Dr. Dana (Dominik) Mahr is known above all as an obsessive misogynist agitator against the biologist Marie-Luise Vollbrecht and as someone who misrepresents his own sex as well as the biological facts. These things are connected, which I pointed out in my reply to an article of his, which as always bore involuntary witness to these connections, and in which I referred to him throughout with the correct pronouns, i.e. the pronouns that correspond to his actual sex. I responded to his attempt to suppress this legally, in other words to compel me to lie in order to satisfy his own psychological needs, with a request for a negative declaratory judgment. This legal request was dismissed by the 19th Civil Chamber of the Regional Court of Bielefeld by the judges Uhlhorn, Brock and Roloff.
The background of the dispute and the double-standard of the judiciary
In order to understand how outrageous and Orwellian this verdict is, we should recall the background of this dispute. Ms. Vollbrecht, together with four co-authors, including myself, published an article in Welt criticizing the false and child-endangering reporting of the public broadcasters on the biology of sex and the transgender issue – an article that in the meantime has the support of over 300 scientists. Shortly afterwards a lecture of Ms. Vollbrecht’s at Humboldt University Berlin was cancelled under pressure from transgender ideologists. This stirred up considerable attention internationally as well, leading to skirmishes in the courthouse as well as on Twitter, where Ms. Vollbrecht explained, among other things, that the constant attempts of transgender ideologues to represent transpeople as victims of National Socialism makes a mockery of the true victims. To which Mahr tweeted: “I’ve never put up a hashtag for trending before. But #MarieDeniesNaziCrimes”.
Ms. Vollbrecht sought to defend herself juridically against this hashtag. The Cologne Higher Regional Court, however (whose verdict is on file with the author) allowed its dissemination by transgender ideologues. Not, however (as transgender activists had been lying internationally) because the court determined that “transpeople” had in fact been systematically persecuted, but because it afforded them a private language, so to speak. According to the court, they wish to attain “the sovereign power of interpretation over the concept of ‘Nazi crimes’” and “thus modify the general use of language”, namely in favor of a “factual dissolution of any distinction between … persecution of transpeople (as such) by National Socialists and the ‘Nazi crimes’ according to the prior linguistic understanding…” And thus, happily sailing past the defamatory intentions of the transgender ideologues, the court concludes “that on a correct appreciation of the statement objected to by the plaintiff, it is not claimed that the plaintiff is a ‘classical’ Holocaust denier.” They didn’t mean it that way, the court said. They were just playing.
Thus in conjunction with the verdict rendered in my own case, we see the following picture emerge: on the one hand, the German judiciary allows men in dresses to disseminate defamatory lies about a young woman (whose feelings are of course not given any consideration) and then hypocritically talk their way out of it by claiming that in transgender language they weren’t lies at all (hypocritically, because to achieve their defamatory purposes they were of course assuming that readers would read the hashtag in the public language). On the other hand, however, this same judiciary prohibits us from saying the truth in the public German language about men in dresses, since this could damage the oh-so-fragile feelings of these men. This is called a double-standard. Moreover, Mahr has told lies about me as well. The judges, however, deny me the right to strike back – even if I want to do so with the truth. This is called a perversion of justice. Here the German judiciary is discriminating in favor of the feelings of an untruthful minority against the majority who make use of the public language and insist upon the truth. This is not what the rule of law is supposed to look like.
The Bielefeld court: it cannot define “woman” but decrees that Mahr is one
Let us now take a closer look at the verdict of the Bielefeld Court. The judges explain:
The designation of a woman as a man and the use of the male sex or pronoun in reference to a woman represents a violation of general personal rights and an attack on her human dignity.
Of course the converse should also hold, and yet the judges speak of Mahr as a woman throughout and refer to him with female pronouns. Thus according to their own determinations they are violating personal rights and attacking Mr. Mahr’s human dignity.
The judges would respond that Mr. Mahr is in fact a woman. For this response, however, their ruling, which is quite poor in argument anyway, offers them no foundation whatsoever. Whereas my side defined “woman” in reference to the dictionary in our complaint, both the judges as well as Mahr prove incapable of providing any definition at all – which is typical of transgender ideologues. Mahr and the judges thus literally do not know what they are talking about – they cannot tell the difference between men and women.
The judges’ lie that Mahr is “a woman under the law”
This incompetence can also be seen in the judges’ statement that “the defendant … is a woman under the law.” Firstly, from the fact that Mahr now has the word “female” in a birth certificate that was retroactively manipulated by the German state, it does not in any way follow that he is a woman by law. For his biological children he is still considered by law as a father, not as a mother, as we indicated to the court. Such juridical details clearly mean nothing to them.
Secondly, this manipulated birth certificate contains the word “female”, not “woman”. Perhaps the judges think that it would follow from this that he is a woman. But why would this follow? Is it because our German language understands women to be adult persons of the female sex? However, the Duden (the decisive dictionary of the German language), in agreement with the German language generally, does not define the female sex as the sex that has the word “female” written into its birth certificates (otherwise hens would not be female), but rather as the sex “that forms egg cells from which, after fertilization, offspring can develop.”[1] Yet Mahr does not belong to this group, but rather to a different one that is suited for the production of sperm cells – we call it “male”.
The judges’ struggles with logic and linguistics
Thirdly: What exactly is Mahr if he is considered to be “a woman under the law” – what is exactly a “woman” according to the law and the Bielefeld judges, how is the concept of “woman” defined? There are logically only two possibilities here. Either the law means “woman” in the dictionary sense or it does not mean “woman” in the dictionary sense.
If it means a woman in the dictionary sense, that is, understood as an adult person of female sex, then the law, the state and the judges are lying in referring to Mahr as a “woman”; for as mentioned, he does not belong to the sex that forms egg cells. And if Mahr considers himself to be a woman in this sense, then he is suffering from a fundamental misrecognition of himself. In a liberal democracy, citizens are not obligated to parrot the lies of the state and its judges, nor to validate the false conceptions or delusions of other persons. Compelling citizens to repeat such lies is in fact totalitarian and recalls the famous scene in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, in which the party enforcer O’Brien wants to force his victim Winston to “recognize” that two and two are five. Perhaps German judges, in Bielefeld as well, should stop unctuously talking about human dignity while they are in the process of attacking it.
The second logical possibility is that “the law” does not mean the word “woman” (and “man”) in the dictionary sense. But since I am certainly using these concepts in the dictionary sense, it would follow that the statement uttered by me, “Mahr is a man”, no longer contradicts the purported statement of the law, “Mahr is a woman”. And in fact Mahr knows that I am using the term in precisely this dictionary sense, since he calls me the “Duden dude”, and we pointed this out to the court. So what are he and the court upset about? Or do they both believe that he is in fact a woman in the dictionary sense? As mentioned, then both would be suffering from a disconnection to reality.
The judges’ lie that I am referring to a woman as a man
Since the judges knows as well as Mahr does that I use the concept “woman” in the dictionary sense, their allegation that I am referring to a woman as a man is at the least false, more likely a conscious lie. The judges might wish to speak Transgenderese themselves, but they know perfectly well that I speak German and am referring to the Duden dictionary. Thus they cannot truthfully state that I have referred to a woman as a man, but rather at best that I have referred to someone “who is considered a ‘woman’ under the law” as someone who is considered a man by the dictionary definition. And he is considered thus. This is, contrary to the weird contortions of the court, not an “expression of opinion” but a correct statement of fact.
It speaks in favor of the supposition that the judges are consciously lying that they explain:
Insofar as the plaintiff proposes bringing to bear the general use of language in which a biological man is a man, it can be countered that the general use of language does not refer to a transwoman as a man.
Most people are not familiar with the bizarre conceptual constructions of the transgender ideology. Hence they will understand the concept “transwoman” as if it were speaking of women just like the concept “businesswoman”; that is, they will assume that it is in fact referring to women in the sense of plain German (or English). It will not occur to them that men in the normal dictionary sense are meant. And hence they will certainly not use the concept “transwoman” to refer to men such as Mahr. In contrast, those who know very clearly that transgender ideologues are referring to trans-identifying men with the term “transwoman” will, if they do not themselves follow this ideology – as the overwhelming majority of Germans do not – quite matter-of-factly refer to “transwomen” as men.
Moreover, the general use of language is recorded in dictionaries, which the judges quite simply ignore. According to the dictionary, Mahr, “transwoman” or not, is not a woman but a man, i.e. an adult person of the male sex, since he belongs to the sex “that forms mobile germ cells and can fertilize egg cells”. Thus I had evidence for my truthful statement, and the judges naturally had none for their lie.
“Transwomen” are men
Moreover, it follows logically from the circumstance that Mahr is a “transwoman” in the transgender-ideological sense that he is of the male sex. In calling him transgender-ideologically a “transwoman”, the court itself is implying that he is a man – at least as long as it is speaking German, which perhaps should not be assumed of this court. For the Supreme Constitutional Court has determined that “the essence of transsexualism is the complete psychological identification with the other sex, i.e. the sex that contradicts the person’s own body.” Thus following the dictionary and the general use of language, sex is defined here in terms of biology and germ cells and not self-identification or registries in government offices. Thus a woman who “identifies as a woman” cannot be a “transwoman”. Conversely, a “transperson” who identifies as a woman is of necessity a man; contrary to the lie of the judges, a “transwoman” is a man in ordinary language.
The appointment of judges and the political separation from the people
Incidentally, the judges should not draw conclusions about the general use of language from the quite special use of language in the green and left-wing milieu they clearly inhabit and to which they most likely owe their positions and wish to appease – after all, they do not owe their positions to being “the best” available, given everything we know about the appointment of judges in North Rhine-Westphalia. It might be that certain Green party adherents, owing to a lack of familiarity with logic, have a leaning for circular drivel such as “a woman is whoever identifies as a woman.” But if the judges think that the general German population with all seriousness considers a “transwoman” like the MoP Markus Ganserer to be a woman – who shows up in parliament in outfits less suited for a representative of the German people and more suited for a representative of autogynephilic men – then they have lost touch with the language used by the German people in whose name they contradict it just as much as they have lost touch with reality.
But as mentioned, I suspect that all this is quite clear to the judges and that they are intentionally lying to appease party politicians. Another indication of this is the judges’ happily declaring that Mahr “as a transwoman belongs to a minority that additionally finds itself confronted with criticism and hostility in society to a not inconsiderable extent.” In fact, “transwomen” are continually celebrated as “brave and stunning” in all possible media, they are allowed to perform ridiculous stereotypes of women and even receive praise for it, and to encroach upon women’s sports and protected women’s spaces and to smirkingly beat up women in mixed martial arts, since despite their penis and higher testosterone levels they are allegedly women – even he better ones, naturally.
“Transwomen” appear more often as perpetrators than victims of violent crimes
Insofar as several “transwomen” have been criticized and vilified for their conduct as misogynistic and opportunistic blokes, they have earned it and cannot complain about it. In this regard we should note that, as I have demonstrated elsewhere, there is no evidence from criminal statistics that “transwomen” are disproportionately often the victims of crimes in Western societies – but there is evidence that they are disproportionately often perpetrators, and not just relative to the female population and the total population, but even relative to the male population. They are not only more frequently represented than women among murderers, rapists and child molesters, but also more so than normal men. This only confirms again that they are neither women nor normal men. Perhaps the judges should have less sympathy for “misgendered”, i.e. correctly sexed “transwomen” and more sympathy for the women and children raped and molested by “transwomen”. Verdicts such as this will make it easier for trans-identifying male rapists to impose themselves upon women’s and children’s spaces. And these judges would probably compel an actual woman who was raped by one of these men identifying as a “woman” to apologize to her rapist for “misgendering” him and additionally find it a good idea to add such male criminals to the female criminal statistics, as is already happening in England, adding insult to injury. These judges are in no position to talk about “human dignity”.
The judges’ confusion of identity with identification and of self-determination with determination by others
The judges further evidence their untruthfulness and their incapacity for logical argumentation with the following assertions:
That the characterization as a man or the address with the male pronouns is the expression of an opinion follows as well from the fact that the plaintiff … is quite aware that the defendant understands herself as a woman and has accordingly chosen her sex. … The judicious reader will determine on reading the article that the plaintiff wishes to deny to humanity and thus also to the defendant the choice of sex identity, and independently of whether a person has undertaken a change in their name and civil status. Thus the plaintiff also notes in his article that the self-determination law discussed in the political sphere would compel people, in violation of their human rights, to ignore biological sex. The plaintiff makes it unmistakably clear that he is not willing to conform to the currently valid legal situation following the TSG on the possibility of changing one’s civil status. This however represents an utterance marked by elements of opinion and personal belief. Since the characterization of the defendant as a man and using male pronouns occurred in this context, this characterization represents an element of personal belief and thus is an expression of opinion.
I think the judicious reader will find, upon reading such remarks, that the judges themselves wish to identify as judicious readers, but are no such thing. I also hereby confirm that they do identify as that, but I deny that they really are what they identify as. And this is also how I view Mahr. He identifies as someone who is well-informed about the biology of sex, more than the evolutionary biologist and Nobel Prize winner in medicine Prof. Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard. But he is wrong about this. He also identifies as a woman – I have explicitly pointed to this in my article, and the judges quoted me accordingly – but he is not one. That I wish to “deny Mar the choice of sex identity” is thus an abject lie on the part of the judges. Mahr can, for all I care, identify as a raccoon, as Jesus, or as a woman. He has this right. And while I acknowledge that he “identifies” as a woman, and thus I acknowledge his sex identity, I dispute, in accordance with the truth, that he is a woman. There is a difference between identification and identity, even if this news might not have reached men in dresses or ideologues in judges’ robes.
Moreover, it is also nonsense when the judges declare that Mahr “chose his sex accordingly”. One cannot choose one’s sex (the judges were clearly not listening in biology class) any more than one can choose one’s species. I do not dispute anyone’s right to do so. I am a liberal. If Mahr is able to transform himself into a raccoon or a woman and wishes to do so, he should go ahead and do it. He is not able to, however, and certainly not through speech-acts such as “I am a raccoon” or “I identify as a woman”. Speech-acts do not present such magical properties; nor do entries in government registries. If the German state under its borderline moronic left-green leadership should decide to make the species designation “raccoon” available to people, this registry would not make the corresponding male citizens into raccoons any more than the entry “female” makes them into women. We live in reality, not in Hogwarts. This also seems to have gone over the heads of the Bielefeld judges.
Returning to the law-bending reinterpretation of a statement of fact into “personal belief”
The judges’ talk of personal belief and opinion is also deceitful and contradictory. As they themselves quite correctly determined:
While statements of fact are marked by the objective relation between the utterance and the reality and are accessible to review by means of demonstration, an opinion is an utterance characterized by elements of personal stance and personal belief.
They add to this:
The characterization of the plaintiff as a man is no purportedly value-free determination of the sex of the defendant and thus no statement of fact. Rather it is the expression of a personal belief of the plaintiff in the sense that a sex is exclusively to be determined in accordance with biology as the innate sex characteristics and the corporeal configuration of a person.
This is nonsense. In had obviously chosen to write the article in question in the German language. And, again, in the German language a “woman” is an adult person of the female sex. This is not my personal estimation but rather can be shown by means of demonstration, in this case by opening the dictionary. The female sex, in turn, is defined in the German language as the sex that produces large egg cells. This too is demonstrable with reference to the dictionary. Mahr does not belong to this sex. That can also be demonstrated – firstly, by using his profile photo, which I referred to (like most people over three months of age, but evidently unlike the judges, I am very good at visually distinguishing men from women.) Secondly, Mahr is to my knowledge also the biological father of a child, and even if this were not true, he himself speaks of a “femininity, which for more than thirty years … was not based on physical being but rather on an inarticulate inner experience.” In fact, his “inner” and, unsurprisingly, “inarticulate” experiences have nothing to do with the biological reality. “Femininity” – under which Mahr might be imagining a preference for pink slippers – is not the same as femaleness. Furthermore he states: “I cannot comprehend the full physical experience of being a woman, whether in terms of menstrual cycles, pregnancy, sexuality, or certain forms of social recognition.” This is due to the fact that he is not female and thus is not a woman.
Thus if anyone is indulging in evaluative personal estimations, it is the Bielefeld judges, who are clearly determined to validate their own value judgments in the face of the facts. As I said, we call this a perversion of justice.
For the judges, the feelings of men declaring themselves to be “women” are valid but not the feelings of those who do not wish to be abased as a means of validating the disordered self-perception of such men
The following statement evidences a noteworthy hypocrisy:
The plaintiff also cannot appeal to the hurt feelings it would cause him to refer to the defendant as a woman in defiance of his own opinion. Aside from the fact that the court is not yet clear whether the plaintiff would seriously claim this, nonetheless it remains open to him to simply address the defendant value-neutrally as “person” or “human.”
Once more the judges are lying bare-facedly, since first of all they are of the opinion that I owe it to Mahr to address him with female pronouns. I assume this would also hold if I called him “a human” (although in German this word has the masculine grammatical gender). With the use of such pronouns I would be implying, contrary to fact, that he is a woman. And the judges consider it acceptable to compel me to this use of pronouns.
Secondly, I mentioned in my article that there is a connection between Mahr’s misrecognition of his own sex and his misrecognition of the biology of sex. To say this, I must also be able to talk about his sex. The judges are however in fact requiring me to tell a lie as soon as I come to speak about his sex, and thus I would no longer be able to make this connection. If this is not an entirely impermissible attack on my own freedom of speech and academic freedom, what is?
Thirdly, I have of course seriously claimed, both in the complaint as well as in the article, that my own feelings are at stake. Moreover the world-renowned writer J. K. Rowling recently stated (although I assume not all the news makes it to Bielefeld) that she would go to prison before she calls a “transwoman” a woman. She clearly finds this coercion to allow oneself to be abused as a means to satisfy the needs of men calling themselves “women” to be degrading. Many feminists also feel this way. In the case of autogynephilic men, as I argued in a philosophical journal, this coercion amounts to sexual assault, and a court that supports the autogynephilic man with the means of state coercion would be making itself guilty of aiding and abetting sexual assault. Abetting the coerced satisfaction of a false self-perception is obviously bad enough, however. Thus the judges might spare us their affected “We don’t know whether he means it seriously”, since they partially quote the following passage from my article:
What would need to be enforced is a politics in which people, in violation of their human rights to free speech and free conscience, are coerced to ignore these facts as well as the reality in front of their own eyes and allow themselves to be degraded by others to instruments of the validation of others’ self-perception. Precisely such a politics is envisioned by the Law of Self-Determination supported by Mahr.
And this is also supported by the judges willing to comply with the green-left ideology. They are overflowing with empathy for the hurt feelings of a man who is correctly identified as a man in accordance with the rules of the German language, but contrary to his own self-perception. But they pretend to suspect a lack of seriousness when a man fully conscious of reality explains that it is degrading to be coerced to lie about the sex of a man in a dress in order to satisfy the psychic needs of his distorted self-perception. How stupid can a German judge pretend to be, I wonder – or actually be? For if we are serious, what is worse: to hurt someone’s feelings by telling the truth about him, or to hurt other people’s feelings by requiring them to sacrifice their own freedom of speech and conscience and lie in order to validate the self-perception of men pretending to be women? The answer is quite obvious for every reasonable person.
German judges on the trail of 1984: “Two plus two is five, and Mahr is a woman, Winston” – the authoritarian state is always right
Moreover, the judges might claim – I would in fact say, might lie – that they are not forcing me to lie but “only” to adopt a new terminology. But here they lack any sort of competence, since unlike me and the dictionary they prove incapable of providing any definition of “woman”. Vague talk, as we also find in this regard on the part of the Supreme Constitutional Court, cannot replace a definition, i.e. a clear indication of necessary and sufficient conditions for something falling under a concept. And incidentally, if the sex registration were elevated into a defining characteristic of femaleness, as the judges seem to envision, this would certainly have uncomfortable consequences for Mahr as well. For then a “woman” would be an adult person registered as “female” in their documents, and then, embarrassingly, refugees without any documents could not be women. Moreover, Mahr himself before receiving the modification of his registered sex would have been delusional and schizophrenic due to his identification as “woman”. For then Mahr would have been identifying himself as someone with the registered sex of “female”, although he didn’t have this registration yet – he would have falsely identified himself – and he would have been seeking to obtain a sex registration that he believed himself to already have – which is schizophrenic.
But in fact nothing depends on whether the judges or anyone else can offer an alternative definition of “woman” that satisfies the needs of transgender ideology. (The philosopher Tomas Bogardus has disputed this possibility with good arguments in two articles). Rather what it comes down to is that I as a German participating in German debates in the German language do not have to allow myself to be forbidden from using traditional German concepts to describe reality, neither by men in dresses nor by linguistic dictators in robes.
Let us imagine O’Brien’s approach to Winston a little differently. Suppose that he said: “Well, well Winston, I don’t want to force you to lie when I want to hear from you that two and two are five. Rather, the party has changed the concepts. From now on ‘two’, when it follows the word ‘plus’, means the same thing that ‘three’ used to mean. So you’re not lying when you say that two and two are five like I’m asking. So say it.” And when Winston refuses, he receives an electric shock.
Is this any less totalitarian, since O’Brien “only” requires the adoption of a new terminology? Of course not. And it is no less totalitarian, merely less brutal, to use milder means of state compulsion instead of electric shocks. Winston has a right to adhere to the English language against the will of the party. I have just as much right to adhere to the German language. Not just forcing people to lie is totalitarian; hindering people with force from saying the truth in their received language is also totalitarian.
And it bears repeating that it is simply a lie when the Bielefeld judges claim that I am denying Mahr the right to identify as whatever he wants. Nor do I deny the judges this right. The judges and Mahr can happily dance in front of the mirror together, he in a tutu and the judges in their robes, and identify as a woman and as reasonable and intelligent judges. They can identify themselves and thus “self-determine” as they like. They have this right. But they have no right to force me and determine me to identify them as they like. To the contrary, I have every right – a human right – to make use of my own understanding and identify them correctly. And thus I identify the one as a man and the others as revenants of the literary figure O’Brien and of the not not-so-literary precedents of other judges in recent German history: as henchmen of a totalitarian ideology that forces its lies upon the citizenry and forbids them from describing the world in their own received language rather than the state-approved terminology.
Such judges are not suited for their office and are a shame to liberal democracy. They contribute to the contemporary German state’s delegitimization (which our beloved constitutional protector Thomas Haldenwang, contrary to fact, sees as being effected only by citizens). The same holds for parties that have helped to put these judges into office against the principle of meritocracy but rather with an eye for toeing an ideological line. It can only be hoped that the influence of such parties, just like the bullying from men in dresses, will be pushed back in the future. In fact we can already see signs of this nationally as well as internationally. It is high time.
© Uwe Steinhoff 2024
[1] When the Duden dictionary states that “female“ means “belonging to the sex that forms egg cells”, it should be noted that the female sex, which produces egg cells, does not consist of a single individual. Someone can belong to the sex that collectively produces egg cells without herself currently or at any point in her life producing egg cells. There is of course not only the phenomenon of menopause, but also that of biological disorders. In other words, to belong to the sex that produces egg cells, one does not have to actually produce egg cells, but rather only to have a body that functionally – biologists are very interested in biological functions – is oriented to their production. As I have formulated it elsewhere: “Biology defines sex more precisely as the developmental direction of an organism towards the production of a certain type of anisogametic (heterogeneous) gametes … The notion of a ‘developmental direction’ is meant to account for the fact that for various reasons not every individual of a sex in fact will produce the corresponding gametes, and the reference to gametes means that brain structures, behaviors, sexual orientation, appearance, hormones and even chromosomes do not underlie the distinction of male and female organisms.” Consequently, women are adult persons whose bodies demonstrate developmental steps towards the production of egg cells. For men these are sperm cells. Thus so-called “transwomen” are not women.
Uwe Steinhoff 