The
Trump administration continues its assault on transgender rights.
In July 2017, Trump sought to bar transgender
people from serving in the military. Then, this past October, The New York
Times obtained a memo indicating that the administration was considering
narrowly defining gender “as a biological, immutable condition determined by
genitalia at birth.” Anyone wishing to challenge their officially assigned sex
would have to have the matter resolved by genetic testing.
Those
opposed to recognizing gender identity sometimes call it a form of “radical
gender ideology” or “political correctness” gone too far.
But recognition of transgender identity is no
recent phenomenon: Some doctors acknowledged gender-nonconforming people far
earlier than most might realize. Perhaps the most important pioneer was German
physician Magnus Hirschfeld, who was born 150 years ago, in 1868. As a
historian of gender and sexuality in Germany, I’m struck by how he paved the
way for the legal recognition of gender nonconforming people.
In
recent years, the medical and psychological professions have come to a consensus
that sex assignment at birth is inadequate for understanding individuals’
sexual and gender identity – and that failure to recognize this fact can have a
devastating impact.
Magnus
Hirschfeld was the first doctor to openly research and advocate for people
whose gender did not correspond with their sex assignment at birth.
He’s
often remembered today as an advocate of gay rights, and in the early 20th
century, his activism played a major role in nearly overturning Germany’s law
criminalizing male same-sex relations.
But
Hirschfeld’s vision extended much further than homosexuality. He defined his
specialty as “sexual intermediaries,” which included everyone who did not fit
into an “ideal type” of heterosexual, cisgendered men and women.
According
to Hirschfeld, sexual intermediaries included many categories. One type was cisgendered
people who were gay, lesbian or bisexual. Another consisted of transvestites:
people who comfortably identified as their assigned sex but who preferred to
dress in the clothing assigned to the other sex. Yet others were “trans” in a
more radical direction, like those who wanted to live fully as their
nonassigned sex or longed for sex-change surgery.
As a gay man, Hirschfeld was aware of the
legal and social dangers sexual intermediaries faced.
Since
sexual intermediaries often turned to their doctors for help, Hirschfeld worked
to educate the medical community. He published medical journals including the
“Yearbook on Sexual Intermediaries” and the “Journal of Sexual Science.” In
1919, he founded the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin to promote further
research.
In court
he gave expert testimony on behalf of men who had been accused of violating
Germany’s law banning male same-sex relations.
He even
co-wrote and made a cameo appearance in the world’s first feature-length movie
featuring a gay protagonist: the 1919 silent film “Anders als die Anderen”
(“Different from the Others”).
Nor did
Hirschfeld shy away from political engagement. In 1897, he founded the
“Scientific Humanitarian Committee” to advocate for gender and sexual rights.
Then,
from 1897 to 1898, Hirschfeld worked to decriminalize male same-sex relations
in Germany. He collected over 5,000 signatures from Germans willing to be
publicly identified with the effort, including such luminaries as Albert
Einstein and Thomas Mann. A bill decriminalizing male homosexual acts gained
only minority support when it was introduced in Parliament in 1898, but a new
bill was reintroduced after the First World War. In the more progressive
environment of the Weimar Republic, the bill advanced to parliamentary
committee, only to stall when the Great Depression hit in 1929.
Importantly, Hirschfeld’s advocacy extended
well beyond the decriminalization of gay male sex.
Like
most European countries, Germany had – and still has – an “internal passport,”
a government-issued ID that citizens are expected to carry with them. Germans
whose passport indicated “male” but who dressed in female clothing were subject
to police harassment or arrest for disorderly conduct.
Together
with a colleague, Hirschfeld in 1910 convinced the Berlin police to accept a
“transvestite certificate,” signed by a doctor, to nullify such charges. After
World War I, he convinced the Prussian judiciary to permit legal name changes
from gender-specific names to gender-neutral names, which enabled trans people
to present as the gender that was most true to themselves.
Not all sexual minorities in Germany endorsed
Hirschfeld’s views. Early 20th-century Germany was a politically and culturally
diverse place, and that diversity extended to same-sex and gender-nonconforming
people.
Some gay
men, for example, argued that far from being an “intermediary” sexual type,
they were the most masculine men of all: After all, they didn’t form close
bonds with women. The vision of these “masculinists” had little room for
lesbians, bisexuals or trans people.
By contrast, Hirschfeld’s approach was
all-inclusive. In his view, all “sexual intermediaries” – whether L, G, B, T,
Q, or I in today’s parlance – were worth recognizing and protecting. He once
calculated that there were 43,046,721 possible variants of human sexuality.
That was simply another way of saying that the human species was infinitely
diverse.
“Love,”
he said, “is as varied as people are.”
When the
Nazis came to power in 1933, Hirschfeld, who was Jewish, was on tour lecturing
on sexual science. From abroad, he watched newsreels of his Institute for
Sexual Science set aflame by Nazi storm troopers. Thousands of unique medical
records, publications, photos and artifacts were destroyed.
Hirschfeld
died two years later, and materials confiscated by the Nazis became evidence
against gender and sexually nonconforming people in the Third Reich. Male
same-sex relations weren’t decriminalized in East Germany until 1968, and in
West Germany until 1969. Full legal equality had to wait even longer.
Nearly a
century after Hirschfeld’s institute burned, only tentative progress has been
made in ending discrimination based on gender identity. And that progress is at
risk.
Yet no
bureaucratic definition of “sex” will change what Hirschfeld so clearly
demonstrated over 120 years ago: Trans people exist.
The
early 20th-century German trans-rights activist who was decades ahead of his
time. By Elizabeth Heineman. The Conversation , November 9, 2018.
Over 100
years ago, the gay German sexologist Dr Magnus Hirschfeld pioneered the
understanding of human sexuality and the advocacy of lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transgender and intersex (LGBTI) human rights at a time when it was deeply
unpopular to do so. That took immense courage - and determination. He was
battling against the ignorance and prejudice of centuries.
While
Oscar Wilde was being tormented in Reading Gaol, Hirschfeld launched the
world’s first gay rights organisation in Berlin. Whereas Wilde merely lamented
the persecution of LGBTI people, Hirschfeld organised to fight it.
His
Scientific Humanitarian Committee, founded in Germany in 1897, trail-blazed the
struggle for homosexual emancipation. A similar movement did not emerge in
Britain until the 1960s, over half a century later. He truly was a man ahead of
his time.
Hirschfeld
was born into a conservative Jewish family in what was then Prussia in 1868.
During his childhood he developed a curiosity and fascination with sex. Against
the conventions of his era and the moralism of his elders, even as a young boy
he viewed sexuality as something entirely natural and wholesome.
At medical
school, he was traumatised by a lecture on ‘sexual degeneracy’, where a gay man
- who had been incarcerated in an asylum for 30 years because of his
homosexuality - was paraded naked before the students like a laboratory animal.
Hirschfeld was the only student revolted by such mistreatment. All the others,
even his best friend, viewed it as normal and justified.
Further trauma
ensued when, soon after setting up himself as a doctor in Berlin in 1893, he
was waylaid outside his apartment at night by a soldier who was deeply
disturbed by his homosexuality. Hirschfeld resisted the soldier’s pleading for
a consultation there and then, telling him to come to his surgery the next day.
Overnight, however, the soldier committed suicide.
Hirschfeld’s
terrible guilt and remorse motivated him to begin studying homosexuality and,
eventually, to write a pamphlet calling for the decriminalisation of gay sex,
which was then outlawed under Paragraph 175 of the German penal code.
When his
family advised him to study something more worthy and respectable like cholera,
arguing that research into homosexuality will not bring him any acclaim or joy,
Hirschfeld riposted: “What are you saying: that cholera brings you more joy
than sexuality?”
As his pro-gay
reputation spread, more and more men who were unhappy with their homosexuality
came to him as patients. Hirschfeld’s prescription? Lots of gay parties and
plenty of boyfriends!
One of
Hirschfeld’s biggest problems was hostility from other gays and lesbians. They
mostly accepted their second class legal status. Many did not like him rocking
the boat. He was seen as a trouble-maker. They refused to co-operate with his
sex surveys and law reform campaigns.
Realising that
his lone efforts were not enough, in 1897 Hirschfeld founded the Scientific
Humanitarian Committee (SHC). Its strategy was to promote research and
education on all sexual matters; in particular to debunk homophobic prejudice
and to present a rational case for the decriminalisation of homosexuality.
The 1890s
equivalent of the UK gay lobby group Stonewall, the SHC’s motto was: “Justice
through science”. Some of it’s more radical supporters adapted the battle cry
of the French Revolution, demanding: “Liberte, Fraternite, Egalite, Homosexualite!”
As well as
having to contend with the complacency and disparagement of other gay people,
Hirschfeld was also attacked from left by militant OutRage!-style campaigners
led by Adolf Brand. Advocating direct action and the outing of homophobes, Brand
denounced Hirschfeld’s “queeny committee” as a talking shop of respectable,
middle class homosexualists.
Much as I
admire Brand’s defiant, assertive gay activism, his criticism of the SHC was a
bit unfair. In those ignorant, bigoted days, to have a group like Stonewall was
truly radical - almost revolutionary. This is confirmed by the way the SHC and
Hirschfeld were put under police surveillance as subversives and subjected to
repeated harassment.
Thanks to
Hirschfeld’s tireless campaigns, in 1898 the German parliament debated the
repeal of Paragraph 175. Leading the call for its abolition was August Bebel,
head of the left-wing Social Democrats (Hirschfeld was also a prominent member
of the SPD). Although defeated, the debate put homosexual equality onto the
mainstream political agenda for the first time.
Undeterred by
this setback, Hirschfeld decided to tackle the police, in bid to stop them
enforcing the unjust anti-gay laws. He took the police commissioner of Berlin
on a tour of gay bars and clubs. Instead of the dens of debauchery that he was
expecting, the commissioner found that LGBTI people were witty, stylish, polite
and well behaved - and he enjoyed their company. “I wanted to see Sodom and
Gomorrah,” he complained somewhat disappointedly.
To strengthen
the rational, scientific case for law reform, Hirschfeld proceeded with his
medical research into the causes and nature of homosexuality, in the hope that
understanding the facts would discourage prejudice and promote acceptance.
Far in advance
of others, he concluded that everyone is a mixture of male and female. But this
perceptive true analysis led him to erroneously advance the idea that lesbian
and gay people were an “intermediate sex” that was biologically predetermined
at birth. In his view, male homosexuals possessed a “woman’s soul trapped in a
man’s body.”
This
well-intentioned misjudgement aside, Hirschfeld was right on most other things.
He can and should be forgiven.
As well as his
concern for the welfare of homosexuals, he was also a strong advocate of the
rights of transgender people - again, decades ahead of his time. Good fortune
shone on Hirschfeld when he was paid a fabulous sum to perform one of the
world’s first gender reassignment operations. The payment enabled him to
establish the Institute for Sexual Science (ISS) in 1919, which predated Dr
Alfred Kinsey’s US sex research institute by nearly three decades.
As well as its
research role, the Institute promoted sex education, contraception, marriage
guidance counselling, advice for gay and transgender people, the treatment and
prevention of sexually-transmitted diseases, gay law reform and women’s rights.
It saw over 20,000 people a year.
These were
novel ideas at the time, and Hirschfeld’s fame and notoriety spread world-wide.
When told that the American newspapers were hailing him as “the Einstein of
sex”, he wittily replied that he would feel much happier if they called
Einstein “the Hirschfeld of physics.”
But his work
bought him into conflict with the Nazis. They ranted against his “perversions”
- attacking his public meetings and
beating up him and his lover and assistant Karl Giese.
While away in
the US lecturing in 1933, Nazi stormtroopers attacked and ransacked the
Institute for Sexual Science, destroying its priceless research archives. The
vast library was burned in the great bonfire of “enemy books.” The newsreel
footage of these burning books features in almost every documentary about the
Nazis and in all the main history books. But it is rarely acknowledged that it
was Hirschfeld’s sexological institute and the headquarters of his German gay
rights movement that were the main targets and victims of the stormtrooper’s
wrath.
The Nazis also
seized the Institute’s huge list of client’s names and addresses. These were
used by the Gestapo to compile their notorious “pink lists”, which identified
homosexuals and led to their arrest and deportation to the concentration camps.
With the Nazis
publicly denouncing Hirschfeld as one of the country’s leading “Jewish
criminals,” which was effectively a death sentence, friends advised him not to
return to Germany. He went to the south of France instead, where he died
suddenly of a stroke in 1935. His partner and fellow researcher and campaigner,
Karl Giese, committed suicide in 1938, while on the run from the Nazis. Both
died sad, lonely deaths; unbefitting their enormous humanitarian contributions.
It took many
decades for Hirschfeld’s life and work to be properly documented and for him to
receive the social acclaim he so richly deserved.
His
extraordinary endeavours are thankfully now well documented in the film, The
Einstein of Sex (Rosa von Praunheim, 1999), and in the biography, Magnus
Hirschfeld (Charlotte Wolff, 1986). They chart his political campaigns, sexual
research and the myriad ups and down of his own less than joyful personal life.
As with so many other human rights campaigners, Hirschfeld often sacrificed his
own happiness and comfort for the love and welfare of others. A true pioneer
and hero of the struggle for sexual human rights and queer emancipation!
Magnus
Hirschfeld Advanced LGBT+ Rights In The 1800s - His Pioneering Work Mustn't Be
Forgotten. By Peter Tatchell. The Huffington Post , February 21 , 2018.
The
fetish cruising bar Bull is a place of pilgrimage in Berlin for more than one
reason. To patrons, it is a 24-hour safe space that caters to every palate. To
the British historian Brendan Nash, it is a symbol of “Babylon Berlin,” a
golden decade of LGBT freedom in the city in the 1920s, when the bisexual
Hollywood star Marlene Dietrich mixed with prostitutes and transgender
dance-hall girls.
“There’s
been a gay bar of some kind at this address for more than 100 years,” Nash, an
energetic 54-year-old, explained to a walking tour he was leading as he
gestured enthusiastically at a neon sign outside, which featured cattle with
large nose rings. Chuckling, he told the group that an elderly woman
nonchalantly wanders through Bull with a sandwich cart at 5 a.m. in case anyone
is hungry. “There is nothing that she has not seen,” he said.
Germany
has long been lauded for its liberal attitude toward sex. It recently passed
laws allowing same-sex couples to marry and adopt, and just became the first
European country to legalize a third gender. But LGBT-rights groups have warned
of a parallel rise of violent homophobia in mainstream politics.
Since
the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) Party stormed into the Bundestag
last year, its politicians have called for homosexuals to be imprisoned, vowed
to repeal gay marriage, and denounced those suffering from HIV. Such attacks
not only symbolize yet another seismic, global shift to the right. They are
also reminders of Germany’s fascist past and, rights groups worry, signs of
dangerous future clamp-downs on vulnerable minorities.
Berlin
is a powerfully queer place—gay culture, politics, activism, clubs, and sex
reverberate through the city. Crowds here dance under confetti rain at annual
Christopher Street Day, or gay pride, parades. A fierce campaign is under way
to protect intersex children from surgery, and antiracism protesters regularly
drown out far-right rallies. But “Germany is not the shiny, progressive country
it wishes to be portrayed as,” says Katrin Hugendubel, the advocacy director of
the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association in
Europe (ILGA-Europe), which represents more than 1,000 LGBT organizations.
In 1918,
when Bull’s predecessor first opened, Weimar-era Germany was embarking on a
scandalous decade. Gay communities in New York, Paris, and London faced the
threat of imprisonment, financial ruin, murder, or even execution. Berlin’s
reputation for wild immorality and its unusually liberal law enforcement, by
contrast, helped turn the city into Europe’s undisputed gay mecca.
By the
1920s, Berlin was home to an estimated 85,000 lesbians, a thriving gay-media
scene, and around 100 LGBT bars and clubs, where artists and writers mixed with
cross-dressing call girls who supposedly inspired the Some Like It Hot director
Billy Wilder. Magnus Hirschfeld’s revolutionary Institute for Sexual Science
openly lobbied for the decriminalization of homosexuality and helped
transgender men apply with government agencies to live legally under their new
gender. Audiences, straight and gay, queued up at Eldorado, a Jewish-owned
nightclub where trans women and drag queens performed and gave paid dances to
visitors. There, patrons watched the drug-addled, bisexual Anita Berber star in
naked dances named after narcotics. In 1929, the British writer Christopher
Isherwood, whose pivotal years in Berlin were brought to life in the film
Cabaret, wrote in his diary: “I’m looking for my homeland and I have come to
find out if this is it.”
Isherwood
is something of a passion for Brendan Nash. With a shaved head, a hooded
jacket, and an endless supply of racy anecdotes, Nash is not your average
armchair academic. For the past eight years, he has transported tourists and
earnest gender-theory students back in time to search for the ghosts of their
pioneering heroes, as part of his popular LGBT walking tour around West
Berlin’s “gayborhood” of Schöneberg.
But
lately, the tour has taken on a different meaning. Instead of merely teaching
history, he’s drawing parallels with the present.
“1932
was the 2016 of its age,” Nash explained to a rapt group, muffled in thick
coats in the bright, cold sunshine. Passing around a 90-year-old one million
Deutsche Mark note—a legacy of the period’s hyperinflation, which drove many people to embrace populist
politicians—that he had found at a flea market, he added: “Desperate people in
poverty were being promised jobs, that they could ‘take back control’ and ‘make
Germany great again.’”
The
electorate voted, and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, which would
become the Nazi Party, won a shocking 6.3 million votes, increasing its
presence in the Bundestag from 12 seats to 107.
Ten
months later, on May 6, 1933, the Institute for Sexual Science was looted and
same-sex dancing was banned. From 1933 to 1945, an estimated 100,000 LGBT
individuals were arrested. An extraordinary decade of sexual freedom was over.
Nash
talked ardently of the comparisons between the rise of fascism in the 1920s and
1930s and modern German rhetoric. “When I read political speeches from 1932, I
think to myself, I heard someone say that on the six o’clock news last night,”
he said.
The
current political mood in Germany is unstable, with old fractures reopening
between the conservative East and affluent West. In September 2017, the AfD
made history when it became the first overtly far-right party to sit in the
Bundestag in 60 years. Founded in 2013 as a fringe, anti-migrant group with
alleged neo-Nazi links, it is now the third-largest party, with 92 seats in the
Bundestag and a representative in every state.
Since
the AfD’s arrival, the LGBT community has experienced “unbearable incitement of
hatred,” says Micha Schulze, the managing editor of the LGBT news site
queer.de. He cites AfD politicians calling same-sex marriage a “national death”
and posting an obituary on their website mourning “the German family.” Reported
hate crimes against LGBT individuals in Germany rose by roughly 27 percent in
2017, according to the German Interior Ministry—a figure that Schulze and other
LGBT groups claim is “the tip of the iceberg.”
In
October, the AfD co-leader Alexander Gauland, who has vowed to repeal same-sex
marriage, was accused of paraphrasing a 1933 speech by Adolf Hitler. The same
month, the party launched websites to recruit child informants to spy on
teachers expressing political opinions, including those in favor of LGBT
rights, in the classroom. The party pushed the youths to then “denounce” the
teachers anonymously online. Christian Piwarz, the culture minister in the
state of Saxony, called the move a “despicable mindset of snoopery...from the
times of the Nazi dictatorship or the Stasi.”
On
December 7, the sexual-health charity AIDS-Hilfe Sachsen-Anhalt Nord e.V.
criticized the AfD representative Hans-Thomas Tillschneider for a Facebook post
that echoed Nazi-era propaganda against homosexuals by claiming that HIV
sufferers were “martyrs of a disinhibited, hedonistic, hypersexualized
society.”
Given
the AfD’s homophobic reputation, it is perhaps surprising that 39-year-old
Alice Weidel, its other co-leader, is a lesbian who lives with her female
partner and children. But instead of advocating for LGBT rights, the former
investment banker wants to protect gay Germans from “dangerous” Muslims whom
she has called “headscarf girls, welfare-claiming knife-wielding men and other
do-nothings.” The party even has a vocal LGBT group called “Alternative
Homosexuals” that opposes migrants.
When
questioned about her comments, Weidel has blamed the media for spreading
“propaganda” and insisted to Der Tagesspiegel, a German newspaper: “I’m being
credited with being involved in a supposedly homophobic party, but that's not
the reality.”
Anti-LGBT
sentiment appears to be spreading beyond far-right parties, too. Chancellor
Angela Merkel’s replacement as leader of the ruling Christian Democratic Union
is Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the party’s former general secretary. She has
previously claimed that same-sex marriage could lead to the legalization of
incest.
“You
could argue that we live in a climate of hate speech,” says Markus Ulrich, the
spokesperson for the Lesbian and Gay Federation in Germany, an influential
lobbying group. While Ulrich believes that the majority of the mainstream left
and center-right parties have “made their peace” with recent pro-LGBT
legislation and would fight attempts to repeal it, the growing influence of
far-right politicians is worrisome. “This is definitely a step towards
concrete, violent action against the LGBT community,” he adds.
For now,
Berlin’s sexual subcultures continue to walk in the footsteps of their
pioneering forebears from the 1920s. It remains, still, a place for The Other.
At
around 2:50 a.m., in the dark and pungent night club SO36 in the hipster
neighborhood of Kreuzberg, Pansy, the blonde-wigged, gold-leotarded,
hairy-legged host of the Miss Kotti drag-queen beauty pageant, leaned into the
microphone.
“It gets
so bad, sometimes it’s impossible to get out of bed. Being suicidal when you
are queer is no fucking joke, and it happens far too often in this city,” she
told the beer-soaked crowd. “But the one thing that keeps me going is drag.
Coming to rooms like this and seeing everything right with the world.
“The
only way that we get over it,” she said, to drunken shrieks of approval, “is
when we come together as human beings and celebrate each other. You know what I
mean?
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