A German police officer is facing charges of attempted fraud for altering her gender from male to female in official records, allegedly to expedite her promotion through the ranks.
The unnamed Düsseldorf officer in her 30s altered her gender from man to woman last May in line with a new “self-determination” regulation passed by the last federal government.
The law came into effect a year ago to assist transgender, intersex and non-binary people to change their gender and name entry in official records and documents.
The application requires a self-declaration, without the need for official paperwork or third-party assessments.
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Within six days of the change, her employer filed attempted fraud charges, prompting the woman to countersue her employer.
Her lawyer insists his client had suffered greatly under her male identity for some time and that the promotion remark “was intended ironically” for the ears of insensitive colleagues.
Düsseldorf police told the Süddeutsche Zeitung daily that the police officer had “at multiple times in different settings with colleagues, in an active, explicit and placative way” said the change was to take advantage of special promotion rules for women.
To correct a gender imbalance in the force, Düsseldorf police recruitment boards have been instructed – when presented with two equally-qualified candidates – to favour any female candidate.
According to police records, the gender change saw the woman jump 43 places in the promotion table and helped her progress from assistant to full commissioner – boosting her salary by up to €500 extra monthly.
“You don’t make such a life-changing decision for something like that,” said lawyer Christoph Arnold to the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger newspaper.
However Düsseldorf police claim the woman – after securing the promotion – had signalled to colleagues she was planning to change her gender back to male in advance of her planned wedding – to a woman.
In its first year some 22,000 self-determination applications were filed, mostly without any fuss. However this is not the first time an applicant has been accused of exploiting the gender self-determination law.
In August a prominent German neo-Nazi, Sven Liebich, was convicted of incitement and slander. At his sentencing hearing Liebich appeared in women’s clothes, said he had changed his gender to female and said on going to a local women’s prison.
Liebich has since disappeared and remains on the run. For Christoph Arnold, lawyer for the Düsseldorf police officer, her employer’s case is doomed to fail.
“The new [self-determination] law is funny because I don’t have to justify the change,” he said, “thus it’s impossible to defraud.”
