The media is constantly making us feel like Germany is overwhelmingly being beleaguered by the tragic plight of trans people, with Ukrainians being a distant second. The target audience of the lavishly bankrolled propaganda of the gender transition has extended beyond the young people to reach the kids.
Oversimplifying social processes is oh so characteristic of any online blogs, including the Russian ones. The Russian-speaking part of the worldwide web has recently been abuzz with quite a peculiar discussion. Namely, the German government has allowed its citizens to change their gender once a year.
It sure has, but it gets much worse. Of course, one can just laugh it all off by saying they would have easily greenlighted a more frequent back-and-forth, had they not been mired in a nightmare of bureaucratic paperwork. It may take at least a whole year to complete all the forms and get the nod.
Otherwise, scores of people would be transitioning every time they would want to visit the opposite gender’s sauna room. That being said, Germany is big on Freikörperkultur (FKK), or free body culture, and shared sauna rooms would not raise a single eyebrow here, except for maybe those of a couple of Arab refugees.
But we digress. The Bundestag has passed the Self-Determination Act. As the parliamentarians were going through the motions on that fateful day, a group of feminists and their sympathisers converged outside to protest the bill. Indeed, what the new law does is, first and foremost, violate women’s rights in a spectacular variety of ways.
Soon enough it will be much easier to officially change a person’s gender identity in a civil registration office whereby transgender, intersex and gender-diverse individuals will be able to rewrite their identities at the stroke of a pen in a single application form.
The bill was supported by 374 members of the Bundestag, with 251 parliamentarians opposing it and a further 11 abstaining. The CDU/CSU, Alternative for Germany and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) said an emphatic ‘nay’.
Pursuant to the new law, beginning on 1 November, anyone will be eligible to change their gender status and their name by simply submitting an application to a civil registration office. The former requirement of providing a doctor’s note and several expert evaluations will be rescinded.
The freshly approved act has effectively replaced the act on transsexual people that was passed some 40 years. The Federal Constitutional Court has repeatedly denounced some stipulation in the law as unconstitutional and cited the humiliating nature of the procedure to those who have to undergo it.
The humiliation is finally over, per Sven Lehmann, the commissioner for the acceptance of sexual and gender diversity in Germany. Nyke Slawik, a representative of the Greens and herself a transgender person who apparently had to suffer through the previous legislation to get her gender identity changed thanked everyone who had made it possible to pass the new bill. ‘As transgender people, we have time and again faced scenarios where our dignity is negotiable,’ she said. ‘Thankfully, it is now history.’
In the future minors will also be able to have their gender status tweaked. Teenagers aged 14 or older will need to provide their parents’ consent. The parents of younger children will be able to apply on behalf of their kid but not against their will. A child aged between five and 14 may give their consent.
Since the general public is preoccupied with the impending man-made economic downturn and related issues, they mostly have no clue as to what the ‘trans’ fuss is all about. If you are one of them, here is some context for you.
To begin with, the civilised world has had no problem helping those in need of changing the sexy they were assigned at birth for an appreciably long while now. Back in the 1970s, a Soviet physician Viktors Kalnbērzs performed the world’s first-ever successful sex reassignment surgery. Ever since the surgery and hormone replacement therapy has been tremendously helpful to individuals whose lives quite literally depend on the medical intervention. Except there is a catch. By taking on secondary sex characteristics of the opposite gender, no one can override their innate chromosomal makeup, which is different in men and women FYI in case you skipped much of your secondary school prep or have consistently been within earshot of the persistent propaganda narrative. Moreover, no one can start producing eggs or sperm, for this is our body’s immutable sex-specific ability.
But just as is the case with any series of medical interventions, the transformation takes time and involves a lot of pain and suffering. That is to say, those who used to agree to undergo the ordeal were prepared to go the distance. Moreover, the necessary legislation has indeed been in place, like the aforementioned 40-year-old German law that called for a battery of medical tests and evaluation reports – in a word, something the present-day activists decry as ‘humiliation’.
But it is the same breed of activism that prevents age checks from being run on immigrants without identification based on their palms or dental condition. This has resulted in a spate of ‘unaccompanied minors’ who claim they are 14 years of age inundating the country and a number of bearded ‘kiddoes’ taking notes in classrooms nationwide. Why? Well, such checks are also said to constitute a ‘humiliating procedure’.
However, outside of the politicised, activism-driven gender reassignment realm lies something called medical insurance coverage. The 40-year-old law was specifically designed to work out the payment procedure in case the sufferer decided to detransition. Like, who is going to cover the expenses? And then there is this issue of how many trans people there actually are.
‘Over the last five years the number of requests to cover the gender transition therapy costs has doubled, as reported by the Federal Medical Service’s statistics Die Welt has accessed. In 2017, the statutory health insurance system was contacted by 2,923 individuals asking to cover their medical bills. A year later this number jumped almost twice to reach 5,813 applications. The requested procedures include mastectomy and sex reassignment surgery.
Once submitted, the request is appraised by the Federal Medical Service for an estimated cost. The biggest prerequisite is the ‘pathological suffering’ that cannot be alleviated by, say, a dozen appointments with a shrink. When it comes to a surgery request, the patient is obliged to prove that they have tried fitting into a new gender for at least a year. This is done to minimise the risk of poor judgement and of a subsequent retransition.
According to the service, last year 55.2% of the applicants met the medical criteria making them eligible for the cost reimbursement, 11.5% were a partial fit and 28.5% did not qualify at all. The remaining 4.5% were provided with additional information. According to the service’s spokeswoman, ‘partial fit’ can mean only some of the requests were approved. A case in point: an insured person seeks to transition to the female gender and asks for their lower ribs to be surgically removed to reduce the waist size. And while the sex reassignment surgery would be compensated for, the removal of the ribs would not.
One thing about the social and medical evaluation of a potential surgical intervention for sex reassignment is that the latter may only be performed on a biologically healthy individual, the spokeswoman adds. Over the past five years there has been no significant change in the number of requests: the number of requests that have been fully reimbursed is between 45% and 55% depending on the year. The stats have not been filtered by gender.’
So, a total of 5,813 individuals applied for the painful transition. Mind you, this is all happening to the tune of the rampant propaganda machine almost cattle-prodding people to the ‘new normal’. That is fewer than 6,000 people in a country of 80 million. But wait a second. The media is constantly making us feel like Germany is overwhelmingly being beleaguered by the tragic plight of trans people, with Ukrainians being a distant second. The target audience of the lavishly bankrolled propaganda of the gender transition has extended beyond the young people to reach the kids.
All of the above prompts a couple of considerations. Since this whole narrative directly pushes against women’s rights and – surprise, surprise – those of gay people too, it comes across as a deliberate attempt to rein the women’s right advocacy movement, which has, of late, been incredibly successful and is now almost taking on the cherished ‘capitalist values’. They once tried to torpedo the real grassroots feminism by caricature RadFems. If you happened to ever come into close contact with the latter, your understandable kneejerk reaction must have been to steer clear of the entire feminist agenda. The problem was, they were so improbably full of it, it did not pan out. The next thing they did was pedal the trans narrative in a campaign of overt manipulation intended to further divide the public into even smaller and much more manageable fragments. Trumpeting a false agenda is akin to shooting at fake targets from an attack helicopter.
Counterintuitively, the 5,813 individuals that have applied for the surgery are nothing but a thorn in the flesh of strident activism. Hence the rollout of the gender role saga etc. The next move should have been the ‘right’ to transition without any surgical intervention. On Monday, a person could begin to identify as a different gender and demand that the rest of the world treat them accordingly. This would perfectly fit the humongous industry of the purportedly wronged minorities, encouraged by the democratically-minded faux liberals who, in reality, represent the mighty totalitarian structures attacking and steamrolling any dissent. And it has long transcended the medical, psychological, mental or hormonal realms to be wielded by the New Order with a blatant disregard for the state borders.
Some of the Welt readers have commented: ‘Perhaps it would have never occurred to these so-called trans persons that there was something wrong about their bodies if they had not been aggressively propagandised by the ideologues. Never once in my life – in rather a long while, that is – have I seen anyone in school, in college or at work who would have been facing these problems. But it now turns out these folks are aplenty. What other kinds of crazy stuff are our politicians up to?’ In other words, regular people feel like they are on to something.
The new law is already being used in other countries by sex offenders to do jail time in women’s correctional institutions and by perverts to work as female schoolteachers. In Germany, though, it faced pushback from the opposition parties. In the run-up to the vote the Bundestag members were supposed to hear a talk given by Alexander Korte, an expert in the transgender issues, who was expected to offer his assessment of the Self-Determination Act. But suddenly he was substituted by somebody else. The explanation is simple. It turns out Dr Korte was about to warn of the dangers of people misdiagnosing themselves as being ‘trans’.
‘The gender has almost ceased to be a biological fact. Instead, it is now a matter of someone’s current state of mind,’ said Sahra Wagenknecht. Early into the debate and following Wagenknecht’s remarks, the Bundestag Vice-President Petra Pau (The Left) who chaired the session called for respect and objectivity, thereby silencing the dissenting views. But Sahra fought back and shrewdly illustrated the absurdity of the new bill by saying: ‘In a country whose government bans people from deciding what kind of heating or what kind of car they want, a person may now suddenly identify as a different gender and the government goes, ‘Sure! That’s your private choice.’”
One of the Welt readers wrote, ‘No disrespect, but this isn’t the right to self-determination. The actual right to self-determination both starts and ends at very different points. It starts with a right to live and die the way one deems fit. It involves personal freedoms, such as free speech, the free press, a freedom to travel and to decide what type of heating to use, what food to eat, what clothes to wear etc. It also involves the right to be a patriot or avoid being one. Whether you consider yourself a patriot is also about self-determination. What we have been shown today is nothing but pandering to a vanishingly small minority at the expense of a similar-minded community and also at the expense of the entire community of gay people and lesbians because they are going to pay for it.’
Boy, did he nail it.