Two trans women make parliamentary history
Two trans women in the Bundestag for the first time: an election night that changed Germany's queer politics.
On 26 September 2021, Germany elected a new Bundestag. On election night it became clear that this parliament would be different. With Tessa Ganserer and Nyke Slawik, two openly trans women entered it for the first time. Both stood for the Greens, and both lost their constituencies in Nuremberg and Leverkusen. They made it in nonetheless, via the state party list.
Ganserer was no newcomer: she already sat in the Bavarian state parliament and had stopped using her old first name in 2018. Even so, it appeared on the ballot paper. The reason: Ganserer refused to have her name changed under the Transsexuals Act then in force. That required psychological reports, a court decision and many intimate answers. So the entry in her identity card stayed as it was. Ganserer called the wrong name on the ballot paper painful and humiliating. On her posters she responded with wit: "If you want Tessa, you have to vote Ganserer."
Slawik from Leverkusen was twenty-seven. She too knew the lengthy and expensive name-change procedure from her own experience. In politics she wanted to be visible, to make it harder to discriminate against gender minorities.
The Bundestag was not entirely without precedent, however. Previously only one person who had sat there had come out as trans, and only after their term of office. But Ganserer and Slawik were the first to be elected as openly trans.
Both pursued the same goal. The old law was to give way to a self-determination act. That promise was kept. Since November 2024, trans, intersex and non-binary people in Germany have been able to change their first names and gender marker with a declaration at the register office.
The election night of 2021 was thus more than a symbolic moment. It stood at the beginning of a reform that has noticeably changed the everyday lives of many people.