Do Czech liberal political parties that are currently part of the government coalition claim that there are "100 sexes?" No, that's not true: TOP09 and STAN parties support gender equality, while the Czech Pirate Party, the most progressive junior member of the government coalition, supports LGBT+ rights, including same-sex marriages, and free determination of gender, but the parties have never claimed that there are 100 sexes.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) published on TikTok on November 18, 2023, with the caption in Czech, translated by Lead Stories staff to English: "Supposedly, there are 100 sexes?".
The person speaking in the video is Tomio Okamura, the leader of the populist opposition party Freedom and Direct Democracy. He says in Czech, translated to English by Lead Stories:
[...] but the liberal current says that we are to mix with everyone in the world, they promote migraton, 100 sexes... Look at the Pirates and TOP09, they promote gender policies and also STAN does that.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed Nov 22 09:12:18 2023 UTC)
None of the representatives of the Czech Pirate party have ever said that there are "100 sexes," other than biological male and female, or in rare cases hermaphrodite, Pirate lawmaker Klara Kocmanova, who focuses on gender issues, wrote to Lead Stories in an e-mail on November 24, 2023. "It is not true that we promote hundreds of sexes," Kocmanova wrote. "We advocate guaranteeing equal rights, opportunities, freedoms, and responsibilities for all."
The narrative of liberals promoting "dozens of sexes," which has been circulating for some time, confuses the terms "sex" and "gender." While the English word "gender" has become part of the professional vocabulary, neither Czech nor Slovak has an equivalent for it, so the word "pohlaví" is often used interchangeably for both. While gender is a social construct that has more to do with cultural stereotypes that assign certain jobs, qualities, or roles to men or women, the term sex refers to the biological characteristics of the two, Kocmanova wrote.
More detailed definitions of both terms can be found here on the Council of Europe website. It is also noted that some languages do not have a specific term for "gender."
The Czech Pirate Party, the most liberal and progressive party in the government, supports LGBT+ rights, including the introduction of same-sex marriage. The party´s platform underlines that the Pirates stand for the free self-determination of gender and sexual identity, support international decriminalization of homosexuality and want to abolish the obligation to indicate gender in official documents.
There are no relevant results when searching on Google for statements from the two other government coalition parties that would corroborate the TikTok's claim: A Google search, performed on November 23, 2023, with terms including TOP09 (archived here) or STAN (archived here) and "100 sexes" yielded no relevant results. Like the Pirate Party, representatives of the two other government coalition junior members voiced support for introducing same-sex marriages into the civil code during the debate in parliament in May 2023, iDnes reported.
The claim that liberal parties try to introduce "tens of sexes" has already been part of the 2023 election campaign in neighboring Slovakia. Representatives of the Progresivne Slovensko party, which emphasizes LGBT+ rights were mocked by their political opponents for being incapable of governing the state because they were unable to recognize that there are two sexes, male and female.
