Translated from the German original, «Eine Motion gegen sechshundert Menschen».

The last time I went swimming was 2018. In Hawaii. I was never happy with my body and rarely went into the water even before that. Honestly, swimming just never crosses my mind.

On 10 August, the SVP published an editorial about protecting women in changing rooms from people like me. Above it, a picture: six women at the poolside, horrified, hands over their faces. Next to them, a bearded man in a bikini. That the scene never happened is stated too, small and grey and set vertically along the far left edge. Image: AI-generated. So it is declared. It gets overlooked anyway.

I felt sick when I saw it. Not because of the picture, that is merely crude. But because I follow what has happened in England, and I recognise the beginning.

I have stood at that counter she writes about. A good year ago, five minutes, 75 francs, a declaration. After that my legal name was Alyssa. National Councillor Nina Fehr Düsel wants to reverse exactly this and will submit a motion in the autumn session. Back to what applied before 2022: a court procedure with expert reports. Her justification is the protection of women in changing rooms, in toilets, in nude bathing areas and in sport. It is not discrimination, she says, but common sense.

Support comes from the FDP. National Councillor Marcel Dobler says people with penises have no business in the Paradiesli or in women’s saunas. An elected national politician describes citizens of this country by their genitals. That is how we are talked about now.

As concrete evidence, the editorial names exactly one situation. Late June, the Marzilibad in Bern, a trans woman was removed by police from the women’s nude bathing area, the Paradiesli. The editorial tells the incident as proof of where this policy leads. The City of Bern tells it differently. It has acknowledged that the facility wrongly opted for a police removal. The person concerned met the access rules. She was entitled to be there. What triggered the situation was that other guests did not read her as a woman because of a few physical features. The responsible department apologised and announced staff training and a public set of guidelines.

According to people close to her, six police officers took her to the ground, restrained her and held her for two hours. She spent the night in hospital, where several large haematomas were documented. The police describe the sequence differently and speak of forceful resistance. How it escalated will have to be clarified by others. The police removal was already wrong as such, and the city established that itself.

I read the reports the way probably every trans woman in this country did. Not as news, but as a calculation. She did everything right, she was allowed to be there, and it happened to her anyway. That very case becomes, in the editorial, proof that too many women have access.

Alongside women’s spaces, the editorial also names fairness in sport and legal certainty. It provides no example for either. In sport, the regulations of the individual federations apply, and the register entry does not automatically decide every eligibility to compete.

How many of us are there, actually? Since 2022, around 3000 people have changed their entry. In the first year it was a little over 1100, and since then the number has settled at around 600 a year. For 2025 the Federal Statistical Office reports 600 changes. Across nine million inhabitants that is roughly one person in 15,000, or eight people a year in a city the size of Winterthur. The high numbers at the start can be read as a catch-up effect: people who had not taken the more onerous route before could suddenly do it more easily. I was one of them.

And around half of them go in the other direction. In 2025, 313 people changed their entry from male to female and 262 from female to male. Trans men do not appear once in the entire editorial, even though they make up almost half. This also has a practical side. If access depends again on the sex registered at birth, trans men with beards and testosterone legally belong in the women’s section. The rule meant to protect against men in the women’s changing room sends men into the women’s changing room.

And if the register entry is to decide access, someone has to check it. At the entrance, among naked people, by staff not trained for it. What gets checked is then not who is in the register, but who does not fit the picture. Women who are considered too tall, or whose hair is too short. In the Marzili that is exactly what happened, and the woman concerned was entitled to be there.

With toilets the argument falls apart fastest. You go in, close the cubicle door, do your business, wash your hands and leave. A toilet is built precisely so that the use happens behind a closed door. Yet there it stands in the list, right next to the changing room. It is there because it gets carried along, not because it proves anything.

For me it has another side. I live as a woman and I am read as a woman. According to the SVP’s idea, I would have to use the men’s toilet, that is, the room women expressly avoid. I am supposed to go precisely where I stand out most. An ID requirement in the changing room protects no woman. It monitors her.

The editorial asks: where is the protection of women in all this? The question is legitimate, and the answer is in the crime statistics. In 2025 the police recorded 55 completed homicides, 34 of them in a domestic context. 23 of those killed were women. In killings within a current or former partnership, it is 19 women against 2 men. On top of that come 22,066 recorded offences in the domestic sphere, and rapes among them rose by 38 per cent compared with the previous year. The Federal Council writes that on average one woman dies of this violence every two weeks.

A large part of the lethal violence against women takes place in the domestic sphere. Often the perpetrator is the partner or the ex-partner. The motion starts with a single incident at a swimming pool, not with this violence. It contains no measure against domestic violence, no additional funding for women’s shelters and not a single new post for protecting affected women. And when parliament dealt with sexual criminal law and the consent model, only yes means yes, the SVP rejected that solution.

I will not go swimming this year. Not because of the SVP, but because swimming simply never crosses my mind. That is the danger a motion is being submitted against. Whether I would go into the Paradiesli myself is a different question from whether I should be allowed to. I would think twice and probably stay home, because I do not want to be the one written about in the paper afterwards. That I have to make that calculation is the problem, not the solution.

What is being proposed protects no woman. It creates a procedure in which women are assessed at the entrance, it sends trans men into the women’s changing room, and it leaves those 22,066 offences untouched, the ones this is supposedly about.

The rest is a picture that does not exist.