• flora_explora@beehaw.org
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    7 months ago

    I’m trans and from Germany. I don’t get what you mean by “when transitioning you have to change your name”. How do you define “transition” then? Who is stopping you from transitioning?

    The underlying problem, and you are right there, is that this new ability to self-ID does not touch on any of the laws of anyone’s medical transition. Germany is a country with a more or less working health insurance system that covers most medical expenses. However, although medical transition is definitely necessary for the wellbeing of trans people most health insurances won’t pay for much of your transition. HRT is pretty straightforward to get and as long as you go to enby-friendly endocrinologists you won’t have that much of a problem getting HRT under your old name etc. Speech therapy is even easier to get. But anything like surgery or other medical procedures like laser/electric epilation hair removal are really hard to get covered by a health insurance. In case of gender affirming surgery, you often need to prove the health insurance how binary trans you are and that you really want to transition all the way. With hair removal they usually would pay for it, but only to doctors on a rate that no doctor would agree on.

    I know trans people in various stages of their transition and changing their names is not something that anyone had to do. And if you happen to have a gender neutral name, you certainly don’t have to change it.

    • Given the context, it would be terms of legally transitioning someone’s gender marker.

      No clue how true it is. I think this is the proposal for the law, but I don’t know German, so finding the actual bill seems challenging: https://perma.cc/DML8-XWED

      S2 paragraph 3 seems to say they may choose 1 or more names, but idk the nuances of the language to know if that means choosing 0 new names is not allowed?

      • flora_explora@beehaw.org
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        7 months ago

        I searched a bit more online but couldn’t find any more information on this. The text you shared is from last year. But even in there change of one’s gender marker isn’t linked to a change in name. The linked text even talks about changing the name or gender marker.

    • antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      7 months ago

      Thank you, it’s possible he or his gf misunderstood some aspect of the law. I pretty much just retold what my friend told me. I’ll definitely ask them both for details when I get the opportunity.