lady-vetinari

[lady-vetinari]

rereading a midsummer night's dream and the amount of trust the craftsmen have for the nobles' reading comprehension is just hilarious

"i wonder if they will understand that i'm actually not a lion" "i think we should make it clear that i'm a person playing a wall and not actually a wall" "are they in fact at all familiar with the concept of acting"

[lady-vetinari]

Tear them apart!

[source]

[lady-vetinari]

In 2011 an elderly german trans woman filed a lawsuit regarding the Transsexuellengesetz (TSG) that regulated change of civil status and name for trans people. It required you (among other things) to get two indepedent psychological evaluations, to have had genital surgery and to be "provably" sterile. The trans woman filing the lawsuit had planned to enter a civil partnership with her partner, a woman, which would have been impossible at the time; they would have had to marry (which was a purely heterosexual thing back then I swear I'm not old) with her deadname and everything in the register. The lawsuit concerned the fact that due to her health, getting surgery was out of the question for her. The german constitutional court ruled the requirements of having to have had surgery and being sterile unconstitutional discriminatory, struck them from the law and advised the law makers to draft up a new law. All's well that ends well, right?

Well, at this point I would like to point out, that, apparently, according to that reasoning, requiring trans people by law to be sterile was not thought to be discriminatory against trans people as such, but only against those who would not be able to be permanently sterilized.

Anyway, the court demanded a new law to be put in place, and nothing happened for 12 years. Only last year a new law (the Selbstbestimmungsgesetz, self determination law) was drafted and finally implemented this year, in 2024.

At this point I should probably mention that these laws exlusively regulate name change (which in germany is much more difficult than a lot of other places) and civil status, not medical transition. Regulating medical transition is up to health care providers and health insurances, which in general tend to sort of follow international standards. So in general, if you want to get on hormones the official way, you need a diagnosis that until the implementation of the ICD 11 on January 1st 2022 was called Transsexualismus MzF/FzM (Transsexualism MtF/FtM) and was categorized as a personality disorder. Ironically, often psychologists that specialize in trans people tend to immediately slap you with the diagnosis when they find out that you're desperate enough to DIY, because from their perspective it's of course safer to take hormones under supervision, though that really depends on how sympathetic your psychologist is. Anyway, being trans used to be a personality disorder until two years ago.

So, back to the Selbstbestimmungsgesetz. The core of the self determination law is basically the abolishment of the psychologicalizing and medical requirements to change your name and civil status, which is good. However. It guarantees much less rights than the TSG once that process is over.

Both laws, in theory, make it a finable offense to reveal a trans persons trans status, if the person in question has changed their name and sex entry through the respectuve law. But the Selbstbestimmungsgesetz, while raising the fine, undermines this in several ways. In the draft of the law was originally a paragraph that required the citizen's centre where you filed for the change to inform every single law enforcement and intelligence agancy of your name change. You know, just in case you're a criminal, and not at all to have the state have lists of trans people. This was struck from the final version, because it wouldn't have lasted a second in court.

What was not struck from the law, however, were a paragraph specifically targeting refugees, and two paragraphs specifically targeting trans women:

The paragraph targeting refugees is, sadly, an accurate representation of the rising nationalism and racism, and typical in how callously it is implemented in law. If a refugee, or any other foreigner, changes their name and gender per law, it can, up to two months after fact, be nullified, if the person is about to get deported. In my opinion this is obviously done to stop appeals against deportation that are based on the fact that it is illegal to deport a person to a country that is currently persecuting a group that that person belongs to, by detransitioning them on paper (though I am not a lawyer and thus can't say for sure, but like it is extremely blatant).

There is another paragraph that is entitled "effects of changing name and entry of sex" that explicitly says that the legal sex and name are required to be used in legal relations but not in matters concerning sports, health and more general, the body. A lot of ink has been spilled about how just assuming that a person on HRT will react to every medical problem and intervention in the same way as a perisex cis person who had been assigned the same gender at birth can be very dangerous, so I won't rehash that argument here. It gets worse, though. The paragraph also states that the Hausrecht (I'm not sure how to translate this as I'm not the lawyer, but among other things it's the right of the owner business or place to manage who is allowed to attend and how they have to behave etc etc) is unaffected by the Selbstbestimmungsgesetz and completely up to the individual/organization, basically implying that discrimination against trans people is not discrimination. The draft of the law comes with a paper expanding on the reasoning of the law. The part that justifies that section talks exclusively about trans women. The most prominent example uses a hypothetical women's sauna and states that the law justifies banning trans women from establishments like this, and women's shelters, of course. Explicitly mentioned is a legal reasoning called "desire for protection of the intimate personal realm and personal security". Just to be clear: this is the german legislative authority explicitly saying that the mere presence of a trans woman ought to be treated like the presence of someone who has made actionable threatened or harassed you. The paragraph itself can be employed against all trans people equally, but the official reasoning is to keep trans women out of women's spaces, and, because of how it is worded, public spaces as well.

The other paragraph that singles out trans women concerns military service: if you change your sex entry within two months before a war breaks out, it will be nullified if that nullification makes you male and thus draftable. It doesn't say whether trans men will be drafted, though. In this case transitioning to be a woman or to be divers (if you were wondering, the three legal genders: male, female, diverse), is explicitly cast as a threat to the safety and orderly functioning of the state. By transitioning I am depriving the state of cannonfodder and thereby threatening its very security.

People on tumblr and twitter have a tendency to talk about gender and identity as completely divorced from reality. Whether I chose to identify as a trans woman or not, psychologists diagnosed me with transsexualism anyway. I never had a choice about this. If somebody has a problem with me in public the german state, with the new law, explicitly and actively encourages them to get the people responsible for the space in question to remove me from it, simply for existing. And it encourages those people in positions of authority to accommodate them. To be trite, I have to consider this every fucking single time I take a piss in a public toilet, which is basically every time I have to be outside for longer than like 2 hours, because even I have to hydrate sometimes. The number of trans women that outright refuse to go see a doctor for almost anything, even unrelated to the law, just because of how they are being treated, is distressingly high. For a lot of us there just doesn't seem to be a point.

In 2021 an iranian trans woman, Ella, commited suicide by lighting herself on fire at the Alexanderplatz. She had been living in germany since 2015. Nazis regularly deface her grave. If you look at the Selbstbestimmungsgesetz you can see the nationalist, racist and transmisogynist attitudes that led to her death enshrined in law.

It's not like the Selbstbestimmungsgesetz is all bad, but I find it hard to appreciate its good point. If you compare it to the old TSG, what sticks out to me is that the TSG required sterilization in addition to surgery and everything. Maybe I'm just so fixated on that because everybody is usually (and with good reason) exclusively talking about the two expert evaluations that were required, quite expensive, and paved the way for a lot of harassment and inappropriate behaviour towards trans people. But in my opinion the sterilization reflects an old attitude towards queer people: eugenics. We should not have children or families. The law was implemented by the BRD in 1981, but you can clearly still see the underlying logic inherited from the early pseudo-scientific ideologies that also motivated the nazis: the so called "bloodline" should be kept clean. Sorry. I hate myself for typing out these words. There could also be a different justification for it, namely to guarantee the integrity of the sexes as distinct categories, but that is not less eugenicist, as it too is about encouraging patrilinear, heterosexual reproduction and discouraging everything else and sterilizing anybody who doesn't fit that pattern. But two things can be true at the same time.

The Selbstbestimmungsgesetz in contrast does not attempt to regulate reproduction as far as I remember (though laws about gay and lesbian parenthood are still extremely restrictive). Instead it seems to be driven by culture war concerns: open hostility towards refugees and a lot of attention paid to the supposed dangers trans people in general and trans women in particular pose to society. Pandering to neo-fascists and TERFs, who decry the law as an evil, decadent poisoning of society anyway.

[lady-vetinari]

[lady-vetinari]

i don't like john mulaney because he invited dave chappelle on stage with him after deeply praising him at the height of the transphobic controversy around him after his netflix special but i cant say stuff like hope he dies lest people think i'm in the camp of people that hate him because he got a divorce for some reason

[lady-vetinari]

oh shit get mystery dungeon'd

@savedatateam

[lady-vetinari]

is this anything.

[lady-vetinari]

Imagine sucking so much as a fellow politician that the guy known for having No Backbone™ snaps and develops one but specifically for roasting you on live television

[lady-vetinari]

[lady-vetinari]

[lady-vetinari]

not to be overshadowed by the US election results the german government just decided to file for divorce

[lady-vetinari]

hey if you're trans in the us i love you. hey if you're queer in the us i love you. hey if you're a person of color in the us i love you. hey if you're a woman in the us i love you. hey if you're disabled in the us i love you. i love you i love you i love you

[lady-vetinari]

Regardless of how tomorrow goes, I want to tell every trans person on here one thing.

You have to live. You have to live. Even if by some godforsaken reason he wins, you have to live. You have to keep pushing on and living loud and proud. It might be hard, but you absolutely must live.

We will do what trans people have done since the beginning of time. We will resist. We will find our communities and we will thrive, even if it has to be in the shadows. We will live and we will resist no matter what comes tomorrow.

Get out there and vote!!! Ensure a bright future for yourself and your brothers and sisters!! GET OUT THERE AND VOTE BLUE DOWN THE BALLOT!!

[lady-vetinari]

Smutty fanfiction is so great, I wish sexual attraction was real

[lady-vetinari]

[lady-vetinari]

unstoppable force (i want to see this tragic character survive and heal) vs immovable object (their death was the most thematic and narratively satisfying resolution possible for their character arc and anything less than death just feels cheap)

[lady-vetinari]

kritisch das tagesgeschehen beobachten reicht nicht mehr ich muss christian lindner beißen