Up until 2011, transgender German citizens who wished to legally change their gender had to submit to mandatory sterilization first.
Now, one transgender “man” (a biological woman) is suing the government and demanding an official apology for its “human rights abuses” against transgender people.
Reuters reports:
When German authorities insisted Tsepo Bollwinkel get sterilized in order to be legally considered a man 25 years ago, he was “eager to follow the rules, even if they sounded insane.
Now Bollwinkel, a 58-year-old empowerment coach, wants compensation for himself and potentially thousands of other trans people who underwent mandatory sterilization to change their sex on identity documents before legal reform in 2011.
Under Germany’s Transsexuals Act of 1980, a mental health diagnosis was required, alongside proof of sterility and gender reassignment surgery, which opponents reject as distressing, stigmatizing, and often prohibitively expensive.
At least 10,000 people were sterilized prior to 2011, according to the Berlin-based Bundesverband Trans* (BvT), a transgender advocacy group.
Now, Bollwinkel’s goal is to make Germans aware of the country’s “dark history” of compulsory sterilization—which by no means ended with the fall of the Nazi regime.
Several other nations in Europe still require transgender people to undergo surgery and sterilization or be diagnosed with a mental disorder in order to have their new gender legally recognized, Reuters adds.
In 2018, Sweden became the first country in the world to compensate hundreds of transgender people who had to undergo sterilization to get their change of gender recognized, to the tune of 225,000 kronor ($23,882.)
“I am not interested in money,” Bollwinkel said. “But in Germany, like in other European societies, recognition has to come in the shape of euros to be considered real.”
Another German transgender person, a man who believes he is a woman, told Reuters that the law robbed him of his chance to start a family when he was sterilized 30 years ago, pointing to the growing number of transgender people choosing to keep their reproductive organs in order to have children.
“They just could not conceive that a man could get pregnant or that a woman could make another woman pregnant,” the “woman” said. “They stole that from us. …There was no justification.”
Reuters links the sterilization of transgender people in Europe to the ethnic Roma (commonly referred to as gypsies) who were subjected to forced sterilization under Nazi Germany’s “racial purity” laws, as well as “thousands of women in Japan, Sweden and dozens of U.S. states during the 20th century whose governments did not want them to reproduce.”
While the idea that the government would grant itself any authority to sterilize otherwise law-abiding citizens is atrocious, one can’t help but wonder why anyone would comply with such an insane law just to be able to have an “F” or an “M” on their identifying documents.
People with gender dysphoria should not be subjected to torturous medical procedures of any sort—that’s why we so strongly oppose the increasing normalization of “gender transition” therapies and surgeries that are incredibly risky and dangerously under-studied.
They need to be treated, they need to be healed. Until the global medical community shuts out the influence of the left and its celebration of sexual perversion and starts coming up with real solutions to make the individual’s mind match their body—not the other way around—we will continue to see imperfect solutions like this.
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