SelfID law passed in German parliament.

[Brefugee]

It's done.
636 votes
373 yea
251 nay
11 abstentions

Am going to assume that there will now be a long legal challenge. I want to scream.

I live in Bayern so very interested to see how it will play out here, outside of Munich that is. Bayern has already banned „gendern“ in public institutions - a so-called „inclusive“ language practice.

https://apnews.com/article/germany-gender-language-bavaria-change-school-grammar-8a0ae45ebf0134627221382d0bbb0ef0

Bayern has very different areas, it's not just Munich and the rest. Nuernberg, Erlangen, Augsburg, Regensburg, Wuerzburg (my hometown) all have large numbers of students and are quite different from the smaller towns and rural areas. Nuernberg has always (except once, I think) had SDP mayors and councils, contrary to the CSU dominated Bavarian governments.
Anytime I tried talking to Germans about this they think it's about people with a DSD.

Bayern is pretty good at interpreting federal rules in its own way. And it's not as if the current federal government is in a position to lean on the states.

I can see why the language stuff has become a flashpoint. The last spelling reform wasn't popular, and I still instinctively use the old spelling if I'm writing in German. This new bureaucratic language peppered with colons and asterisks to signal inclusivity just looks too stupid for anyone who's not a DEI professional.

I've noticed "gendern" also becoming an election issue in Thuringen. Between that, and the cops in Mecklenburg pulling that girl out of school to caution her about posting nationalist Smurf memes on TikTok, I'm starting to wonder whether the German centre-left is on some mission to consciously lose votes.

i have decided to use only a generic feminine version of writing, except for work stuff where we do "gendern" (I'm ok with that, but it is down to being a feminist and feeling excluded when there is a generic masculine form used. and to piss off people on twitter who think it's either because i forgot the * or because I'm a stupid foreigner who can't speak/write German or that I'm a hairy-legged womyn in dungarees)

It is... amusing.

I didn't mind so much when it was just "liebe FreundInnen", I've used that often enough, but I'm damned if I'm putting a * in the middle of a noun 😀

the * is used by screenreaders to differentiate between Freundinnen and FreundInnen.

I mean I'm perfectly happy to write "liebe Freundinnen, liebe Freunde", since that's what I say. It's not as if written German has a great aversion to being long winded.

Visually speaking, I know lots of younger people say they struggle to read Fraktur (which I've never had a problem with), but I really do find it hard to deal with a text that's peppered with symbols. It might be one of those cases where what's meant to be inclusive can actually exclude.

I think I mentioned this on a thread last year or so:
I was looking up a memorial site I wanted to visit. They have a cafe on site and it said “Sitzplätze innen”. My first immediate thought was “Why are they gendering seats?” until the penny dropped.

It will definitely be interesting to see how the law is applied in the various states.
For sure, Bayern will find its own way and Baden-Württemberg, while having a Green Ministerpräsident is also a bit more conservative.
But then, of course, MdB Ganserer is from Bavaria.

I've recently watched The Rise and Fall of the Nazis.

It just struck me as so similar. It starts fairly quiet then builds until it's big enough and feared enough that people who want to object are too afraid to.

It takes a while to realise that this isn't kindness to children but opening doors to people who least have their interests at heart.

The doors are being opened to men who ultimately gain access to children and women.

It's never failed to amaze me that women are left trying to close these doors and being harmed along the way, yet if husbands, fathers, and brothers spoke up against this cult it would be far easier to shut down.

I come across different types of men online and IRL. Many just have an underlying hate for women. When I've mentioned or read about trans women in women's sport their answers are always the same: feminists wanted equality, get on with it. These men don't like women and/or want us put in our place.

Yet surely they can't all be like that? We need to get them to look up from their newspapers, see, understand and act on the harm being done to their women and children.

There are a few men on these boards who get it, my DP gets it, and even my gay brother gets it. It's getting them to get off their arses and do something about it. They get it but don't do it. Maybe we should get a Nike campaign going to get them to just do it instead of not doing it.

I fear it will be an even harder slog for the women of Europe than it has been here. Even here it's only the battle that's been won. The war is still ongoing.

Bloody hell, Germany.

Well. I suppose this utter batshit insanity could finally be the one positive reason for being out of the EU? ‘Sex’ has become meaningless. If no sex, no sexism, no sexual assault? Definitely no single sex spaces. Truly the world went insane on this issue. No wonder that Dr Aiden person referred to Germany. Thank god for living on terf island.

If you missed SW's Bundestag speech, it's very good. She hits many of the FWR classics in just two and a half minutes.

Well done @Brefugee. Just checking - I trust you're aware of the Binnen-I being the non-queer form of gendering? The doyennes of German feminism, such as Alice Schwarzer or the linguist Luise Pusch, will only ever use this over the Genderstern. And Lordy we must all sound like a right group of nutters to non native speakers.

Whilst in the Netherlands the self id law has just been kicked to the kerb by NSC and BBB, two right of center parties that won big in the last Dutch elections. So there is something good in a country not voting for the left parties.

My main takeaway from this thread is, ‘the Germans reviewed their grammar and decided it wasn’t hard enough’. 😉

[psst. I'm not actually a native speaker. Very darned close tho]

I feel bad not using the * when I write after someone who uses a screen reader told me about it. Which is why I try to use a generic femininium now.

As for the pp with the EU comment above 🙄

#SorryNotSorry (I can say that now I'm actually German)

The EU angle will be interesting. Woo in the west will presumably exacerbate natural tensions with the East, Poland and Hungary in particular.

What I struggle with is "Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren", how do you "incorporate" the "Divers"?

By the way the first time I came across a job advert in a newspaper that had "M/W/D" I asked what the D stood for. My aunt rolled her eyes and said "divers", to which I then rolled my eyes and said "Well you're either one or the other".

So "Divers" is like ROW in sport, transport, data analysis and so on?

I cant wait for it to reach south east Asia where "Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren", translates as the bubbly sounding "tuan tuan dan puan puan".

Add in "divers" and you would get "tuan tuan dan puan puan dan lain lain lagi" (Plurals are formulated by saying the word twice.)

Not a native speaker, but close enough that when I lived in Bayern most of my daily conversation was in dialect...

And that's another question. The new innovations only really work in very formal written language. I suppose you could approximate them in spoken language if you're one of those Germans who talks like an editorial writer on the FAZ. But I'd feel pretty ridiculous trying to use queer gendering if I'm speaking Bairisch.

Most people I know write and say things like "hallo zusammen" and the Everyone is included.

You don't. It's been prohibited. Bonus points is if you can find some hideous gerund to replace it. That's if you want to scrape and bow to the blue haired crowd. I prefer to be part of the résistance and have deliberately expanded my usage of additive gendering. I also now make a point of explicitly talking about "beider" sexes rather than "der" (or heaven beware, "aller.")

The group "Sahra Wagenknecht" / split-off from "Die Linke" has been mentioned by PP already, but on the homepage of the Bundestag/Parliamament, you can see the results of the vote by name.
https://www.bundestag.de/parlament/plenum/abstimmung/abstimmung?id=910

Almost ironically (not), the topic was filed under "Women" ("Frauen").

The same problem and debate that is in the UK regarding voting Tory/Labour is happening in Germany as well: on one hand, the green and social and economic topics are very important, and the Conservatives have governed for decades before, with not very good outcomes, either.
The Conservatives were hindering women in different ways, for example not finally setting up enough kindergarden or pre-school places (school entry is at 6 years, not as early as in the UK), which often means families, or rather women, cannot choose whether they care for their children at home or go to work, but are foced to have one of the parents at home. Another aspect is the tax-system, which favours families with two unequal incomes and has never been fixed in decades.

Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (they said they'll get a new name once established, but will leave it like that at least until European Elections, which are soon) have different opinions on the Russia/Ukraine-war (more for negotiations and giving up), which affects people in Germany differently. Besides, The Left party is mostly a leftover / turnaround from socialist East-Germany pre-1989, which still affects some of their positions.

It is also possible that it's a political play, meaning parties will say that whatever they think gets them elected. So the Conservatives and AfD (far right and thus unelegible IMHO, they are already under observation by the police) will protest loudly for votes, that doesn't mean they'll later turn-about if it would serve them.

On the other hand, the self-ID issue is so vast and encompasses so many aspects of life and sets the path for the future, which I partly realiized thanks to the discussions on this board, that it may be necessary to set some topics aside and deal with them afterwards when it means winning this fight.

It is a very difficult decision.