By Elijah McKelvey
From the moment I walked into the classroom for our guest lecture, Jamie Rose immediately stood out to me. Was this in part due to her being an unfamiliar face? Obviously. But also, Rose stood out as her appearance and demeanor felt in a way familiar to me. She reminded me of many friends from home; a person that I could possibly befriend as well.
Rose had come to speak to our group about the topic of trans rights in the Czech Republic, a topic she herself as a trans woman and activist was intimately familiar with. Her lecture focused mostly on the struggle to obtain proper healthcare for gender transition as a transgender person living in the Czech Republic. To properly flesh out the current political struggle trans people are going through in the country, Rose began with a history of trans issues in the Czech Republic, and how the field has deep ties to sexology, a now dying field of medicine which has been mostly proven to be incorrect and outdated, and yet, transgender individuals are still forced to visit a doctor specialized in sexology in order to obtain a legal prescription for any sort of gender affirming care. The Czech Republic is also one of the last countries within the European Union to require that people go through sexual reassignment surgery (and therefore also sterilization) before they are legally allowed to change their gender marker on documents. As one can imagine these significant medical and legal barriers to transitioning create much distress in the Czech trans community. The barriers around obtaining legal permission to transition is especially problematic since while more and more sexologists retire with no young doctors taking up their vacant positions, simultaneously, there is an increase in people attempting to pursue medical transition, a problem which seems to be quite common across Europe, as similar situations were mentioned by our lectures on trans issues in both Germany and the Netherlands.
After her lecture, I was invited to grab lunch with Jamie, and my professor Iveta. Crammed together around a small table in the basement of a Nepali restaurant, the three of us conversed about the rapidly changing dynamics of Trans discourse across the world. We both reflected on our personal experiences within queer community, and about the generational knowledge gaps often found in our communities and the multiplicity of reasons which cause such divides. As lunch was wrapping up we found ourselves unable to end our conversation, trading trans media recommendations, anecdotes from archived pre internet era queer and trans zines, and magazines, and our own personal research, communal, and activists aspirations. The experience of being able to be around another trans person, especially one I learned I had so much in common with, was a deeply refreshing and rejuvenating experience, especially in Prague where the queer community felt far less visible compared to both Utrecht and Berlin. We continued to chat up until the moment Jamie’s tram had arrived, something we didn’t even realize happened until it was about to leave and our conversation was forced to end abruptly as Jamie made a mad dash to the tram. I left the interaction feeling immensely grateful for how even in a foreign country I was barely settled into, there was still room for such little acts of community.