On Thursday, Family Minister Lisa Paus (Greens) and Justice Minister Marco Buschmann (FDP) presented the cornerstone of the planned law on self-determination at a federal press conference (queer.de reported). Although no new information appeared at the meeting, the angry reactions of the right and extreme right were not long in coming.
Demands came from the Union to maintain the obligation to carry out an assessment in order to “objectively” check whether transgenderism or intersex really exists – only reinforced by the AfD, which denies this very possibility.
assessment obligation
The spokeswoman for family policy of the union faction Silvia Brecher (CDU) told the German newsroom that transgender and intersexuality can be “determined using objective criteria”. Especially when it comes to minors, “a supportive psychological assessment would be absolutely necessary from the Union’s point of view,” Brecher tried, as usual, to play “real” and “fake” transgender people against each other. The Federal Constitutional Court, for example, denied precisely this objectivity in its revolutionary ruling from 2017.
AfD deputy federal spokesman Stephan Brandner, who is close to the nationalist “wing” of the party, called the project “an expression of open denial of reality.” Biology, which is not about traffic light plans at all, “cannot simply be ignored by law” and is also “not a majority issue”.
Human gender is now “completely arbitrary” and, like the name, “can be changed at any time”. It has nothing to do with freedom. But the law does not aim to introduce at all the possibility of separating the official gender registration from biological circumstances. It only changes and simplifies the procedure that has been open since 1981.
Creation, normality and facts in distress
Although the planned law almost exclusively regulates the issue of passport gender and officially registered name, and the ministers have abandoned earlier, more far-reaching ambitions, “FAZ” commentator Reinhard Müller sees “fingers” on “creation”. He denounces the reform as a “natural disaster” in which sex is ordered “à la carte” – “more precisely: all you can eat”.
Alleged gender-specific “duties” could now be avoided “at will” and alleged “advantages” for women were open to all. Müller does not discuss what those duties or benefits should be. “Suddenly” in the future you will be able to be “a national player, even a world champion”. But even though legal and hormonal gender changes have been possible for decades, world champions have not yet become famous.
In particular, the right-wing magazine “Cicero” is upset by the delicate attempts of FDP Justice Minister Marc Buschmann to emphasize the normality of transgender people at a federal press conference. Volker Resing, head of the department for the Berlin Republic, calls it “the normalization of the abnormal”.
According to Resing, “more differentiation” is needed between pathologization, which has long ceased to correspond to the scientific state of the art, and “ideologically motivated ‘normalization’.” This is also necessary for those who are “affected”, because they know that “sex change”, “sex change”, “is not harmless”. The commentator is silent in the text in order to differentiate the middle course. Only the title of the article suggests it: “abnormal”.
Any young person aged 14, if they still misunderstand transgenderism, should “in the future be able to choose their gender identity independently of biological circumstances”. The adaptation of officially recorded gender registration to an identity that is not freely selected, instead of biological gender markers, has been a legal reality for 41 years. This even applies to youth under the age of 14.
And the women’s magazine “Emma” accuses the ministers of “incredible ignorance of important facts”, only to immediately claim: “Biological sex as a category will therefore be abolished”. In the future, “‘perceived gender’ will determine whether someone is officially female or male all the way up to the birth certificate.” “Emma” author Chantal Louis doesn’t take facts so seriously. Changing gender registration should, she writes, “already be possible for children”, in their case by their parents. Change the current status quo? none.
Queer officer Sven Lehmann is also said to have kept his word. Even before the summer break, there is a draft law on self-determination. The projects presented on Thursday are not draft laws at all, but rather a political compromise between the ministries involved.
Not even the “Ukrainian war, galloping inflation and the threat of energy shortages,” Louis complains about disappointed hopes in the crisis, have changed anything in the federal government’s priorities. The law is apparently delayed compared to earlier announcements, probably due to the war and its consequences.
Louis celebrates that a “critical debate” to which “EMMA has also contributed over the past year and a half” has prevented the right to hormone treatment and surgery being dropped from standard care. At least there might be some truth to that.
Beatrix von Storch (AfD) has already reacted to the self-determination law and called it “the first ideological traffic light project that changes society” (queer.de reported).
With AFP material.
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