Originally a comment by Der Durchwanderer on Check the label.

Liberal democracy does not depend on silly lies about who can do what in the way of magic personal changes.

Aye, but there’s the rub. Germany is slowly (actually not-so-slowly) ceasing to recognise itself as a liberal democracy as you might understand that term; it sees itself, rather, as the world’s first “defensive democracy”. Its politicians regularly tar any opinions, statements, or policies which disagree with the ruling coalition as “anti-democratic”, regardless of how soundly those opinions, statements, and policies are founded in the principals of liberalism nor how widely they are to be found amongst the demos itself.

Anything that does not fit onto the tip of the spear of progressive thought as interpreted by the youth wings of the Greens and the SPD is classified as “right-wing extremism”, and things as banal as retweeting a meme that takes the piss out of a government minister are likely to have that minister personally file a complaint with the police under the law of “impeding a public officer in his duties”, which will get your house searched by the cops and see you with a hefty fine backed with the threat of jail time.

Now it appears that the German agency charged with “protecting the constitution” may well consider any public utterances in support of the “gender binary” to be statements against the German constitutional order, perhaps classifying them in the recently-invented category of “delegitimation of the state relevant to constitutional protection”, wherein the constitutional protectors give themselves the right to spy on German citizens who make suspect-but-not-illegal statements against the government until they find something they can prosecute for. (This extralegal category was invented in April 2021, largely in response to mass protests against anti-COVID measures, many of which were themselves unconstitutional and of dubious efficacy…but though the pandemic is over, the tools forged during it remain, and will take much longer to dismantle.)