A Czech court has refused a demand by a non-binary person who was born a man but considers himself to be gender-neutral to change his national identity number to a “neutral” or “female” form.
The complainant sought a change of birth number to ‘neutral’ because he does not consider himself a man and thus does not want a birth number in the form men have in the Czech Republic, despite a Czech national identity number having no relevance to a person’s gender.
The courts did not comply with the request, and a complaint filed by the individual was rejected by the Constitutional Court of the Czech Republic (ÚS).
“The complainant’s birth number expresses his date of birth. It also contains four essentially random digits. Thus, there is nothing in his birth number that explicitly states or perhaps emphasizes that a complainant is a man,” the constitutional judges held.
ÚS stated that Czech society generally accepts the issue of human existence and gender as binary. The court added that if the so-called neutral gender term had been introduced and assigned to the complainant, nothing would have changed in his birth number.
“It would continue to be the case that the applicant a) is not a woman and b) does not have a female birth number. The connection of the complainant’s birth number with the male sex, which the complainant seeks to eliminate, is therefore given by the binary understanding of gender in the Czech Republic, meaning something that does not belong to the Constitutional Court,” ÚS added.
According to the court, the constitutional order does not even imply the right for a birth number to record a person’s sex or gender identity.
The constitutional judges also rejected the complainant’s other arguments. They pointed to the illogical claim that his birth number had a so-called female form when his female gender was not recorded after birth, and the concerned person did not consider himself a woman.
