Constitutionalizing “Biological Truth”: Gender Politics and the 2025 Slovak Constitutional Reform

In September 2025, the Slovak Parliament approved a constitutional amendment that formally defines only two sexes—male and female—and anchors parental and family rights on strictly biological criteria. The amendment, passed with 90 votes, was justified as a defense of “traditional values,” “biological truth,” and the “sovereignty of Slovakia in cultural-ethical matters.” It also introduced related clauses prohibiting surrogacy and reinforcing the right of a child to know “a mother as a woman and a father as a man.” By doing so, Slovakia aligned itself with a broader Central European trend in which illiberal actors instrumentalize family and morality to reinforce political authority. This paper interprets the 2025 constitutional reform as a case of masculinized governance: a political project that legitimizes state power through paternal protectionism and moral regulation. Drawing on political sociology and critical studies of men and masculinities (e. g. Connell 2005; Guasti 2023; Ziemer 2024; Krizsán 2024), the analysis situates this reform within a broader Central European pattern of “governing through protection”—where gendered hierarchies are mobilized to reassert national sovereignty, cultural purity, and symbolic control over the body. Empirically, the paper examines parliamentary debates, media coverage, and political communication surrounding the 2025 legislative process. Using critical discourse and frame analysis, it identifies how tropes of protection, purity, and tradition function as legitimizing narratives that fuse gender order with nationhood. Sociologically, the paper reads the constitutional codification of gender binarism as a performative act of state identity construction and moral boundary-making. It contributes to debates on political masculinities, anti-gender mobilization, and democratic backsliding by showing how illiberal regimes use gender to transform uncertainty into moral certainty—transforming bodies, families, and knowledge into terrains of political control