Draft Self-Determination Act: It’s about human dignity

With its proposal for a self-determination law, the federal cabinet has taken a step that is as important as it is legally overdue. The issue of gender identity is highly personal and non-negotiable.

It’s a big misunderstanding: the right to self-determination is a gender ideology – as is now being heard from critics from the Union or the AfD. When they think of gender, these critics think of male and female. There doesn’t seem to be anything else for them. Luckily, life is more colorful than black and white.

Biological sex and gender identity are two different things. They don’t have to match. And it is not up to the state and politicians to judge.

There are people who do not want to assign themselves to any gender. Others who feel they are of the wrong gender. The state has so far treated these people as if they were sick. Federal Minister of Justice Marco Buschmann is now correctly stating: You are not sick, you are not abnormal. An important advance.

Critics cooperate insinuations

With this law, the traffic light lives up to its own claim to modernize the rule of law. But that took longer than planned. And has become more complicated than necessary. It seems as if the government wants to regulate each individual case in advance – just to accommodate its critics.

These critics often work with insinuations and false assumptions. As if men now went to the registry office in rows and had their gender changed, only to then gape in the women’s sauna. As if people who have experienced discrimination are now looking for conflict. As if minors were changing their sex en masse because that’s the trend. And as if parents carelessly had the gender entry of their baby changed shortly after the birth of their child.

State must guarantee fundamental rights

The right to self-determination is not only a socio-political necessity, but also a legal one. The Federal Constitutional Court has repeatedly overturned parts of the previous transsexual law. For this reason alone, new rules are overdue. The Bundestag should decide quickly.

The law doesn’t take anything away from anyone, it doesn’t impose anything on anyone, but it makes life easier for a group. Numerically, that might be a small one. But the self-determination law is essentially about the question of how much the state guarantees human dignity and the free development of personality for everyone. The critics should take a look at the first article of the Basic Law.