Germany's transgender rights law takes effect

Starting Friday, people aged 18 and older will be able to change official records to alter their names and genders or have the gender marker removed altogether, under Germany's new Self-Determination Act.

There is a mandatory three-month wait between applying and making a personal declaration, but the requirement for two psychiatric assessments and a court hearing have been scrapped.

Minors — over the age of 14 — can do so with parental approval, or seek legal recourse. Parents can act on behalf of younger children, but the child needs to be present at the register office and give their assent. This is a purely bureaucratic procedure with no medical implications.

Nyke Slawik, a German parliamentarian and transgender woman who helped negotiate the bill for the Green Party, hailed the law as a historic reform of international significance. "It's a sign of hope in times where right-wing populist voices are getting louder again and where there is unfortunately a rollback in many countries in terms of the rights of queer people," she told DW.

More accessible, less costly, far less intrusive

Kalle Hümpfner, policy officer for the German Trans* Association (BVT), welcomed the fact that gender self-recognition will now be much more accessible and less costly.

Hümpfner stressed that the new law will also make the process far less intrusive. "In the assessments, people were forced to divulge a lot of very personal information — information that was shared with the court. There have been many awful reports of people having to talk about their sexual preferences, about their masturbation practices, or their underwear choices," Hümpfner said.

Some 1,200 people in Berlin, with its thriving LGBTQI+ community, have submitted applications to date, according to the German press agency dpa. The Catholic news agency KNA has reported a similar level of interest in other major cities.

Richard Köhler is an expert advisor for TGEU (Trans Europe and Central Asia), a nonprofit advocacy group for trans and nonbinary people. He said the move brought Germany back into line with international human rights law and European developments of the last 10 years. It is now the 12th country in Europe to introduce legal self-determination legislation.

"Let's face it, it's an issue affecting a small number of people in a very personal way and respecting their choices doesn't harm anyone else, but it does uphold the core values of dignity and freedom that we all share," he said. Köhler warned that many other countries in Europe are introducing bans on legal and medical transition, including in Georgia and Russia.

Making lives of a marginalized minority easier

The changes make the practical daily lives of transgender, inter-sex, and nonbinary people much easier, as there is no longer a potential mismatch between appearance and official paperwork, which can make traveling abroad prohibitive or even just paying by credit card a serious headache.

Once someone has applied to change their gender and first name, no further applications can be made for a minimum of 12 months. Right-wing populists have suggested the new law would lead to people changing their gender marker every year.

Altering a birth certificate generates a huge volume of follow-through bureaucracy in changing official documents, from driving licenses to school exam certificates. "It's an enormous amount of work to make your documents match and no one does that just for fun," said Hümpfner of the German Trans* Association.

Inclusivity and gender politics have become sensitive topics in Germany. Germany's center-left government of Social Democrats (SPD), Greens and neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP) took over in late 2021 with a pledge to progress and modernize the government, and included the change to the law in their coalition treaty. It was opposed by the largest opposition bloc, the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) and Bavaria's Christian Social Union (CSU) and also by the far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD).

The new Self-Determination law was passed in April 2024 after a hotly contested debate in which a number of restrictions were added.

'Orchestrated attack against democracy, equality, diversity'

Hümpfner expressed regret that anxiety and fear of abuse had framed the debate — with transgender people repeatedly cast in the role of potential perpetrators. "Time and time again during the entire legislative process, it was forgotten that this is about the basic rights of a marginalized and still very disadvantaged group," said Hümpfner.

Changes to the draft law included appearing to give business owners the right to decide whether or not to refuse individuals access to their premises on the basis of their gender. "There was a lot of discussion about women's saunas. Our experience is that many transwomen rarely or never go into saunas because being in these places and being stared at a lot because of their physicality is regarded as unpleasant," said Hümpfner.

Another concern raised during discussions surrounding the passage of the bill was about the possibility of transwomen using women's shelters. The Association of Women's Shelters (FHK) told the German newspaper Tagesspiegel this was baseless. "We do not know of a single case from our membership of transgender women misusing a safe house or becoming violent there — and that although transwomen have been regularly using safe houses for many years and finding protection in them without great ado," said the FHK.

Köhler also argued that the way the debate had been steered had poisoned public discourse and polarized the population, adding that people in the trans community were experiencing a rise in antagonism and harassment as a result.

"We're seeing an orchestrated attack against democracy, against equality, against the diversity in our society. And it's deliberate and it's orchestrated and it's heavily financed," said Köhler. He said trans people were easy targets because they made up such a small minority and so few people had personal contact with them.

Women's fears being instrumentalized

Beate von Miquel, the chair of the National Council of German Women's Organizations (DF) and a gender researcher, told DW that the issue was being politically instrumentalized and had become part of a culture war by far-right groups not known for their advocacy of women's rights.

"It is really bitter for the women's movement that this has become a very divisive issue. We should not allow ourselves to be divided," she said.

Von Miquel, whose umbrella organization represents 60 women's associations and groups, warned that the trans community and women's organizations should not be played off against one another.

"There is concern that the category woman or women will disappear and that it won't be about women anymore," said Miquel. "We will stay the German Women's Council. But there must be more freedom and diversity and individuality, there is more than one way of living gender and being a woman."

Edited by: Rina Goldenberg

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