To remove a timezone (tzinfo) from a datetime object:

# dt_tz is a datetime.datetime object
dt = dt_tz.replace(tzinfo=None)

If you are using a library like arrow, then you can remove timezone by simply converting an arrow object to to a datetime object, then doing the same thing as the example above.

# <Arrow [2014-10-09T10:56:09.347444-07:00]>
arrowObj = arrow.get('2014-10-09T10:56:09.347444-07:00')

# datetime.datetime(2014, 10, 9, 10, 56, 9, 347444, tzinfo=tzoffset(None, -25200))
tmpDatetime = arrowObj.datetime

# datetime.datetime(2014, 10, 9, 10, 56, 9, 347444)
tmpDatetime = tmpDatetime.replace(tzinfo=None)

Why would you do this? One example is that mysql does not support timezones with its DATETIME type. So using ORM's like sqlalchemy will simply remove the timezone when you give it a datetime.datetime object to insert into the database. The solution is to convert your datetime.datetime object to UTC (so everything in your database is UTC since it can't specify timezone) then either insert it into the database (where the timezone is removed anyway) or remove it yourself. Also note that you cannot compare datetime.datetime objects where one is timezone aware and another is timezone naive.

##############################################################################
# MySQL example! where MySQL doesn't support timezones with its DATETIME type!
##############################################################################

arrowObj = arrow.get('2014-10-09T10:56:09.347444-07:00')

arrowDt = arrowObj.to("utc").datetime

# inserts datetime.datetime(2014, 10, 9, 17, 56, 9, 347444, tzinfo=tzutc())
insertIntoMysqlDatabase(arrowDt)

# returns datetime.datetime(2014, 10, 9, 17, 56, 9, 347444)
dbDatetimeNoTz = getFromMysqlDatabase()

# cannot compare timzeone aware and timezone naive
dbDatetimeNoTz == arrowDt # False, or TypeError on python versions before 3.3

# compare datetimes that are both aware or both naive work however
dbDatetimeNoTz == arrowDt.replace(tzinfo=None) # True

Note that for Python 3.2 onwards, the datetime module contains datetime.timezone. The documentation for datetime.utcnow() says:

An aware current UTC datetime can be obtained by calling datetime.now(timezone.utc).

So, datetime.utcnow() doesn't set tzinfo to indicate that it is UTC, but datetime.now(datetime.timezone.utc) does return UTC time with tzinfo set.

So you can do:

>>> import datetime
>>> datetime.datetime.now(datetime.timezone.utc)
datetime.datetime(2014, 7, 10, 2, 43, 55, 230107, tzinfo=datetime.timezone.utc)

Since Python 3.11, there also exists datetime.UTC which is equivalent to datetime.timezone.utc. So you can also do datetime.datetime.now(datetime.UTC).