Germany's AfD: Pause the blockers and hormones now

The Opposition party has a track record of challenging the gender medicalisation of minors, but so far it's been thwarted by other parties from both the political right and left

Photo by Sid Saxena on Unsplash

‘Halt the hormones’

The fast-rising German Opposition party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), has called for an immediate moratorium on puberty blocker drugs and cross-sex hormones for minors.

“The Federal Government admits it has no idea of the risks of irreversible transitions among vulnerable young people with a high burden of co-morbidity,” said the AfD health policy spokesman Martin Sichert.

The right-wing populist party issued its call for a moratorium after a terse government response to 25 AfD questions seeking data and information on the medical transition of young people.

Those questions focused on the pre-existing mental health problems of this vulnerable group of youth; the role of ADHD, autism and trauma; the extent of psychiatric assessment and screening before hormonal treatment; detransition rates; and the influence of the UK Cass review.

In a poll published last week, electoral support for the AfD rose to 28 per cent, ahead of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) on 24 per cent and the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) with 14 per cent.

The Federal Government is run by a “black-red” or conservative-leftist coalition between the CDU/Christian Social Union of Bavaria and the SPD. These and other parties refuse to form a coalition with the AfD, claiming it represents right-wing extremism.

This so-called “firewall” or cordon sanitaire excludes any co-operation with the AfD, such as voting in support of its parliamentary motions. And yet no other major party has an evidence-based policy to restrict paediatric gender medicine.

In its answers this week, the Federal Government acknowledged an AfD-cited study of health insurance data showing an 8-fold increase in gender-identity-related diagnosis among young people aged 5 to 24 over the past decade.

In this 2024 paper by Bachmann et al, more than 70 per cent of young people had at least one psychiatric diagnosis in addition to a gender diagnosis. And after five years, only 36.4 per cent still had a gender diagnosis on their records, a result at odds with the “born-that-way” dogma of the gender-affirming treatment model.

But the Federal Government’s answers to the AfD questions pleaded the “limited” number of studies in the field of youth gender dysphoria. And while the Government said it followed the national and international debate, it stressed that the provision of these hormonal treatments was the responsibility of Germany’s largely autonomous, self-governing health system.

The Federal Government cited the recent, low-quality S2k guideline—on “Gender Incongruence and Gender Dysphoria in Childhood and Adolescence: Diagnosis and Treatment”—and said the Federal Ministry of Health had no plans to study the persistence of youth gender dysphoria nor the associated mental health problems.

Nor did the Government have any plans to prohibit irreversible gender transition of minors with pre-existing mental health problems or legislate to require a 12-month trial period of psychotherapy prior to hormone therapy; both these measures were suggested by the AfD.

In his statement on Monday, Mr Sichert said the answers revealed “massive gaps in the Government’s knowledge regarding co-morbidities before and after transitions and their long-term consequences …”

“They are resorting to excuses such as self-governance [by medical professional bodies which develop treatment guidelines] to shirk their own responsibility.

“This is grossly negligent: children are being reduced to guinea pigs for ideological experiments.

“Whilst other countries such as the UK, Sweden and Finland are restricting irreversible measures in cases of co-morbidity, and the Cass review … warns of high risks, [Germany’s Federal] Government is planning nothing: neither studies, nor legislative changes, nor educational measures regarding infertility or detransitioning.

“The AfD parliamentary group calls for an immediate ban on irreversible transitions for minors with pre-existing mental health conditions.”

Mr Sichert told GCN that “as an Opposition party, we can only push something through if there is a majority in Parliament in favour of it”.

“There are concerns within parts of the CDU regarding [gender] transitions for young people, but unfortunately these voices are also publicly following the Government’s ‘woke’ agenda and are not being heard,” he said.

The AfD questions put to the Federal Government in March cite articles posted by the lobbying group of critical parents called Transteens Sorge berechtigt (TTSB, the name being a reference to the rights and duties of parents amid the turmoil of trans). The public face of TTSB is a former Greens party member, David Allison.

Mr Allison said it was not surprising that the Government had none of the data requested, but its reliance on the S2k treatment guideline and the self-governing nature of medical professional bodies amounted to “a cop out”.

“The crux of the matter is, in my view, the political one,” he told GCN.

“The SPD is almost more ‘queer-friendly’ and obsessed than the Greens party is. The CDU has, for the time being at least, tied its fate to a coalition with the SPD.

“Although I think there may be some trans-friendly people in the CDU, the party is by and large probably critical, but silently so.

“My view is that the CDU considers the issue to be relatively marginal. It has bigger fish to fry with the SPD—economic and social policy in general.

“It is very difficult for these parties to come to common positions on big issues, including reform of the health system (currently a hot issue).

“Of course, trans interventions at public cost are a strain on the health insurance system. But they remain low relative to the much bigger issues involved in any such reform.

“Because the SPD has married itself to trans-activist positions, it probably won’t budge on them.

“The CDU is probably hoping that it can avoid a Trump reaction—“Kamala’s for they/them. President Trump is for you”.

“It’s hoping it can brush the issue under the carpet and get away with it. And they may get away with it, particularly as liberal opinion in Germany is hegemonic in the media.

“They run very little risk of attracting negative coverage from the German media if they go along with the trans agenda. It’s primarily alternative media outlets (NiUS, Apollo, etc) that are critical. And CDU grandees have already denounced these media operations as enemies of democracy.

“All this is part of a much bigger political dilemma in Germany: the cordon sanitaire against the AfD. This means that nothing the AfD introduces to parliament or public debate in general will be considered at all. There is a gigantic impasse in German politics.”

Mr Allison said the “big unknown” was whether the CDU would ever breach the cordon sanitaire isolating the AfD “and either enter a coalition with them or establish a minority government with the tacit support of the AfD.”

The next federal election is scheduled for 2029.

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Popular will: Historian Katja Hoyer on German politics and the rise of the AfD

Vote denied

The AfD has a track record of raising concerns about the gender medicalisation of minors.

In October 2022, the AfD introduced a parliamentary motion urging the Federal Government to submit “a draft bill prohibiting the treatment of children who are unable to give consent with puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and similar medications, and to prohibit associated gender-affirming surgical procedures on minors”.

The Government was also urged “to initiate a study that comprehensively examines the consequences of treating children and adolescents with puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and comparable medications, and to investigate the psychological, physical and social consequences of ‘gender reassignment’ for those affected …

The AfD highlighted the need to research “in particular, the risk of suicide among gender-dysphoric patients or persons with trans identity, and, in doing so, specifically to determine the proportion of those individuals who, after a few years, return to living in accordance with their biological sex (detransitioners)”.

The AfD requested a substantive vote on the motion, but this was denied.

In the January 2025 debate, which resulted in an unproductive referral of the AfD motion to a parliamentary committee, the SPD member Anke Hennig said: “[T]he AfD’s repeated anti-LGBTQ+ motions and their dangerous games with the rights of the LGBTQ+ community are not merely unacceptable.”

“This is a direct attack on the values of our democracy and our society.”

Another MP, Dr Stefan Kaufmann of the CDU/CSU, who served as his parliamentary group’s “spokesperson on queer politics”, said—

“Today we are gathered here to discuss motions from a party that is, to a large extent, far-right, anti-democratic and anti-LGBTQ+, a party that seeks to roll back much of what we have achieved together in recent years, even here in the [Parliament]. That is inhumane and repugnant …”

In December 2024, the AfD introduced a draft bill to criminalise the gender reassignment of minors.

The party’s rationale stated: “For years, there has been a rise in the number of children and adolescents being treated with puberty blockers or [cross-sex] hormones because they do not identify with their biological sex.”

“The treatment of this condition—formerly known as gender identity disorder, now referred to as gender incongruence or gender dysphoria—using puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones, is seeing a sharp rise, despite studies having demonstrated the serious health and psychological side effects and irreversible long-term consequences of these drugs.

“It is also overlooked that, whilst gender-dysphoric episodes do occur in many adolescents during pubertal development and the process of sexual maturation, they normalise over the course of puberty, leading to both psychological and physical acceptance of one’s biological sex.

“This natural development is thwarted by the puberty blocker treatment of adolescents, who subsequently often even decide to take the further step of taking [cross-sex] hormones—and this, in turn, as a precursor to a later surgical sex change. This trend is being driven by political, social and medical campaigns.”

The party noted that the online Rainbow Portal—which operated from 2019-2024 with funding from the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth—“advises children who are unsure about their gender identity to use puberty blockers as an alternative to taking hormones.”

“Children in pre-puberty are directly told that the only thing that matters is feeling comfortable ‘now’ and making a decision to take puberty blockers in line with how they currently feel,” the AfD said.

“The Rainbow Portal thus glorifies drugs that have a significant impact on the development of secondary sexual characteristics and can negatively affect the normal growth of children, adolescents and young people.

“The trivialisation and downplaying of drugs that demonstrably impair pubertal maturation, driven here by the state, but also by other social lobby groups—of drugs that have been proven to impair pubertal maturation—constitutes a constitutionally highly questionable legitimisation of interference with the physical integrity of adolescents and thus stands in contradiction to Article 2(2) of the Basic Law.”

That provision guarantees a person’s “right to life and physical integrity”.

The AfD said that “the administration of puberty blockers, [cross-sex] hormones and similar medications to children who are unable to give consent constitutes a direct interference with their physical integrity and, moreover, hormonal manipulation …”

This “implies an acute risk to the child’s welfare and touches upon the criminal offence of ‘abuse of a person under one’s care’ under Section 225 of the German Criminal Code, although it is not explicitly regulated there.”

Like the 2022 motion, this AfD draft bill was never put to a substantive vote, but was sidelined by other parties in the Parliament.