In a huge win for gender equality and gender non-conforming people, women in the Czech Republic will no longer be legally required to add the suffix -ova to they last names from January 2022.

It’s not uncommon in the Czech media even for foreign names to appear in the same way such as ‘Britney Spearsova’ or ‘Angela Merkelova’ denoting that they are women. 

Of course there has has been an outcry by conservatives who claimed that the bill is an assault in the culture wars and that the change will bring forth grammatical and social chaos seeing as ‘ova’ simply denotes ‘femininity’.

Government commissioner for human rights Helena Valkova pointed out, however, that this had only been part of the law since 1945 and most parents added it to the birth certificate when registering a baby girl or when they took a man’s name in marriage. 

Some linguists also claimed that due to the workings of the Czech language there is often no other way to tell a subject’s gender. Welcome to the rest of the world we say, your gender isn’t denoted by your name and we were somewhat shocked to learn that this was even a law in the first place.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lzAshQYXVg