Every time it feels like we’ve hit peak woke, some new horror comes along to upstage the last. This time, it’s a story about a Swiss man who is facing a prison sentence for making a ‘transphobic’ social-media post. As we reported, citing Reddux, Emanuel Brünisholz, a wind instrument repairman from Burgdorf, refused to pay his fine for expressing a supposedly offensive view on Facebook and, as a result, will now be serving a ten-day stint in jail this December.
You might be wondering what exactly Brünisholz could have said to receive jail time. Did he maybe threaten a transgender person, harass an activist, or call for violence against a group of people? Not even close. In 2022, he wrote a comment in response to Swiss National Council member Andreas Glarner:
If you dig up LGBTQI people after 200 years, you’ll only find men and women based on their skeletons. Everything else is a mental illness promoted through the curriculum.
For this, he was reported to police—allegedly by several activists and journalists—and interrogated by officers in August 2023. When asked what his intent with the post was, he explained: “Well, that those who think there’s not just man and woman, I want to tell them that there’s only man and woman.” He was also asked about his opinion of the LGBT community, to which he replied: “Nothing, absolutely nothing. It’s an extremist bunch. They want to silence me.”
What Brünisholz wrote was clearly nothing more than a biological fact—it is entirely possible to look at a skeleton and determine whether it is male or female. So why did saying this out loud turn him into a criminal? The Swiss justice system decided that, under Article 261bis of the Swiss Criminal Code, his comment constituted incitement to hatred. This law was expanded in 2020 to include the vague category of “sexual identities.”
In a sane country, this case would never have reached the prosecutors’ office. But it was nonetheless decided by a Swiss court that Brünisholz had “publicly belittled the group of LGBT(Q)I people based on their sexual orientation and in a way that violates human dignity.” As such, he was slapped with a fine of 500 Swiss francs.
Brünisholz, however, refused to accept this. He appealed the ruling in December 2023 at Emmental-Oberaargau Regional Court but was once again found guilty. The appeal also cost him a further 600 francs in court fees. Despite this, Brünisholz is still declining to pay the fine. He has instead opted to receive a ten-day jail sentence, which is set to begin in December this year.
His decision to sit in a prison cell for ten days rather than pay a fine for stating scientific facts highlights the absurdity of this case. It shouldn’t be controversial to say that sex is biologically determined. It is quite literally the job of archaeologists and forensic scientists to examine bones and judge what sex the deceased person was—this is how we can find the identities of crime victims or learn about the lives of our long-dead ancestors. To pretend otherwise is pure delusion.
Incredibly, though, there exists a set of archaeologists who really do believe that we can’t—or shouldn’t—determine a person’s sex from their skeleton. Some historians are dead set on rewriting the past, arguing that ancient people could have been ‘misgendered.’ In one ludicrous example of this, a PhD candidate and tutor at the University of Liverpool claimed last year that 7th-century Anglo-Saxon warriors might actually have been transgender men. His reasoning was that, although some of the remains, discovered on England’s south coast, had been previously identified as female, they were found with items that would have historically been associated with men—such as swords, spearheads, and shields. This, apparently, could only mean that the Anglo-Saxons living over 1,300 years ago had decided to identify as trans. This particular academic believes that “the lens of trans theory and the 21st-century language of ‘transness’ has the potential to improve historians’ understanding of early Anglo-Saxon gender.”
Others have gone further, arguing that archaeologists and anthropologists should stop classifying human remains as male or female altogether. We couldn’t possibly know, the argument goes, how these long-dead people identified and what pronouns they used. And it would be a grave offence to potentially misgender a Viking warrior or Roman centurion who has been dead for a thousand years. Some historians have suggested that all ancient skeletons be labelled as ‘nonbinary’ or ‘gender neutral’ in order to avoid inadvertently insulting them.
Outside the batty world of ‘queer archaeology,’ however, most right-thinking people understand that humans can very much be sorted into one of two biological categories. There are always outliers, of course, but these are few and far between. And even in these instances, the bones of intersex individuals carry markers that indicate their dominant sex. But, in the vast majority of cases, skeletons are very clearly either male or female. Certainly, none of them are ever ‘nonbinary.’
This is what makes Brünisholz’s punishment so absurd and so insulting. People are being coerced, under threat of legal retribution, to pretend that the truth is optional. We’ve seen this far too many times before. Remember Isabella Cêpa, the Brazilian feminist who was forced to seek refuge in Europe after she faced criminal charges for ‘misgendering’ a trans politician? Mizuno could possibly be handed a 25-year prison sentence in her native Brazil, all because she referred to a man as a man. Brazil’s bizarre anti-discrimination laws treat transphobia as a kind of ‘social racism,’ and offences carry hefty penalties.
Or look at Enoch Burke, the Irish schoolteacher who landed himself in prison because he refused to use a pupil’s preferred pronouns. Back in 2022, Burke said he would not comply with a request to call a male student ‘they,’ because it conflicted with his religious beliefs. He was subsequently suspended from teaching but continued to turn up to the school as normal. As a result, Burke was arrested and has been fined a total of €225,000.
When ordinary people can be fined into oblivion or even face jail time for stating scientific facts, the truth has been well and truly subordinated to ideology. We are being compelled to lie in order to protect the feelings of a vanishingly small group of delusional activists. But criminalising reality doesn’t make it any less true. Threatening people into pretending that men can miraculously turn into women doesn’t mean they actually can. Facts cannot bend to feelings, and laws cannot rewrite biology, no matter how much the trans lobby wants them to.
Switzerland Is Criminalising Common Sense
Chris Charles on Unsplash
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Every time it feels like we’ve hit peak woke, some new horror comes along to upstage the last. This time, it’s a story about a Swiss man who is facing a prison sentence for making a ‘transphobic’ social-media post. As we reported, citing Reddux, Emanuel Brünisholz, a wind instrument repairman from Burgdorf, refused to pay his fine for expressing a supposedly offensive view on Facebook and, as a result, will now be serving a ten-day stint in jail this December.
You might be wondering what exactly Brünisholz could have said to receive jail time. Did he maybe threaten a transgender person, harass an activist, or call for violence against a group of people? Not even close. In 2022, he wrote a comment in response to Swiss National Council member Andreas Glarner:
For this, he was reported to police—allegedly by several activists and journalists—and interrogated by officers in August 2023. When asked what his intent with the post was, he explained: “Well, that those who think there’s not just man and woman, I want to tell them that there’s only man and woman.” He was also asked about his opinion of the LGBT community, to which he replied: “Nothing, absolutely nothing. It’s an extremist bunch. They want to silence me.”
What Brünisholz wrote was clearly nothing more than a biological fact—it is entirely possible to look at a skeleton and determine whether it is male or female. So why did saying this out loud turn him into a criminal? The Swiss justice system decided that, under Article 261bis of the Swiss Criminal Code, his comment constituted incitement to hatred. This law was expanded in 2020 to include the vague category of “sexual identities.”
In a sane country, this case would never have reached the prosecutors’ office. But it was nonetheless decided by a Swiss court that Brünisholz had “publicly belittled the group of LGBT(Q)I people based on their sexual orientation and in a way that violates human dignity.” As such, he was slapped with a fine of 500 Swiss francs.
Brünisholz, however, refused to accept this. He appealed the ruling in December 2023 at Emmental-Oberaargau Regional Court but was once again found guilty. The appeal also cost him a further 600 francs in court fees. Despite this, Brünisholz is still declining to pay the fine. He has instead opted to receive a ten-day jail sentence, which is set to begin in December this year.
His decision to sit in a prison cell for ten days rather than pay a fine for stating scientific facts highlights the absurdity of this case. It shouldn’t be controversial to say that sex is biologically determined. It is quite literally the job of archaeologists and forensic scientists to examine bones and judge what sex the deceased person was—this is how we can find the identities of crime victims or learn about the lives of our long-dead ancestors. To pretend otherwise is pure delusion.
Incredibly, though, there exists a set of archaeologists who really do believe that we can’t—or shouldn’t—determine a person’s sex from their skeleton. Some historians are dead set on rewriting the past, arguing that ancient people could have been ‘misgendered.’ In one ludicrous example of this, a PhD candidate and tutor at the University of Liverpool claimed last year that 7th-century Anglo-Saxon warriors might actually have been transgender men. His reasoning was that, although some of the remains, discovered on England’s south coast, had been previously identified as female, they were found with items that would have historically been associated with men—such as swords, spearheads, and shields. This, apparently, could only mean that the Anglo-Saxons living over 1,300 years ago had decided to identify as trans. This particular academic believes that “the lens of trans theory and the 21st-century language of ‘transness’ has the potential to improve historians’ understanding of early Anglo-Saxon gender.”
Others have gone further, arguing that archaeologists and anthropologists should stop classifying human remains as male or female altogether. We couldn’t possibly know, the argument goes, how these long-dead people identified and what pronouns they used. And it would be a grave offence to potentially misgender a Viking warrior or Roman centurion who has been dead for a thousand years. Some historians have suggested that all ancient skeletons be labelled as ‘nonbinary’ or ‘gender neutral’ in order to avoid inadvertently insulting them.
Outside the batty world of ‘queer archaeology,’ however, most right-thinking people understand that humans can very much be sorted into one of two biological categories. There are always outliers, of course, but these are few and far between. And even in these instances, the bones of intersex individuals carry markers that indicate their dominant sex. But, in the vast majority of cases, skeletons are very clearly either male or female. Certainly, none of them are ever ‘nonbinary.’
This is what makes Brünisholz’s punishment so absurd and so insulting. People are being coerced, under threat of legal retribution, to pretend that the truth is optional. We’ve seen this far too many times before. Remember Isabella Cêpa, the Brazilian feminist who was forced to seek refuge in Europe after she faced criminal charges for ‘misgendering’ a trans politician? Mizuno could possibly be handed a 25-year prison sentence in her native Brazil, all because she referred to a man as a man. Brazil’s bizarre anti-discrimination laws treat transphobia as a kind of ‘social racism,’ and offences carry hefty penalties.
Or look at Enoch Burke, the Irish schoolteacher who landed himself in prison because he refused to use a pupil’s preferred pronouns. Back in 2022, Burke said he would not comply with a request to call a male student ‘they,’ because it conflicted with his religious beliefs. He was subsequently suspended from teaching but continued to turn up to the school as normal. As a result, Burke was arrested and has been fined a total of €225,000.
When ordinary people can be fined into oblivion or even face jail time for stating scientific facts, the truth has been well and truly subordinated to ideology. We are being compelled to lie in order to protect the feelings of a vanishingly small group of delusional activists. But criminalising reality doesn’t make it any less true. Threatening people into pretending that men can miraculously turn into women doesn’t mean they actually can. Facts cannot bend to feelings, and laws cannot rewrite biology, no matter how much the trans lobby wants them to.
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