Since November 2024, anyone in Germany has been able to change their registered sex and first name at the civil registry office by simply notifying a civil registry official: no doctor, no expert assessment, no judge overseeing the process. The Selbstbestimmungsgesetz was intended to give transgender people a quick and dignified route. Two years later, that same route has also been used by very different people — and this is now prompting three German states to propose changes.

What the law actually regulates

The Selbstbestimmungsgesetz (SBGG) replaced the old Transsexuellengesetz and removed the requirements that were still part of it: no more psychological assessment, judicial review or medical certificate. A notification to the civil registry office is sufficient, followed by a three-month waiting period before the change takes effect. At the time, the law was presented as a correction to an outdated, medicalised system. Criticism came immediately: among others, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls pointed out that the law makes no provision for the consequences for women-only spaces, while fully equating registered sex with gender identity.

Two cases that fuelled the debate

What had until recently been a largely theoretical debate took on a concrete form this year through two cases. In the first, a man with a far-right background registered as a woman in circumstances that appeared to affect how criminal proceedings against him would be handled. In the second, a police commissioner registered as a woman and then applied for a position in which schemes for women in leadership roles worked to his advantage. Neither case involved a transition in the usual sense — in both instances, the change in registration appeared to be primarily a means of achieving another goal.

The proposal: giving officials room to say no

The justice ministers of Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia — all three members of the CDU — therefore want civil registry officials to be given the power to reject a notification when it is clearly intended for self-promotion, personal gain or to ridicule the law and the groups it protects. They want to submit the proposal at the next spring conference of Germany’s justice ministers. Supporters of the current law point out that most notifications have nothing to do with abuse and fear that allowing each official to decide whether a notification is ‘genuine’ would reintroduce the very barrier the law was intended to remove. For critics, that is precisely the heart of the problem: a law that bases identity entirely on self-declaration has no built-in way to distinguish abuse from a genuine request.