COMMENTARY

Germany’s Trans Laws are a Threat to Women, Free Speech, and Common Sense

A women-only gym owner is facing charges after rejecting a membership application from a man calling himself ‘Laura’ and identifying as a woman.

Caley Vanular on Unsplash

A feminist charged with “insult” for calling a man identifying as a woman a “man” was told she should have used the phrase “woman with a penis.”

The ordeal that began for Doris Lange following this incident continues to this day. First, she received a letter from Germany’s Anti-Discrimination Commissioner, Ferda Ataman, who demanded that she pay 1,000 euros in “compensation for the pain and suffering” she had allegedly caused the “transwoman.” Alongside this, the rejected applicant—who goes by the name Laura—sued her for discrimination. Lange’s case, which has occupied the courts since 2024, is far from concluded, and she is still awaiting a verdict.

The case drew the organisation ‘Frauenheldinnen’ into action when the group posted an open letter in support of Lange. Thus began the next legal ordeal: that of Eva Engelke, the chairwoman of Frauenheldinnen, who was charged with insult for referring to ‘Laura’ as a man—including using the “wrong” pronoun, i.e., “he.” A written statement in which Engelke wrote that Lange was being accused merely because she “steadfastly protected her clients from a potential voyeur” was also interpreted as offensive and discriminatory.

Though Engelke was finally acquitted—which is good—her case shows how out of control the transgender spell cast over parts of Germany’s elite has become. “252 pages of case files and two witness hearings later, it is clear: it is not an insult to refer to a man as a man,” she writes in an article following her acquittal. The amount of time and money she lost as a result is significant. She describes the situation as “bureaucratic madness—an abuse of criminal law as a tool to enforce silence.” Frauenheldinnen has promised to continue the fight by telling the truth—including in relation to the Erlangen fitness studio.

Undoubtedly, Germany’s anti-discrimination officer and the many MPs who have campaigned for ever-stricter trans laws feel they are pursuing a noble goal—one that marks them out as especially progressive, particularly since any opposition to transgender ideology has come to be associated with the far right.

The most common justification for this view is the claim that transgender persons have become one of Germany’s most oppressed minorities. In their eyes, self-ID laws, pronoun mandates, and ‘affirmation’ prioritise subjective identity and are thus a marker of liberalism. Dissent, on the other hand, is framed as an attempt to uphold an ‘outdated gender binary.’ For politicians, this has the additional benefit of appealing to a certain section of urban, younger voters and NGOs (good in times when other coalitions are becoming increasingly frail).

In a recent parliamentary debate, for example, one MP of the conservative CDU (Jan-Marco Luczak) claimed that 40% of the queer community could not openly live out their sexual identity for fear of violence. “We live in a free country, but these people are not free,” he said, adding that “strong signals” from politicians were needed.

It goes without saying that trans people should not be exposed to physical violence. But Luczak would have been more honest had he mentioned that the biggest portion of the alleged rise in violence, as reported in the crime statistics, relates to “verbal violence,” such as causing offence. According to one police statistic from 2024, 158 men and 41 women became victims of actual physical violence. (Out of an estimated total of over nine million people who identify as ‘queer,’ this is a number that warrants police attention but hardly the type of high-level parliamentary alarm expressed).

More importantly, our politicians’ calls for action rest on deeply flawed reasoning. Trans activists are no Rosa Parks fighting against unjust segregation—no transgender person is banned from public transport or other services or spaces. Nor are they the modern-day Magnus Hirschfelds, fighting for the abolition of a restrictive law that criminalises consensual sex between men; transgender persons can have sex with whomever they want, provided it is consensual and does not involve children.

Indeed, far from being victims of state persecution, transgender people have been afforded special state protections, as the case of Laura illustrates. Which other German, one might ask, would receive such institutional support when demanding entry to a private space designed for a certain community?

Trans ideology has increasingly been wielded against ordinary people and society at large. Far from fighting for the right to use a fitness studio, ‘Laura’s’ aim is coercion. If fitness were truly the goal, he could have chosen one of several other studios in the city, many of which are unisex.

Instead, it had to be a women-only studio—because what he is really after is recognition. I feel like a woman; therefore, I am a woman, and I have the right to demand that everyone else see me as such—this is his message.

This type of ‘living out one’s sexuality’ is not liberating but regressive. It is an affront to common sense and to women’s rights to safe spaces. In this particular case, it is also a blatant attack on free enterprise. Doris Lange has run her women’s fitness club—which many of her customers chose specifically for the protection it affords from unwanted male attention—for over 30 years.

Frauenheldinnen is right to emphasise that it’s the law, and not ‘Laura,’ that is their main target—even if he has been initiating legal proceedings against anyone who dares to call him a man for years. (The most recent case involves the private broadcaster NiuS, which was ordered to pay €6,000 in compensation for referring to Laura as a man.)

Germany’s anti-discrimination laws and Self-Determination Act go far beyond what should be acceptable in a free, democratic country.

It begins, of course, with the risks of knowingly ‘misgendering’ someone—something the new law explicitly punishes. Engelke reports that when she asked how she should have referred to her accuser, she was told by the opposing side that she should have called him a “woman with a penis.” Though this would clearly have been nonsensical, it would at least have been legal.

But what kind of state passes laws that provide the basis for such surrealism? Though Eva Engelke was—fortunately—acquitted, it is the very existence of such laws that should concern us: laws that demand citizens refrain from asserting what they know to be true for fear of offending a trans activist.

This brings to mind Hannah Arendt’s famous study The Origins of Totalitarianism, in which she described how societies slip into totalitarianism. Totalitarian regimes, she explained, were not satisfied with propaganda alone but needed to constantly “realise their ideological doctrines and practical lies.” It was not enough, for example, to assert in the face of contrary reality that unemployment did not exist; the regime would “abolish unemployment benefits as part of the propaganda.” In a similar vein, it is not enough merely to declare that a woman with a penis can exist—he must also be granted the right to join a women-only fitness studio.

We can only hope that, as in the case of Eva Engelke, Doris Lange will also be acquitted. But even that should not satisfy us. It is more than shameful that it is left to brave women like Lange and Engelke to fight for all of our rights to say what we believe and know to be true. Germany’s trans laws are a threat to women, free speech, and common sense—and they must be abolished.

Sabine Beppler-Spahl is a writer for europeanconservative.com based in Berlin. Sabine is the chair of the German liberal think tank Freiblickinstitut, and the Germany correspondent for Spiked. She has written for several German magazines and newspapers.