“You can’t talk us away by not talking about us anymore.” According to the organizers, 650 people demonstrated on Gärtnerplatz on Sunday under this motto against the gender ban that the Bavarian state government announced a few days ago. Those affected “want to live in a world that is inclusive and includes everyone and does not exclude people through the use of exclusive language,” said a press release. A gender ban leads to nothing but more suffering, and such a ban could have devastating consequences, especially in schools.
Only recently, in a representative study, 94 percent of queer young people in Bavaria stated that they were discriminated against because of their queerness, it was said. Queer people are already being discriminated against, and their discrimination will be continued by the ban, said Sophie Boner, one of the organizers of the Slutwalk Munich initiative. Against this background, she considers Söder’s ban to be merely a populist measure “to fish for votes on the right-wing fringe.”
Inclusion instead of exclusion: the message from the protesters was unmistakable.
(Photo: Florian Peljak)
Merritt Ocracy dressed up as a starlet.
(Photo: Florian Peljak)
Boner sees herself as a non-binary person, as trans and queer. When she was at school, “it would have meant the world if I had known earlier that there were more people like me who simply didn’t fit into the binary gender system.”
The remaining 15 speeches across the queer scene also criticized what they saw as the discrimination associated with the ban and found that there were other, much more urgent problems in Bavaria.
The SZ usually does not use the gender asterisk. However, given the topic of the demonstration and the express wish of the organizers, it was used in this text.