Slovakia is set to implement a law that will stop men from legally becoming women, and vice versa

[Needanewnamebeingwatched]

Slovakia is set to implement a law that will stop men from legally becoming women, and vice versa. The new law will stipulate that only a person's biological sex will determine whether they are legally a man or a woman

https://twitter.com/ripx4nutmeg/status/1648245751254745088?s=20
Interesting development ...

That's awesome. Slovakia is a beautiful country.

That's excellent news. Very sensible from Slovakia. They are quite right to keep gender separate from sex.

I'll just leave this link here as it would be good for the UK too: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/petitions_noticeboard/4688427-repeal-the-gra

I’d be interested to hear arguments against this from TRAs, other than it will give trans identified people sad feelz.

I wish Ireland could learn from them. Fucking self ID has gone mad over here.

Its good news, I wish the UK would take note.

Born Sex is the base, and should be on all documentation, they if you wish to identify in a different way, you can have a section which states, "I identify as....." or N/A

Pity we have not done that in the UK. I'll sign your petition.

Is Slovenia in the EU? I thought it was ECHR law to let people change legal sex?

I would hope for a world where nobody feels the need to officially falsify their sex any more, where birth certificates state name, sex registered at birth, place and date of birth, and important adults at time of birth, with each of those adults' actual roles specifically delineated, whether that's provision of whole egg or sperm, maybe mitochondrial donation if that turns out to be an important thing, birth mother/gestational carrier/whatever you'd call the actual person who carried and gave birth to the child, whether they have parental responsibility, and maybe (if you want to stick with the tradition) occupation. It would be less simple than Father and Mother, or Parent 1 and Parent 2, or whatever it is at the moment, but a lot more transparent, especially for complex situations.

Yes, you could end up with 6 "parents" listed — mitochondrial donor, female gamete supplier, male gamete supplier, gestational carrier, parental responsibility holder 1 and parental responsibility holder 2 — but you'd know what's what. And most babies would still have something like Parent 1 (whole egg, birth mum, PR), Parent 2: (sperm, PR).

Those things would be unchangeable, but there would be a space for addenda if the person turned out to have a DSD that meant their sex was incorrectly recorded, or maybe if there was a change to the people with parental responsibility, or a genetic test showed a different father to the one assumed, or someone was adopted, or whatever.

Everybody deserves an accurate, unexpurgated record of the important facts of their origins, birth, and adults associated with them.

If sex and gender identity are two different things, and if we can get to a world where there's no stigma or shame or discrimination associated with being transgender, then there should be no issue with being a transman having a birth certificate accurately showing that that person was identified and registered as a female baby. I'm very unhappy with the idea that a historical legal document can be silently retrospectively altered, and it shouldn't be necessary.

The only consideration that concerns me is the protection of trans people needing to travel to countries where they need to go "stealth" or risk discrimination, but almost nothing besides the birth certificate actually needs to state either sex or gender identity — UK passports don't, IIRC. I guess for working abroad, you would need a birth certificate…? I don't know if I would be happy to endorse a system of falsifying birth certificates specifically to fool foreign countries with discriminatory laws against trans people, though.

Based Slovakia.

As long as they don't stop men from wearing skirts and dresses and women from wearing trousers, oh well, I can't really disagree...

The only consideration that concerns me is the protection of trans people needing to travel to countries where they need to go "stealth" or risk discrimination, but almost nothing besides the birth certificate actually needs to state either sex or gender identity — UK passports don't, IIRC.

Passports do have an M/F marker - it’s important for things like border control (which guard searches you, which immigration holding cell you are detained in) but obvs the ability to have it changed to the opposite sex makes it less useful than it’s supposed to be.

You could always make the bio sex bit only readable under a particular light source/specialist scanning equipment which would enable privacy when showing a passport to a bartender for proof of age but allow law enforcement to easily obtain biological facts when necessary.

Driving licenses have a sex marker in the number code, but it’s not recognisable to most normies!

?

The campaign to repeal the UK GRA makes me really nervous. Labour are likely to get in at the next GE, and will then use the campaign as cover to repeal the current GRA and replace it with something worse. "What are you complaining about, Women? This is what you said you wanted."

The GRA is a shite piece of law, but it's better than any likely alternative under Labour or (shudder) a Labour-Libdem-Green alliance, if a hung parliament.

Fair enough Hyena; my memory was wrong — I think I was thinking of my driving licence, which as you say doesn't have an obvious sex marker. It's obviously been too long since I went on holiday

As you say, it can occasionally be important what sex somebody is, but I think we have a longstanding cultural habit of also assuming it's important in situations where it isn't. Which makes it difficult when trying to change the way we do things, because an all-or-nothing "sex never really matters (so you should be able to pick which category you want)" stance is a lot simpler to argue and campaign for than a complex "sex doesn't matter except when it does and then it really does" position.

I think there are very few documents that really need to contain sex, but part of the problem is that, with no single official ID card system, UK people need to be able to use other things like their driving licences as ID, so even though there's probably no good reason for a driving licence to encode the holder's sex, it may be the only ID someone can present, so needs to have sex for the important reasons you mention like being searched or detained.

Well done, Slovakia. I had a quick check of the political background: majority conservative, but in coalition with the liberals and the populist far-right, IIRC.

When is the penny going to drop with the left that supporting GI and transgenderism drives voters to the right?

I can't think of a single good reason why how girly someone feels they are should be recognised in law.

Is there anything similar to making being transgender a "protected characteristic" even if it falls short of allowing you to change your legal sex?
As much as I find AGPs abhorrent, I don't think a bloke in a skirt and makeup deserves harassment/aggro in, say, a men's public toilet. Or is it covered by general public order law?

Slovakia knew who a woman was when they were sterilizing Roma women.

https://amp.dw.com/en/slovakia-issues-apology-for-forced-sterilizations-of-roma-women/a-59926198

Do you mean in Slovakia? In the UK it's covered in the Equality Act under gender reassignment (tho I'd argue it might need updating or at least looking at again, because it was written to reflect a different set of social circumstances).

@JarByTheDoor , I mean in Slovakia.

I guessed you probably did but wasn't sure 😅

It's heartwarming to know there is at least some sanity left in the world, beautiful Slovakia

I guess for me it depends why they're doing it. I couldn't celebrate living somewhere that rolled back being able to change your sex marker, if doing that was just part of a movement towards enforcing stereotyped sex roles, removing women's rights, denying legal protections against discrimination and harassment to people who consider themselves transgender, or broader conservative changes like anti-homosexual or other discriminatory laws.

In other words, why do the people changing the law want certainty on who's male and who's female, and to emphasise that you can't change that?

Is it because they want law and statistics to reflect reality, and to ensure that sex-based protections and rights are upheld (and, additionally, trans people's rights, since "trans" ceases to have meaning if people don't have an underlying immutable sex)?

Or is it because they think people belong in nice neat gendered boxes, assigned on the basis of their sex, which dictate what kinds of jobs they should do, what role they should have in the household, what part they should play in public life, and whether they should be allowed control over their reproductive system, and that people shouldn't be allowed any route out of those boxes? That it's abhorrent that someone with the good luck to be a man should want to degrade themselves by becoming a woman, or ludicrous that someone born female would have the temerity to pretend that they're a man?

I guess this is what Pluvia was getting at by checking out the political environment there.

I suppose you could argue that a good change is a good change regardless of the political impetus behind it, and that if we get what we want because our opponents (TRAs) drive some of our enemies (sexist, homophobic conservatives and traditionalists) to back the thing we want, and many formerly neutral people to start backing our enemies because our opponents are so extreme, we can take the good and fight the rest later, but it's a risky game to play. The traditionalists will hurt us, and they'll also cause harm to our political opponents on this issue, harm that we don't want and they don't (IMO) deserve.

Slang. If someone or something is 'based', they are sticking to their principles without being swayed by social pressure or silly political fads. They are ruthlessly recognising reality.

e.g. "I just came out as cakegender but my mum laughed at me and refused to use my neopronouns!"

"Huh. Based mum."

@JarByTheDoor , that was kind of my concern. We don't want to replace one form of gender stereotype law making with another.
Before I celebrate what looks, on the face of it, a thing we all want, I need to be sure it's not a smokescreen for anti-LGB legislation, anti-choice legislation and some kind of batshit introduction for enforced gender conformity.
I don't know enough about Slovakia and, perhaps unfairly, worry that it is taking its cue from Viktor Orban or some of the stuff happening in Poland.

This is what annoys me about the liberal left being too fearful of extremists within its ranks to actually talk about this and work it out better. No Debate really did stultify liberal/left thinking. And right wing misogynistic, homophobic scumbags think theirs is the voice we want to hear.