Reality Unravels: Germany's New Self-Id
By David Allison
I feared the worst, but I hadn’t anticipated the turn events would take. I was attending a one-day training course for volunteers working in youth project in my hometown in southern Germany. The professional trainers from the state-funded regional social work association beamed as they greeted a mixed bunch of ten volunteers and introduced themselves with their pronouns. They invited us to do the same. Some of the baffled volunteers complied, others were hesitant, I refused. The rest of the four-hour training course focused almost entirely on the need to affirm transgender identities.
Were these the most pressing issues, I asked myself? Was it right to encourage young people to set off on a path that could easily end in them becoming lifelong patients or to allow males into women’s spaces? My questions were unwelcome. They were sure signs of bigotry, it seemed. The trainers questioned whether I was suitable to be in the project at all. Sure enough, a few days later efforts were made by the organising social work agencies to exclude me from further volunteering with the group — in this case, unsuccessfully.
Germany Takes the Lead
Other countries have experienced similar institutional capture, nonetheless, Germany has gone further than many in pushing transgender ideology to its logical extremes and “dissolving all boundaries”, as Helen Joyce put it in her speech at this year’s Genspect conference in Lisbon[1].
The social democratic, liberal and green governing coalition has launched a two-pronged gender assault on German society: legally by enacting self-ID and administratively by paving the way for on-demand, socially insured medical interventions with no lower age limits.
The main thrust of the new self-ID law that comes into effect on 1 November is the expurgation of all socio-psychological assessments necessary for a change of sex in law. In future anyone will be able to change their official sex at their local registry office by means of a simple speech act. The new law allows parents to determine the sex of their children at birth themselves. From the age of 14, teenagers will also be able to change their legal sex. Parental objections can be overridden by the family court, which experience shows, tend to affirm self-declared gender identities. Courts are already withdrawing parental rights and taking young people into care where conflicts arise. Misgendering will be made an offence subject to a penalty of 10,000 euros.
15,000 applications are apparently already in the pipeline, even before the new law has come into force, far exceeding the government’s initial projections. The first legal cases are already coming before the courts. One person who has male external sexual characteristics but identifies as a woman whose membership of a women's fitness studio was rejected by the operator is currently seeking 1,000 euros in compensation for violation of ‘personal rights’ with the support of the government’s anti-discrimination officer Ferda Ataman. Conflicts such as these are set to add fuel to the fire in Germany’s already febrile political atmosphere.
Quietly Promoting Medical Interventions
The government’s second line of attack is perhaps more sinister. This is the under-the-radar aim of promoting gender medicine. German hospitals are already performing mastectomies and even genital operations on minors[2]. But transactivist politicians are eager to keep this out of the limelight. In fact, my conflict with the leaders of the streetwork training course I attended escalated following their flat-out denial that such medical interventions take place at all in Germany – despite the fact that hospitals openly advertise “top surgery” services that help young people “to a new sense of life on the way to the new ‘me’” on the internet [3].
Medical transgender interventions are still relatively expensive. But the government is committed to changing the law so that “the costs of gender reassignment treatments (are) covered in full by statutory health insurance”[4]. This is extraordinary in a country in which the health system is already buckling under the strain of exploding costs and demand and where patient charges are increasingly the rule rather than the exception for many treatments.
Politicians argue that the self-ID law is unrelated to medical interventions. The evidence from the Tavistock in London and the conclusions of the Cass Review – in particular the recognition that social transition is not a neutral act and that puberty blockers set off a cascade of increasing medicalisation – is ignored. This political strategy is aided by Germany’s decentralised health system. The government argues that it has no influence over the guidelines issued by medical professional bodies. The draft guidelines, which are expected to be published any day now by the German Society for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy (DGKJP), completely ignore recent international studies and the Cass Review, and consolidate the affirmative trend in Germany by removing age and eligibility requirements for minors seeking body-modifying endocrine and surgical interventions. They also state that the requirement for psychotherapy prior to such procedures is "not ethically justified for reasons of respect for the dignity and self-determination of the person".
This allows the government to deny any responsibility for setting young people on an irreversible path to becoming permanent patients. The consequence of this is that, unlike in the UK, where the health minister has listened to and responded to concerns expressed by parents of trans-identified children, the German health minister has ignored the evidence presented by German parent groups[5].
Meanwhile, State Secretary for Queer Affairs Sven Lehmann is using a 70 million euro budget to pump money into schools, youth work and counselling centres to promote acceptance and affirmation of transgender identities and to alienate children from their parents.
The Opposition Marginalized
Opposition to these political developments comes from a broad coalition of for the most part purely voluntary organisations. Women’s groups, lesbians and gays all see their hard-won rights and social acceptance threatened. The German Medical Association passed a resolution [6]in May calling for restrictions of the use of puberty blockers with under-18-year-olds. A majority of senior child psychiatrists have raised objections to the medical guidelines only for their voices to be silenced by the procedural manoeuvring of institutional apparatchiks [7].
Little of this criticism finds its way into a mainstream press that is eager to publish a seemingly endless stream of syndicated articles celebrating “sex as a spectrum” and to weave transgender narratives into articles on everything from the political crisis in Georgia to the travails of truck drivers.
And so the press aids and abets Germany’s institutional leaders to continue unperturbed by all criticism.
Transgender Politics as Displacement
This is probably not what student leader Rudi Dutschke had in mind when he coined the slogan “the long march through the institutions” back in 1967. There can be no simple explanation for the (hopefully temporary) triumph of such a frankly “weird” ideology. A new book[8] by Dr. Alexander Korte presented at the recent Frankfurt Book Fair suggests that transgender politics may be a form of displacement. The current German government is deeply unpopular. It lurches from one policy blunder to another, failing to meet the challenges of climate change, globalisation, growing inequality, foreign policy disasters and economic decline. Transgender politics look very much like a flight from reality and an attempt to reassure social liberals that progress, as they understand it, is still somehow possible. In Germany, a longing for absolution from the burden of history may also be part of the explanation for a hyperindividualistic and supposedly progressive mindset that is doing untold damage to women, gays and lesbians and above all families and children.
On November 1 the voices of reason will be protesting against the new self-ID law in Berlin. We know that there will also be protests outside German embassies around Europe. Thank you for your support. We need it.
David Allison is a former member of the German Green Party and speaker for Transteens-Sorge-Berechtigt (TTSB). TTSB is a parents' initiative in Germany that opposes the unnecessary medicalisation of adolescents and young adults who question their gender and/or do not conform to gender stereotypes.
Genspect publishes a variety of authors with different perspectives. Any opinions expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect Genspect’s official position. For more on Genspect, visit our FAQs.
[1] https://genspect.org/what-will-it-take-to-return-to-reality/
[3] https://www.sana.de/duesseldorf-gerresheim/medizin-pflege/zentrum-fuer-transgenderchirurgie-sowie-postbariatrische-chirurgie-adipositas-straffungsoperationen-liposuktion-lipoedem/mastektomie-bei-frau-zu-mann-fzm
[4] https://cms.gruene.de/uploads/assets/Koalitionsvertrag-SPD-GRUENE-FDP-2021-2025.pdf
[5] https://transteens-sorge-berechtigt.net/lltimeline.html
[6] https://www.aerzteblatt.de/nachrichten/151391/Einsatz-von-Pubertaetsblockern-und-Hormontherapien-staerker-abwaegen
[7] https://overton-magazin.de/hintergrund/wissenschaft/transdebatte-dreht-sich-der-wind/
Thank you for refusing and for standing up for reality. It will inspire others. Praying Germany comes to its senses.
State Secretary for Queer Affairs? Oh my.
I had no idea this was happening in Germany. Thanks for sharing and standing up for the truth. I am originally from Ukraine and my mother has been a teacher for 45+ years. With the war, a lot of families were forced to leave the country. My mom stayed in touch with a lot of her students and parents. She is telling me that now a lot of those families are coming back, they choose to go back to the war zone to save their kids from gender ideology that a lot of the kids fallen for in those new schools and new environments.