Should a neo-Nazi be allowed to ‘identify’ as Anne Frank?

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’.

There’s something darkly humorous about the wedding of fusty German bureaucracy with the post-truth insanity of gender ideology. Liebich was not only playing the system, but also flagrantly mocking it, knowing full well that no one would have the gumption to stop him. The fact that an entire court case will now be dedicated to deciding whether we can call Liebich a ‘he’ – no doubt while Liebich himself kicks back with a glass of Smirnoff somewhere in Siberia – is indicative of the humiliating chokehold gender ideology has much of Europe locked in. Indeed, even the news reports on the neo-Nazi fugitive defer to his chosen pronouns, with public broadcaster MDR asking whether ‘the far-right extremist Marla Svenja Liebich could soon revert to her original name’ (my emphasis).

Of course, had Liebich actually shown up to the female prison to which he’d been assigned, the ramifications for the women residing there would not have been quite so laughable. At best, we might hope the sheer stupidity of this case will prompt some kind of sober reckoning with gender self-ID laws, although I won’t hold my breath.

After all, the neo-Nazi who ‘identifies’ as Anne Frank didn’t so much ‘abuse’ self-ID laws as take them to their logical, horrifying conclusion.

Georgina Mumford is a content producer at spiked.