The number of people who request a gender change because they do not identify with their own sexual identity has increased by 315 percent over the past nine years. While in 2013 the special commission of the Ministry of Health of the Czech Republic approved 47 applications for gender reassignment, in 2021 there were already 195. In the period from 2013 to 2021, 1,095 people in the Czech Republic applied for the approval of surgical procedures related to gender reassignment. In addition, since 2017, there has been a significant increase in the number of teenage biological girls who suffer from a mismatch with the gender they were born into. Experts from the VFN Institute of Sexology and the 1st Faculty of Medicine of the UK help them on a long and challenging journey that can not only change their gender, but above all allow them to live in the desired physical and psychological identity, which they have often dreamed of since preschool age.

"We don't know why a person feels uncomfortable in the body he was born into. We don't know the causes of these disorders, and that's why we can't even solve them causally. We cannot change the software, i.e. what our patients have in their heads, what they feel they are, as far as possible we at least try to change the hardware, i.e. their body. Through psychological and psychiatric intervention, hormonal treatment, surgery, subsequent psychological therapy so that they come as close as possible to the gender they feel they are, even in appearance." explains prof. PhDr. Petr Weiss, clinical psychologist of the VFN Institute of Sexology and the 1st Faculty of Medicine, UK.

East versus West

Transgender issues, i.e. the situation where a person's psychological identity is at odds with their biological body, have been dealt with by experts from the Institute of Sexology of the VFN and the 1st Faculty of Medicine of the UK since the 1960s. In our history, the need to transform women into men has always prevailed, and that is about three times more than the opposite transformations. Interestingly, in democratic countries to the west of our borders, historically, it has always been the other way around: requests to change biological men into women prevailed.  "I think this is historically determined by the political-sociological position and the perception of the female and male role in a given society," Professor Petr Weiss comments.

Learn more in the attached press release.