Health Minister Zuzana Dolinková (source: TASR)
The Health Ministry has scrapped the standards of transgender healthcare as of Wednesday, April 3, citing problems occurring at the register offices.
“We fully identify with the expert content of these standards, which were prepared by a huge team of professionals with many years of experience in caring for transgender adults,” Health Minister Zuzana Dolinková (Hlas) said.
The European Psychiatric Association also evaluates these standards as highly professional, she added.
The 35-pages standards specify what processes must take place during diagnosis - for example, mandatory sessions with a psychotherapist or genetic and endocrinological examinations, the public broadcaster RTVS writes.
However, the minister argues that the standards, which she admits are a medical matter, have a significant ethical impact and affect all society. Dolinková then named administrative problems when a transgender person wants to change their name and birth number at the register office.
However, LGBT+ organisations are questioning the reasoning and stressing that the decision comes several days before the presidential election. Meanwhile, the Slovak Psychiatric Association is considering ending cooperation with the ministry. Its members worked on the standards.
Trade-off
Slovak National Party leader Andrej Danko officially endorsed Speaker of Parliament and Hlas party leader Peter Pellegrini, his coalition partner, in the presidential race on Wednesday, April 3, a day after the ministry announced its decision.
During the Wednesday press conference, he thanked Pellegrini for the “support with the gender topic”. Denník N also noticed that Danko granted an interview to the pro-Russian disinformation channel Infovojna on Wednesday morning. On the programme, he confirmed that Hlas agreed to cancel the standards in exchange for SNS’ support of Pellegrini.
“You may not have noticed, but Hlas gave up on gender ideology standards at Dolinková’s yesterday” the SNS leader said.
Last November, Dolinková also cancelled the gender transition guidelines in the “interest of the stability of the government coalition.” It was the SNS party that requested the scrapping of the three-page guidelines, which didn’t list surgery as the condition for gender transition. A medical opinion was supposed to be enough for changing a name at the register office.
Return to forced castration?
Inakosť, an LGBT+ organisation, has written in its statement that even without the standards, doctors should proceed and take into account the latest medical practices. In the current legal situation without detailed guidelines, the organisation added, state authorities must accept any medical certificate proving that a person is transgender when changing a birth number or changing their name.
“Unfortunately, it’s likely that the state authorities will begin to illegally require transgender people to undergo forced castration as a condition for changing their identity in documents.”
Psychiatrist Michal Patarák warned of the potentially catastrophic impacts of the ministry’s decision, telling Denník N that Slovakia is going back to the 1980s. He is one of those who worked on the cancelled standards.
“Can it get worse? Probably not,” he said, “Health care is no longer decided by experts, but by political will and unwillingness.”
Reacting to the alleged ethical problems, he added that an extensive ethical analysis had been worked out alongside the standards.
