Who's sexist now?

Hi there,

My latest exclusive newsletter for subscribers looks at a new law on sexual self-identification and asks how much longer Germany’s coalition government can survive.

Here is an extract:

Since the start of November, Germans have been able to change their sex with a dash of a pen at their local registry office.

This change comes after the Bundestag voted to free the definition of male and female from the constraints of biology back in April. 

With the self-identification law now in force, we are all now free to decide for ourselves whether we are male, female, or to belong to no sex at all. Your sex can be changed back and forth as often as you want as long as you don’t do it twice in one year.

I have to admit that I don’t quite have the intellectual dexterity to wrap my head around this revolution. 

Does it mean that sex is simply a social construct that has lost its societal relevance - in which case why keep it in the law at all? 

Or is this a recognition that we aren’t just born with the physical features of a sex, but some immaterial “knowledge” that is more significant than simply having a penis or a vagina. If so, this would appear to be an admission of the existence of the soul - surely it should be followed by an official recognition of the existence of God?

Luckily for dullards like me, we pay billions of euros every year for our public broadcasters to clear these things up for us.

National news network Tagesschau did its best, explaining that the ability to entirely remove one’s sex from official documentation is for people who are “neither male, nor female, but somehow both and at the same time neither.”

Which brings to mind the case of the Erding Therme, a Bavarian spa and water park that got in trouble a few years back for banning women from using its fastest slide.

The spa’s X-Treme Faser ride hurtles guests down to the water at speeds of up to 72 km/h. 

Unfortunately, an attraction that was meant to get the adrenaline flowing proved to cause a much more tangible release. Within months of its opening, half a dozen women had been hospitalised after the force of the impact collided with female physiology.

The ride soon took on the nickname “the blood slide" and the spa appealed to women to follow the safety instructions and keep their legs crossed.

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Sincerely,

Jörg Luyken