Swiss Miss

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No Truth Allowed in Switzerland Now

Except that is not true, say the Swiss courts. Even when the brain is gone and the flesh is stripped away by time, the subjective feelings of a man who died years ago trump biological reality. 

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.

David Strom:

I always assumed that the Swiss were more immune to absurdities than other Europeans. They are famous for their precision, or at least were. But my assumption turned out to be completely wrong. 

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.’

Come again? According to this court, ‘transgender’, ‘queer’ and ‘intersex’ are sexual orientations, when clearly they are not. Lesbian, gay and bi are orientations. Intersex is a distinct condition. The rest are self-appointed identities.

Prison for saying something that should not be in the least controversial? It makes sense if your goal is to strip meaning from words and hide basic facts. Some people, like Emanuel Brünisholz, refused to be cowed by mere social opprobrium or lesser punishments. As with reality itself, some people are too stubborn to learn what is and is not Approved™ by the authorities. 

Of course, Brünisholz's imprisonment will serve to elevate the ordinary person's awareness of just how far things have gone, so it may backfire. Or not. It may take a series of such cases to generate a backlash strong enough to convince the powers that be that they are going down a path their citizens don't want to travel.