A Human Rights Report to the Fifth State Report of the Federal Republic of Germany according to Articles 16 and 17 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) 2008. Very few people today would claim that homosexuals are actually heterosexuals choosing to be homosexual. Four decades after the Stonewall riots, gays and lesbians have been successful in clearly demonstrating that a person’s sexual orientation is neither changeable nor curable. However, despite this, reality is quite different today for transsexual people – awareness of their sex, which is expressed with statements like “I am a girl” or “I am a boy” is still considered a mental disorder and is sold as such to the public. The discourse turns to sex changes; for example, a transsexual girl could be changed from a “boy with a gender identity disorder” into a girl instead of recognizing her original sex. Transsexual people are people born into the wrong bodies, a fact backed by numerous scientific examinations. Despite this, however, transsexual people in Germany are still considered legally and medically as mentally disordered and are victims of prejudice and extreme religious perceptions. Transsexual people are people born into the wrong bodies, something transsexual people have been claiming ever since – so why so many skeptics? In 1995, scientists were able to prove for the first time that transsexual women (women in men’s bodies) are actually women, because anatomically they have a female brain. Further brain research may show that the brains of transsexual women are not only anatomically female, but also function just like female brains. Scientific sex research is convinced by now that the gender identity is determined before birth and cannot be changed after birth; therefore, transsexuality cannot be cured by therapy.
Transsexual People in Germany: A Human Rights Report
By ATME e.V. Aktion Transsexualitat und Menschenrecht (Campaign Transsexuality and Human Rights), 2008
