The finding of the Constitutional Court from this morning can be described as groundbreaking. The judges overturned the local regulation of the law stating that castration and transformation of the genitals is required for an official sex change, thus cutting open an issue that the same court, but with a different composition, did not dare to deal with until two years ago.
The change in approach at the transformed Constitutional Court is crystal clear because the dispute itself has not changed. Another citizen, identified to the public by the initials GN, appealed to the Constitutional Court after failure in the lower courts. This is a person who was born as a woman, but feels that he is a man, looks like that and manifests himself that way in public and when dealing with authorities and institutions.
In the latter, however, the contradiction between self-presentation and the record in the documents brought him practical as well as psychological difficulties in the need to constantly explain why he presents himself as a man when he is listed as a woman on his identity card. However, he did not want to undergo castration as a condition for a change in official documents. Before the court, his lawyer argued that it was discrimination and that the condition was contrary to human dignity, in other words, the right not to be forced to undergo unnecessary and irreversible consequences causing pain.
Based on this very argument, most European countries have retreated from surgery in recent years. The German Federal Constitutional Court declared this requirement unconstitutional already in 2011. The Strasbourg European Court of Human Rights also stated that the surgical procedure violates human rights in 2017. And now the Czech Constitutional Court has finally joined it.