In December, Emanuel Brünisholz will begin a 10-day stint in a Swiss prison. His crime? Stating the scientific truth that skeletons cannot be transgender.
Brünisholz’s dystopian tale begins in December 2022. In response to a Facebook post by Swiss National Council member Andreas Glarner, Brünisholz, a wind-instrument repairman from Burgdorf, wrote: ‘If you dig up LGBTQI people after 200 years, you’ll only find men and women based on their skeletons. Everything else is a mental illness promoted through the curriculum.’
In August 2023, Brünisholz was interviewed by Burgdorf police, who interrogated him over the ‘intent’ of his comment. Then came a prosecutor’s letter, informing him that he had been charged with ‘hate speech’ against the relatively new category of sexual orientation in the Swiss Criminal Code. He was convicted and fined 500 Swiss Francs.
He appealed this conviction, but was unsuccessful. In December, a court reaffirmed the guilty verdict, and Brünisholz was ordered to pay an extra 600 Swiss Francs in court costs. Brünisholz, unwilling to throw more time and money at this ridiculous assault on his free speech, did not appeal further. He has since refused to pay his fines and court fees and, as a result, will go to prison.
The censorship of gender-critical speech and the accompanying assault on truth is bad enough. But the logical and linguistic contortions in the original judgement make matters even worse. In one passage, the judge wrote:
‘LGBTQI means lesbian, gay, bi, transgender, queer and intersex, and denotes therefore different sexual orientations. It’s a loose group of people who consider themselves a part of the aforementioned sexual orientations. Therefore, LGBTQI is a group of people with specific sexual orientations.’
Hellbound and Down 