Biologist Vollbrecht wins in court against trans activists

Anyone who wants to defend themselves against reputation-damaging claims in social media such as Twitter has several problems at once. He has to secure evidence, take screenshots, and above all: He needs an opponent. However, many accounts cannot be assigned to anyone. The biologist Marie-Luise Vollbrecht and her lawyer Ralf Höcker have now succeeded in winning the debate on trans identity and gender in the form of a court injunction. The claim that Vollbrecht denies or relativizes crimes of National Socialism may no longer be repeated following a decision by the Cologne Regional Court on Monday.

How could it come to this? Vollbrecht is 32 years old and is writing her dissertation on a marine biological topic at the Humboldt University in Berlin. As part of the “Long Night of Science” she wanted to give a lecture at the beginning of July entitled: “Gender is not the same gender. Sex, gender and why there are only two sexes in biology». The university canceled the lecture because of announced protests. Anyone who watched it on YouTube quickly realized that it was a harmless biology presentation. So it fits in with the “Long Night”, which was created as an event to convey science in a way that is close to the people and family-friendly.

Who is a Terf?

Vollbrecht was then massively attacked by trans activists on social media. The title of the lecture was enough for them to identify him as anti-trans. Vollbrecht sees himself as a left-wing feminist and is therefore considered a “Terf”. In general, anyone who wants to have a say in the debate has to learn a number of new vocabulary and abbreviations: Terf means anti-trans radical feminist. Vollbrecht wanted to take legal action against the hostilities. She started a crowdfunding campaign.

Dana Mahr, a medical-sociological researcher at the University of Geneva, developed into Vollbrecht’s main opponent. Mahr also began collecting donations to get legal advice. On Twitter, she is credited with creating the hashtag #MarieLeugnetNSVerrechte. This has been used by many more people, all of whom are now potentially facing injunctive relief.

The opponent in the legal dispute that has now been won before the Cologne Regional Court is the “dgti – German Society for Transidentity and Intersexuality”, an association that co-operates the disputed Twitter account. Attorney Höcker told the NZZ on Tuesday that he first wanted to discuss whether action would also be taken against Mahr. You want to be careful with the money you collect.

Funded by the Ministry of Family Affairs

At first they wanted to attack the trans associations. Of these, the “Federal Association Trans*” recently announced that it would sue Vollbrecht in order to have a so-called negative declaratory action before the Berlin District Court to determine that Vollbrecht had no right to injunctive relief because her personality rights were not affected by the “Federal Association Trans*” at all had been injured. So far, however, nothing has been received, says Höcker. Unlike Vollbrecht, who has to raise the money for her legal counsel privately, the “Bundesverband Trans” is mainly financed by the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, i.e. from taxes.

Vollbrecht herself runs a somewhat more factual account under her name and a sharply tweeting one under “Ms. Summer”. The debate – if that’s even an appropriate term for the agitated and fact-poor exchange of blows – on social media is hard to summarize. Some people put in a lot of work and still try:

At the heart of the legal dispute was Vollbrecht’s response to the trans activists’ claim that “queer” and transsexual people had been persecuted by the National Socialists. Vollbrecht denied this, implying in a tweet that transsexuals, unlike Jews, had opportunities to avoid annihilation. With that she started a storm. Your own tweets on the topic are not publicly available and cannot be embedded here. Enemy locations are summarized here:

The “taz” editor Jan Feddersen joined Vollbrecht, which earned him the accusation of historical forgetfulness. His tweet has since been deleted. The hashtag #MarieDenialNSCrimes has been used many times. She was even credited with being close to the neo-Nazi party NPD.

With the accusation of putting the Holocaust into perspective in Germany, one can push every participant in the debate into the death zone of the discourse and silence them. But Vollbrecht did not play along. She clarified what was meant by her tweet and fought back.

She does not deny the crimes committed under the rule of National Socialism, including against transsexuals, and she deeply despises them in their entirety, she explained in the application to the court. She merely pointed out that there were “very significant differences, which are not disputed by serious historians, between the Shoah, i.e. the industrialized mass murder of European Jews simply because of their ethnic affiliation, and the fate of all other groups of victims of the National Socialist tyranny.”

The urgent application with extensive attachments such as screenshots has 150 pages; the approving decision of the district court of Cologne manages with four pages. The dgti can object to this.