The Federal Ministry of the Interior seeks to introduce a regulation requiring that government authorities store and share details of a transgender individual’s previous legal gender and former first name, in connection with the new Self-Determination Act. This Act was designed to make the process of gender and name changes more accessible. The Ministry claims the regulation is needed for maintaining accurate official records and facilitating identification processes across different bureaucratic domains. Critics, notably advocacy organizations and legal experts, object, arguing that not only is this measure unnecessary—given the current law already provides clear and limited scenarios for disclosing such information—but it could also lead to privacy violations, discrimination, and increased risk for affected individuals, especially amidst a climate of rising hate crimes. They warn the measure would impose a de facto special register for transgender people, contravening established privacy norms and potentially inviting social marginalization.

I must voice my profound alarm at this proposal from the standpoint of personal liberty and a free society. I cannot view with equanimity any expansion of bureaucratic powers that encroach upon the dignity, privacy, and autonomy of the individual—especially those who already face social and legal disadvantages. The rationale provided by the Ministry, cloaked in the language of administrative necessity, is the sort of justification that invariably precedes the curtailment of freedom in the name of order. When the state insists on tracking an individual’s most intimate personal history—the very knowledge of one’s former sex and name—across the entirety of government records, it creates a mechanism by which the individual is permanently marked, no matter how complete their legal transition may be.

The Self-Determination Act, for all its flaws, represents a necessary step towards the recognition of personal sovereignty in matters of identity. To now regress and tie its implementation to a broader, speculative concern for administrative “accuracy,” at the cost of vulnerable people’s security, is to completely misunderstand the proper bounds of state action. The central danger is clear: once established, these categories of sensitive data do not become more secure, but instead are prone to ever-expanding access, mission creep, and—as history tragically teaches us—abuse. Today it is a register maintained “for identification”; tomorrow, it becomes a means of surveillance, or worse.

Let us not forget that the engine of bureaucracy is propelled not by the pursuit of justice, but by the hunger for information, classification, and control. If a person is to truly assume ownership over their legal identity, the old state-imposed markers must not follow them in perpetuity, exploited for vague administrative convenience or, still worse, made available to institutions prone to prejudice. Liberty does not mean the absence of all rules, but it most certainly does demand that the state justify, with the utmost rigor, every infringement on the private sphere. Here, such justification has not been provided—indeed, it cannot be. The exceptions in existing law for matters of criminal and national security are already more than sufficient. Anything beyond that is nothing less than a bureaucratic overreach—a step towards the kind of “collectivist” control that, wherever it has emerged, has destroyed both individual dignity and the spontaneous order of a free society.

It is precisely in these dark, seemingly minor corners of administration—where a register is kept, where a datum is shared without consent—that the spirit of liberty is most imperiled. I urge a return to principle, not expedience: the individual’s will over official routine, personal freedom over bureaucratic uniformity. This regulation must be abandoned if we are to preserve not only the rights of transgender people, but the foundation of a society in which state power knows its limits, and the inviolability of the person is not a negotiable good.