Germany’s disastrous embrace of gender self-ID
by Sabine Beppler-Spahl, spiked:
Germany’s coalition government is deeply unpopular. A poll this month found that 78 per cent of Germans are unhappy with it. But instead of trying to address public concerns, it has doubled down on its hated woke agenda.
On 12 April, the government passed the ‘Self-Determination Law’. Replacing the Transsexual Law from 1980, the new law will no longer require people to obtain psychological and medical assessments before being able to change their legal gender. People aged 14 and over will now be able to change their first name and gender simply by making a declaration to a registry office – although under-18s will need to obtain consent from their ‘legal guardians’ or, if they refuse, through a family court.
Germany’s family minister, the Green Party’s Lisa Paus, and justice minister, the Free Democratic Party’s Marco Buschmann, have presented the law as a victory for personal freedom. Paus claims that the government has created the legal framework for a ‘free, diverse and modern society’. But in truth, this new law has done nothing for freedom in Germany. It has antagonised and alienated many more people than it can claim to have helped. And it represents an attack on important and hard-won rights.
Women’s organisations have rightly complained that the new law undermines women’s right to single-sex spaces. Gay rights’ activists, like journalist Jan Feddersen, have claimed it threatens to erase those who ‘simply want to be gay’. Feddersen has also pointed to the irrationality of a law that assumes reality can be changed through a ‘speech act’ (ie, the idea that calling someone a woman, makes them a woman).
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