For Tessa Ganserer, the matter is clear: “I just don’t go to the swimming pool anymore.” It has been like that for two and a half years out of fear of devaluation. In 2019, the Nuremberg woman publicly fully committed to being a woman, appears as Tessa Ganserer, privately and in the state parliament, where she sits for the Greens and was previously known as a man. She knows discrimination. Now that Nuremberg is getting a bathing day for transgender and intersex people, their joy is “of course huge”.
The queer bathing day was the goal of the Greens in Nuremberg and as soon as Corona allows normal swimming pool operation again, it should be tested. Last week the works committee in the city council approved a corresponding motion by the parliamentary group, only the AfD was against it. The plan: once a quarter, a swimming pool in the south of the city should only open to transgender and intersex people.
Tessa Ganserer fought for a bathing day for transgender and intersex people.
(Photo: Andreas Gebert / Reuters)
There were concerns beforehand and not everyone on the committee could immediately start with the bathing day idea. The Third Mayor Christian Vogel (SPD) admits that he initially thought: This would “separate” those trans and inter people. Why couldn’t they just swim with everyone else? Yes, why not? Isn’t society ready for a long time?
Ganserer knows this reaction. “Many people have no idea what kind of discrimination experiences people with norm-deviating transgender or intersex physicalities have,” she says. She knew of trans people who were “gawked at” because of their appearance in men’s locker rooms. Problems often arise before sex reassignments, for example because tied breasts can hardly be concealed under loose clothing in the swimming pool, as is usual.
Uwe Scherzer, who introduced the motion to the city council and appears there as the travesty artist “Uschi Nonsense”, emphasizes that it is a matter of “creating a shelter”. Transgender people, as Ganserer put it, were assigned the wrong gender at birth. Intersex people have sexual characteristics that differ from the medical norm of female or male bodies.
For Ganserer, Scherzer and the Nuremberg Greens, it is important that even transgender or intersex people can feel “right” in the swimming pool and not be commented on in an offensive manner. And there is always the problem of having to make a decision in a binary society: Do I go to the public men’s or women’s toilet? Do I change in the men’s or women’s cabin? The question arises for people with the gender entry “diverse” who do not clearly assign themselves to a gender. For herself, says Tessa Ganserer, that’s clear. And yet she fears rejection in the swimming pool.
And even more: Again and again, transgender and intersex people are accused, especially in social media, of deliberately intruding into the shelter of others. Of course it would be nicer if everyone went to the swimming pool together, says Ganserer, but as long as such narratives are served, extra bathing days are needed.
This should start in Nuremberg’s Katzwangbad as soon as the corona pandemic allows regular operation. There were concerns recently because actually all swimming times in the city pools are planned for the public or for clubs. You don’t want to take bathing time away from anyone, says Mayor Vogel, but you also want to make an inclusive offer. So the city now makes the bathroom available once a quarter, on Sunday mornings from 8:30 a.m. to 10 a.m. Swimming must be organized by the scene as a club, Erlangen and Fürth have announced that they want to go along with it. Like in Cologne and Berlin, where there are already comparable bathing days.