Germany to Allow 14-Year-Olds to Legally “Change Gender”

It’s not just America doing this…

The Times:

For many years Germany was one of the most unpleasant places in the western world for transgender people.

As recently as 2007 married people had to divorce their spouses before they could formally change their gender. Between 1981 and 2011 about 10,000 people were compelled to submit to gender reassignment operations that rendered them sterile.

Now, however, as trans rights become one of the fiercest battlegrounds in British and American politics, Germany is introducing legislation that will allow anyone over the age of 14 freely to alter their registered gender and make “deadnaming”, the practice of referring to trans people by their past names, a crime.

“We live in a liberal and diverse society,” Lisa Paus, the German minister for family affairs, said. “In many ways we are already further advanced as a society than our laws are. It’s high time to adapt the legal framework to our social reality.”

Lisa Paus

Viewed from the outside, the most striking thing is not the law itself but the absence of anything like the controversies in the UK. While German activists have mobilised on both sides of the debate, the political mainstream has been eerily quiet. Both the conservative opposition and the right-leaning press, which otherwise cheerfully crusade on hot-button cultural issues such as gender-neutral language and the lyrics in pop songs, have by and large kept out of the fray.

“Honestly, I absolutely think the politicians deliberately let the whole thing slip under the radar,” said Chantal Louis, the editor of Emma, Germany’s most prominent feminist magazine and one of the few publications that have systematically taken up arms against the reform. “My theory is that if the public knew what the government is actually planning here, there would be serious pushback.”

This is part of a pattern. Olaf Scholz’s coalition government has embarked on the most liberal package of social reforms that the country has seen for at least a generation: gender self-identification, looser regulations on abortion and nationality, provisions for groups of friends or neighbours to acquire some of the rights previously confined to families.

So far, though, they have largely been greeted with a shrug, to the point where pollsters have not even felt the need to measure the balance of opinion. That raises two possibilities: either German society as a whole is fundamentally not all that bothered about this sort of thing, or the culture wars simply have not started yet.

The gender self-identification reform is the most obvious potential flashpoint. Under the current “transsexual law”, which dates back to 1981, gender identity is treated as a medical problem. It can only be changed on official documents after two psychiatric reports, which can include questions such as how often the applicants masturbate and whether they wear women’s underwear.

“This law is encrusted with blood and tears, and has caused so much suffering,” said Tessa Ganserer, a Green party MP from Nuremberg who in 2018 became the first openly transgender politician in any of Germany’s legislatures. “I don’t want anyone to have to go through such a demeaning process any more, and I can’t subject myself to this process. A person’s dignity and identity are the very last thing that should be taken away from them.”

Germans felt the need to vote for a guy in a dress.

They’re actually more extreme than the US on this topic.