change in the law was sought by a person who considered himself non-binary.
“The petitioner, born a man but considers himself neither male nor female, but a person of ‘neutral’ sex, sought a change of his birth number before the administrative authorities and the courts,” the Constitutional Court described the merits of the case.
He also proposed to delete the passage of the Civil Code according to which gender reassignment is a surgical procedure and the wording of the law on specific health services concerning gender reassignment of transsexual patients.
“In the Czech Republic, people are divided into women and men.”
The Constitutional Court did not deal with the conditions of gender reassignment. Still, it focused exclusively on the form of the birth number, “in relation to which the petitioner sought to abolish the increase of the double number expressing the month of birth for women by 50”.
“In the Czech Republic, people are divided into women and men. This understanding of the binary existence of the human species does not originate in the will of the state in the sense of the will of the public power, since the public power has merely accepted it as a social reality,” the court stated, and went on to say that if this division is constitutionally accepted, it seems logical “that the state records information about gender, i.e., whether a person is a man or a woman, in some form.”
That this is done in the form of a birth number is not considered by the judges to be a problem, and in its reasoning, the court recalled that the use of birth numbers is gradually being phased out.
“The purpose of the impugned provision governing women’s birth numbers is not to present the gender with which the bearer of the birth number identifies,” the court stressed.
We are not the justice of the culture wars.
“By contrast, the role of the Constitutional Court is not to protect or perhaps even enforce modern trends, nor is it its role to prevent such trends. The Constitutional Court is not and cannot be a judge entering the culture wars and actively determining the direction of social development in the Czech Republic,” the judges concluded.
The full court’s decision was not unanimous, with seven of the 15 judges dissenting.