Minister announces amendment to Penal Code regarding gender identity
Equality Minister Katarzyna Kotula has announced the expansion of protected personal characteristics in the Penal Code to include sexual orientation and gender identity. Many people in Poland still do not understand the latter concept.
On 25 May, Equality Minister Katarzyna Kotula provided an update on the progress of the amendment to the Penal Code that the Civic Coalition promised during the election campaign. The Standing Committee of the Council of Ministers has recommended that these changes be further reviewed at the government level. The minister stated that the draft would soon leave the Council of Ministers and be forwarded to the Sejm.
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Hate speech bill soon in the Sejm
"Yes to protection, no to violence, discrimination, and hate speech!" Kotula wrote on X.
The new legislation will broaden the range of protected characteristics used as the basis for prosecuting hate speech and insults. Currently, only national, ethnic, racial, religious, and irreligious affiliations have such status. The need for this amendment was extensively discussed in an interview with lawyer Dr Mateusz Wąsik.
As Minister Kotula announced, the amendment will also grant protected status to characteristics such as age, gender, disability, sexual orientation, and gender identity. This means that public insults targeting individuals based on their association with any of these groups will be of interest to law enforcement and prosecution.
What does the term "gender identity" mean?
The term "gender identity" sparked the most questions in response to Minister Kotula's post on X. Many comments explicitly asked, "What is gender identity?" Others spread misinformation, such as: "Pseudo-concepts like gender identity do not exist in scientific discourse. Sexual orientation is an objectively verifiable fact. 'Identity' is purely a manifestation of volition or an aberration requiring treatment," wrote one user.
However, the concepts of both identity and gender identity do exist in the scientific discourse. Widely cited in other scholarly works, Wood and Eagly define it as follows: "Because gender refers to the cultural meanings ascribed to male and female social categories in societies, psychologists have focused on whether individuals define themselves in terms of these cultural meanings. We use the term gender identity to refer to these masculine and feminine self-definitions."
Source: ‘Handbook of Individual Differences in Social Behavior’ edited by M.R. Leary and R.H.Hoyle
