The AfD submitted, late on Thursday evening in a first reading, a bill (PDF) that would make it practically impossible for providers of child and youth welfare to support transgender, intersex, and nonbinary youths. The draft had only been presented this week (TheColu.mn reported).
Specifically, a portion of a passage in the Social Code Book VIII would be struck, a passage that for years has required funded programs to “take into account the different life situations of girls and boys as well as transgender, nonbinary, and intersex young people, to reduce disadvantages and to promote gender equality” (§ 9 No. 3 SGB VIII). The AfD wants “to finally put an end to that today,” said Birgit Bessin, the party’s notoriously anti-queer deputy, in her speech.
Because the AfD regards the consideration passage with its “three words” as a “legal authorization to tell children and adolescents at state expense that their biological bodies are their mistake, and that biology—the true biology—constitutes a right-wing conspiracy theory.”
Hate speech followed by bans
Now the practical argument that youths would be indoctrinated by declaring themselves queer is actually more a conspiracy than anything else. Bessin carried the whole program forward: case numbers have risen “because a fad and an activist scene have run into institutions that prefer affirming to asking questions.” The deputy spoke of “peer pressure,” “transgender re-education programs,” a “state-financed production of patients,” or an “annual gender shopping”: “They want to push new pronouns, trigger social transitions, and certainly not merely accompany.” Children should “not become the test subjects of adult fashions.”
The AfD seeks “a return to normalcy and the closing of the divisive transgender freak show,” Bessin said. In practice, the AfD draft would not only strike a single paragraph from the Social Code but add new provisions that prohibit in youth work, youth social work, and school social work the “promotion or dissemination of gender identity concepts that deviate from biological sex.”
It is “absolutely insane in which direction this country is headed,” Bessin continued (in a concrete reference that ultimately concerns only the “consideration,” i.e., acceptance, of queer teenagers). “And that’s why we need to clear this up here. Article 6 of the Basic Law says: Education is primarily the responsibility of the parents.”
Motion referred to committee
Other speakers in the debate did not address the AfD’s speech or the motion. The discussion was bundled with a government plan for broad reforms in child and youth welfare. Both motions were referred to the committees.
In an era when even the magazine “Emma” runs a cover warning of a “trans mania in schools,” AfD-era harassment has become almost routine. It is not surprising either: “There must be no indoctrination of children and youths by transgender cults, early sexuality, and gender ideology,” already stated in the AfD platform for the federal elections. “Any government funding for this must be cut.” The party still lacks a majority to implement its rhetoric.
