You seriously do not want to know how much pain and fear and rage the process to get to this point caused in the German trans, inter, nonbinary and agender community (CW for transphobia and humiliation, obviously). It was a complete shitshow, every step was flanked by fearmongering from all the political and media pundits you’d expect, and a lot of it directly found its way into the new law, which has a ton of questionable passages, many of which appear outright unconstitutional. I expect this law to be constantly revised and harmful paragraphs stricken from it in decades of court battles, with exceptions for open and blatant discrimination in public spaces and in sports being especially sore points. Like, this law that is supposed to allow me self-determined gender id suggests (not outright states, but very strongly suggests in a legally ambiguous way) that it would be ok to kick me out of a public toilet, dressing room or sauna if i do not pass. In Germany, the country known all over the world for mixed gender saunas. You can’t make this shit up.

Up to a week ago, the draft for this law even included a paragraph that would have outed everybody changing their name to every single state and federal police and intelligence agency, customs, immigration offices and the central weapons registry, based entirely on the spurious cis fantasy that trans people are spies and infiltrators (you can thank the SPD for that). Up until yesterday, i still considered using the old, humiliating, expensive and openly unconstitutional legal process to change my name because of this threat, a process which involved not one, but two independent psychiatric exams you had to pay for yourself, exams which traditionally included highly invasive questions about your sex life, early childhood and gender presentation. Like, there’s people who’ve been asked to show off their underwear in these trials, and were then asked to jump up and down to prove they do not have a boner from wearing women’s panties. These are actual procedures German trans people have been put through to not get deadnamed anymore.

And because the process to get the new self id law took so long, was so traumatizing and included so many threatening regulations, i know tons of people personally who’ve opted to go for the old TSG process to change their papers. It’s less traumatizing today than it used to be because people exchange info about good or at least not that bad psychiatrists for the exams online, but i still know somebody who got denied his name change this year because the psychiatrist in question thinks that “nonbinary is just a phase.” Dey ended up paying almost 2000 € to get to hear that.

So yes, this new law is a huge step forward for our gender diverse communities, but it was war to get here and there’s a ton of other, equally necessary changes in Germany’s legal treatment of trans, inter, nonbinary and agender people that have been postponed because of this, may be met with comparable transphobic outrage campaigning, and may not pass the parliament anymore before the next election, which is almost guaranteed to lead to an even more transphobic government again that will do fuckall for us. For example, health insurance covering gender affirming surgery is entirely up to goodwill at this point and needs entirely new legislation to be guaranteed again. Health insurerers are letting this slide for the time being, i get my bottom surgery payed for in spite of this problem and that seems to generally hold true, but it’s an extremely precarious situation when trans healthcare is under attack worldwide and your government drags its feet on providing a solid legal framework for it.