Europe gender news: Slovakia's next

Plus: transing the Holocaust, Dutch debate delayed, and more transactivists join EU upper management

Transgender German Green MP Tessa Ganserer got a tattoo of a woman touching her genitals. Image screenshot from Ganserer’s Instagram account.

Slovak expert group narrowly approves self-ID LITE, all that waits is the minister’s signature

Slovakia has a “sterilisation requirement” (transactivists’ words), meaning citizens can only change their sex on their legal documents if their “reproductive functions have been definitely eliminated”. This is still the case in a number of countries in Europe.

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess this practice stemmed from a desire to protect women and children, a legacy of the time when people could say publicly that a man in a dress is still a man, with the same (or more) likelihood of depravity as a man wearing leg-covering clothing.

But anyway, all that looks like it’s about to change. And it hasn’t had to take the usual torturous route (see Finland, Spain, and currently the Netherlands). A ministerial expert group recently voted 12-10 to allow men and women to access the process with just a psychiatric diagnosis, which is short of the wild-west of self-ID but much more accessible than what was on offer before.

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