In July 2023, German neo-Nazi Sven Liebich was convicted of ‘extreme-right incitement to hatred, defamation and insult’. He had been caught red-handed wearing a stormtrooper get-up. A ream of Nazi-esque social-media posts had been made under his name. Apparently, he had even distributed baseball bats inscribed with the phrase ‘deportation helper’.
Liebich’s crimes were grim enough, but it was his Princess Diaries-inspired transformation that brought him to international attention. In 2024, he showed up in court in lipstick, a floppy beach hat and a leopard-print blouse. He asked to be referred to not as Sven, but ‘Marla-Svenja’. He also declared himself to be female. Since Germany explicitly allows anyone to identify how they please under the 2024 Self-Determination Act, there was little that could be done to stop him. And so, Liebich’s name and legal sex were duly changed and he was ordered to report to Chemnitz women’s prison in August the following year.
It took many months for the penny to drop that maybe, just maybe, Liebich had been playing the system. Curiously, it wasn’t the fact that ‘Marla’ still had a whopping great moustache on ‘her’ face, nor his history of publicly harassing gay and trans individuals that seemed to wake up the authorities. No, the straw that broke the camel’s back was his request in November last year to change not only his gender again – this time from female to ‘diverse’ – but also his name… to ‘Anne Frank’.
According to LTO, a magazine specialising in legal affairs, the authorities in the district of Saalekreis in Saxony-Anhalt have now had enough of Liebich’s provocations. Towards the end of last year, they asked the courts to overturn his original request to change his gender. Judges will soon report back on whether the far-right fugitive might have ‘abused the system’ of gender self-ID. You think?
The sudden realisation that Liebich might not be a woman after all is too little, too late. Not least as this question is now purely academic. Liebich has long since gone AWOL. Authorities believe him to be hiding out in Russia – that famous haven of ‘trans rights’.
Hellbound and Down 