Guest post: The reimposition of blasphemy codes
Originally a comment by Der Durchwanderer on All the rights.
There is only one trans “right” being asserted by activists, and that is the “right” to have everyone else in the world affirm their particular religious beliefs, at all times and in all places.
The incoming government of Germany has recently signed an agreement in principle on their governing priorities, which must now be referred to the coalition parties at large for approval before that government can be put into effect. When the agreement is approved, the measures within it will not automatically become law, but they provide a roadmap for what the government wishes to accomplish during its reign.
Many of the proposals are undoubtedly an improvement over the status quo; in particular, simplifications to immigration and legalisation of cannabis would materially improve the lives of millions of German residents, if and when these come into force before the next election.
More neutral, or at least less obviously good, are a few economic policies on offer; in particular, opening the German retirement fund to market speculation (supposedly with the equivalent of mutual funds in the US, though possibly a bait-and-switch to allow stock traders access to retirement funds for their individual bets) and a philosophy of austerity-for-all-seasons could have dramatic medium- and long-term negative consequences for the German and thereby the European economy.
But, more contentiously, the government proposes to bring in a raft of “trans rights” which ultimately amount to the reimposition of blasphemy codes in public and private life. As the incoming coalition is left-leaning, they all seem to have drunk deeply of trans activist dogma, at least their various youth wings. In particular, they are promising to enact some form of Self-ID (possibly with no-questions-asked statutory insurance coverage of any cosmetic procedures under the umbrella of “gender medicine”), along with a proposed fine of up to 2,500 Euros for instances of “misgendering” people.
Given the fervour of adherence to trans dogma and the promise of liberation and meaning it provides to its adherents, it is a virtual certainty that these measures will remain in the coalition agreement, and the chances are quite high that they will be among the first implemented by the new regime. Trans activists online are lustily promising to scour the timelines of suspected TERFs in search for wrong-think which they can then report in order to impose this fine, and some trans activists (with the barest cover of irony) are welcoming the construction of an anti-TERF “police state”.
I do not believe that the people proposing these measures have thought through the societal implications of them, nor of the reaction they are likely to engender across the voting public. The most likely danger is that these young activists accomplish this policy of compelling the speech they approve of and forbidding the speech they disapprove of with harsh penalties, and when enough people outside of the core of Berlin come into contact with these policies, they generate enough scandal to bring down the government and force a new election.
It could very soon be a reality in Germany, at least for a time, that such questions as drove Ophelia from FreeThoughtBlogs are no longer matters of philosophy, or interpersonal comity, or even personal politics; being asked “Meinen Sie, dass Transfrauen Frauen sind, ja oder nein?”, on the Internet or on the street or in the privacy of your own home, could well come with a hefty financial penalty for offering a negative answer, regardless of what you actually believe.
Trannish Inquisition, indeed.
Gender Stasi? It just wasn’t that long ago. How will people let this happen again?
Kommen sie zu uns, sonst kommen wir su Ihnen!
That sounds dreadful.
One of the basic rights in a democracy is the right to question everything. As soon as speech is forbidden or compelled, all meaningful opposition is prevented and we’re in the world of ‘1984’.
To be clear, the proposal in the Koalitionsvertrag (Coalition Agreement) reads as follows (page 119, near the bottom of the paragraph under “Queeres Leben”):
“Geschlechtsspezifische und homosexuellenfeindliche
Beweggründe werden wir in den Katalog der Strafzumessung des § 46 Abs. 2 StGB explizit aufnehmen.”
This translates to “We will explicitly take up gender-specific and homophobic motives into the Catalog of Punishable Offenses of Article 46 Clause 2 of the Strafgesetzbuch (which literally translates to “Punishment Law Book”, but means “Penal Code”). The relevant clause of the relevant article reads as follows, with my translation afterward:
Standard disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and not a native German speaker, but here is my impression of what this law says:
Thus, in the charitable reading, the incoming government promises to pay special attention to “gender and homosexual” motivations when considering crimes, particularly of the sort the Anglosphere terms “hate crimes”.
There is already an existing though rarely-enforced law on the books in Germany from early in its days as a nation-state, called the Beleidigungsgesetz, which makes it an offense to egregiously insult someone, in public or in private. The relevant punishments include fines or terms of imprisonment for the offenders. This is conceptually similar to the “fighting words” doctrine in the United States, which as I understand it no longer has legal force, but at one time was a justification for restraining speech.
TRAs have taken the promises in the Koalitionsvertrag and this pre-existing law to mean that they can claim “misgendering”, “deadnaming”, and eventually even publicly disagreeing with trans dogma at all, is such an “egregious offense” which can be punished under the Beleidigungsgesetz, with enhanced consideration of the offender’s motives.
To be sure, the Koalitionsvertrag also has many good things within it, even unambiguously good things relating to “queer” people, such as promises of broader support for non-heterosexual families, special consideration for homosexuality in asylum applications from lands where being homosexual is illegal, and on and on. But there is a real danger here that the TRA interpretation of the Koalitionsvertrag’s promises will guide our society into a place where everywhere is Twitter and Twitter bans for misgendering come with hefty fines, or possibly even terms of imprisonment.
And the greatest danger, as I intimated but didn’t spell out, is that this nonsense will be first up to become law, and its consequences will topple the government before they have the chance to enact other much-needed progressive reforms, such as reducing the waiting period for citizenship and removing the requirement to renounce all other citizenships first, or ending the war against cannabis everywhere in the country — places such as Bavaria where simple possession brings the not-insignificant risk of years in prison.