November 2024
Sabine Schneider - Lesbian Resistance - Speech at the Global Protest Against Sex Self-ID - New Zealand
I’m Sabine from Lesbian Resistance New Zealand.
I worked in this building for seven long years, and in that time, I saw three ambassadors come and go. None of them were confused about who was a woman and who was a man.
It’s wild how much has changed since I quit my job in 2021!
The current German Ambassador, her Excellency Frau Nicole Menzenbach, no longer recognizes the difference between men and women, or the difference between sex and gender, and it seems she also can’t tell the difference between identity and mental illness. She states that pretending to be something you’re not is a basic human right. Journalist Jennifer Bilek appropriately calls this pretense “sex deception”, which might be a lot of things. But a human right it is not.
I have no idea how it is now, but while I worked at the German Embassy, no one even mentioned things like self-ID, and our email signatures did not dictate anyone’s pronouns.
If I’d been asked to call a man “Frau So-und-So,” I would’ve refused, even if it meant risking my job. In fact, part of why I left was because I had a smidgen of an inkling of where things were headed. But I admit, even in my most cynical outlook I never saw Sex Self-ID coming.
Forcing people by law to take part in someone’s delusion is so absurd, so grotesque, that only enlightened novelists like Orwell or Huxley could make it up.
Letting people legally lie about something as basic as their sex is creating a dystopian society that has no chance of happiness or good fortune. Being forced by law to lie is not progress; that’s oppression, even tyranny.
One of the most disturbing results of self-ID laws is what they mean for homosexuality. Lesbianism – by definition – is an exclusively female world. When a man can simply declare himself female and, by law, be part of lesbian spaces, it doesn’t just disrupt things—it erases the very definition of what it means to be a lesbian. In short, it is deeply homophobic.
Laws that force us to lie need to go. That’s our fight here in New Zealand, and I know Germany is working on it, too.
In fact, we’re actively involved with LAZ reloaded, so greeting from Downunder.
We stand in solidarity with all our German sisters, united in this fight.