A prominent right-wing extremist who once dismissed transgender people as fascists and “parasites on society” has won permission to serve a prison sentence in a German women’s jail after formally changing gender.
Marla-Svenja Liebich, 53, who until December went by the first name Sven, was convicted of inciting hatred, criminal insults and trespassing and handed an 18-month sentence for, among other things, trying to sell a baseball bat over the internet as a “deportation aid”.
Questions are now being raised as to whether the neo-Nazi exploited a recent reform that made it significantly easier for people to alter their officially registered gender.
Under previous German law, gender reassignment required two separate supporting opinions from medical specialists. In November, however, the last government’s self-determination act reduced the threshold to simply signing a form at a local registry office.
Liebich has been a leader on the east German extreme-right scene since the Nineties, and ran the regional chapter of an explicitly Nazi organisation called Blood and Honour in Saxony-Anhalt. Blood and Honour was banned in 2000.
Liebich later organised numerous demonstrations in Halle, his native city, where the local branch of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency described Liebich’s activities as “unparalleled” across the entire country.
In recent years Liebich has campaigned energetically in support of the Putin regime and its war against Ukraine, selling the Russian ultra-nationalist “Z” symbol through his various social media channels.
Hellbound and Down 