I was asked by the British feminist groups #199 Days Later and “No men in women’s prisons” to describe the situation in Germany at their London protest against men in women’s prisons. This is my speech, delivered in London on 29 August 2026. Further information has been added to the text.
Video of the protest:
Friends,
I want to tell you about two days in July of this year. Two men, two prisons, forty-eight hours apart.
14 July: A child sex offender wins his way into a women’s prison
On 14 July, a man serving a multi-year sentence for the sexual abuse of children was moved out of Tonna men’s prison in Thuringia and into the women’s prison in Chemnitz. While in custody he had changed his legal sex under the Self-Determination Act. He went to court. The court ordered the transfer. The Thuringian justice ministry objected on security grounds – and lost.
Chemnitz is Germany’s largest women’s prison. It also runs a mother-and-child unit with five places for imprisoned mothers with babies and toddlers up to the age of three. Children live there.
15 July: A neo-Nazi has to leave the women’s prison
On 15 July, the neo-Nazi Marla-Svenja Liebich was extradited from the Czech Republic and taken to that same prison in Chemnitz. Liebich – convicted while still called Sven, for incitement to hatred, defamation and insult – had also changed his legal sex, loudly and as a provocation. He was out within hours. He was moved to a men’s prison the same day.
So the German state can protect women. It moved fast, it moved decisively – for a man whose paperwork embarrassed the government.
For the women in Chemnitz, it did not move at all.
State prison laws pre-empted the Self-Determination Act
Thuringia requires prisoners to be housed strictly according to their registered sex. The state’s prison code allows a departure only where a prisoner does not feel they belong to the sex on the register – but not where the safety of the other prisoners argues against it.1 The regional court of Meiningen confirmed this in April 2026 in the same case: the security or order of the institution is “no permissible ground for departing from the separation principle” – a separation principle that Thuringia has reduced to absurdity, because it puts a man’s self-declared gender identity on the same footing as a woman’s sex.
The safety of the women inside the women’s prison does not count. The offence a male perpetrator was convicted of does not count. The entry on the form outranks the risk in the corridor.
The judge himself did not hide his opinion of the law. He called it absurd, compared changing sex to registering a car with the licensing authority, and accused the legislature of reducing sex to “a purely administrative act”. He still had to rule the way he did.
Both men were taken to Chemnitz prison in July. One was moved to a men’s prison the same day; the other stayed. The prison stated that the two cases were not comparable.
Even the Transsexuals Act gave male offenders access to women’s prisons
None of this began with the Self-Determination Act. In 2024 the initiative Lasst Frauen Sprechen – “Let Women Speak” – filed freedom-of-information requests with all sixteen German states. The result: not one state guarantees that its women’s prisons hold only women. Berlin admitted to fifteen men. Most states could not answer the question – because they no longer record sex, only the entry in the register. Not one state could say what these men had been convicted of. Saxony demanded eleven hundred euros before it would answer at all.
The harm is documented.
The newspaper Welt found five documented assaults by men on female prisoners, four of them sexually motivated.
In Chemnitz, women wrote a letter about being harassed by a male inmate.
The same prison took in a convicted double murderer who had prostituted his girlfriend and then killed her and her client. In custody he changed his sex entry and was moved to the women’s prison. In 2012 he was back in court for throttling a female prison officer – and afterwards told the court he intended to change the entry back.
We collect these cases on a public map, at was-ist-eine-frau.de. We call it “Just an isolated incident”. It is not an isolated incident. It is a system.
That is what I bring you from Germany.
Self-ID does not create predatory men. It takes away the state’s last lawful reason to say no. It takes the word of a male offender and makes it binding on the state.
Britain has a Supreme Court ruling that says sex means sex. Germany has a form. Do not trade one for the other!
Thank you.
Postscript: What has happened since
On 12 June 2026 the 97th Conference of Justice Ministers, on a motion from Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia, called on the federal government to tighten the Self-Determination Act: registry offices are to be allowed to examine cases of “obvious misuse”. The decision came a month before the two transfers. It did not protect the women in Chemnitz.
But it shows what the law is built on. Under the Self-Determination Act the declaration alone is decisive – there is deliberately no examination. Anyone now demanding objective criteria for misuse concedes that the declaration is not, after all, enough. That anyone wants to tighten the law at all is owed not to any insight on the part of the ministries, but to the documented cases.
The coalition agreement provided for an evaluation of the law by 31 July 2026. It is due.
Background
The cooperation between British and German feminists goes back to 1 November 2024, the day Germany’s Self-Determination Act came into force. The initiative Lasst Frauen Sprechen! had asked women and feminist groups around the world to protest outside German embassies and consulates that day – documented at lasst-frauen-sprechen.de/selfidharms and selfidharms.com. I was part of the British organising group at the time. Some of those women later formed a new group and took up the countdown idea from the SelfID Harms campaign – hence the name #199 Days Later, counted from the Supreme Court ruling.
This exception to the separation principle was only introduced by the Thuringian act on prison data protection and the adjustment of further prison provisions of 16 November 2023 (state gazette no. 14 of 30 November 2023, p. 291), a government bill, parliamentary paper 7/6810. Before that there was no exception at all. Thuringia was then governed by a Left–SPD–Green minority government under Minister President Bodo Ramelow (Die Linke); the responsible department was the Ministry for Migration, Justice and Consumer Protection, held by the Greens. The new § 17(1) sentence 4 of the Thuringian prison code does name the security and order of the institution and the needs of the other prisoners – but only for how such a prisoner is accommodated, not for whether separate accommodation applies at all. That is precisely what the Meiningen court relied on. The provision came into force eleven months before the Self-Determination Act.