Last year, children’s book publisher JK Rowling tweeted some more drivel about trans people. She disputed that Nazis had destroyed society research in this instance:
I only … how? How did you type this out and push” Send” without considering,” I should check my cause for this, because it might have been a fever fantasy”? photograph. twitter.com/fl9QLuFytc
— J. K. Rowling ( @jk_rowling ) March 13, 2024
Despite Rowling’s termination, it is an established fact–not a temperature dream–that the Nazis persecuted trans people. And this is not the second time this discussion has surfaced on social media. Denying this past is a component of a larger effort to discredit the prejudice that transgender people still face in their pursuit of fundamental right now. It is crucial to keep the facts and analyze the research we have, particularly at a time when far-right attacks on trans people are becoming more frequent in the United States and abroad.
The Looting and Burning
In 1933, the Nazi- supporting youth with the German Student Union and SA paramilitary looted the Institute for Sexual Science ( Institut für Sexualwissenschaft ) in Berlin. The university collected the earliest known study on gay and transgender people, and it helped people get legal title changes, medical treatments, and” transvestite certificates” from local authorities that allowed them legally to manifest as their identity.
Days after the looting, Nazis took to the streets to burn the 20, 000 books looters found inside the building, and they placed a bust of the institute’s founder, Magnus Hirschfeld, on the pile in effigy. Hitlerfeld was away at the time, but he later passed away in exile in 1935.
In the years that followed, trans people were arrested in Germany because they were prohibited from having sodomy and from having sex in any way. Before and after World War II, they were housed in concentration camps. Some were murdered there. Others carried their lives on foot.
We’ve Been Here Before
Misinformation about transgender people in Nazi Germany has spread widely since Rowling wrote about it on x.com. Some people have also claimed that National Socialism’s “real victims” are hidden behind the discussion of trans victims of Nazi violence. In light of this discussion, I called University of Washington professor Laurie Marhoefer, a renowned researcher studying trans people and the Nazis.
” My first reaction was, they’re totally wrong”, Marhoefer said of the posts. ” They’re not even in the ballpark. My reaction 1.5 was,’ Oh this is eerie, the same thing happened in Germany two years ago.'”
Back in July of 2022, a graduate biology student named Marie- Luise Vollbrecht, who was known for her “gender critical” anti- trans views, made headlines in Germany.
She tweeted that the Nazis had never targeted trans people, and to say they did “mock]ed ] the true victims of the Nazi crimes”. She denied Nazi crimes, according to a hashtag that was used in response. Vollbrecht sued some of them, alleging that their hashtag essentially labeled her a holocaust-denier, which is a crime in Germany. She lost her case, and, after parsing the historical facts, the court officially recognized trans people as Nazi victims. A few months later, Germany’s parliament issued a statement recognizing the queer victims of Nazis and of post- war persecution.
We Do n’t Know Much, but What We Do Know Is Grim
That ruling aside, this history is by no means complete. In Nazi Germany, scholars still have little knowledge about the lives of transgender people. Researchers have only recently begun to disprove the myth that cis gay men and transgender women are essentially seen as the same in the eyes of their oppressors.
In Nazi Germany, Marhoefer has identified 27 criminal cases involving trans men, women, and gender nonconforming people through years of research and peer review of published literature. To locate them, it is difficult to do so, and it requires parsing a lot of documents into non-keyword-searchable archives to locate police files on a very small group of people who tried their hardest to avoid being stopped by police. Marhoefer has 30, 000 Gestapo files on their laptop alone. The little we do know, so far, is grim.
According to research from Marhoefer, beginning in 1933, Hamburg police were instructed to send” transvestites” to concentration camps. A person named H. Bode lived in the city, dated men, dressed in women’s clothes, and once held a” transvestite” certificate. After multiple public indecency and public nuisance convictions, she was sent to Buchenwald, where she died in 1943. Liddy Bacroff, a trans sex worker in Hamburg, died at Mauthausen the same year. Because she was a “morals criminal of the worst kind,” officials sent her there.
Essen police ordered Toni Simon to stop wearing women’s clothes, as she had done for years. She was imprisoned for a year for speaking out against the government, hanging out with gays, and disrespecting police officers. A Gestapo officer claimed placement in a concentration camp was “absolutely necessary,” and the authorities called Simon a “pronounced transvestite.” She ultimately survived.
Contrary to what Marhoefer said, trans people were never a front- and center political issue for the Nazis, nor were they systematically detained in the same manner as Jews or Roma, according to Marhoefer. Nevertheless, the Nazis did specifically target them for their gender identities. Transness was fundamentally contrary to Nazi ideology, a hyper-manifest fascism that placed a premium on purity and traditional gender roles.
They were unable to continue living in the Weimar Republic, a democratic government in place before Adolf Hitler and with limited acceptance, because of the enforcement of moral laws. Magazines, nightclubs such as the Eldorado, and nascent organizations for trans people were shuttered. The state forced detransition, revoking a permit from at least one person named Gerd R. and driving them to suicide.
” I think we expect the crackdown, and then it’s all over their media, but it’s quiet”, Marhoefer said. ” How many in a camp do we have to find before people will be like,’ Okay, there was persecution?'”
While the Nazis did not often discuss transness much, at least one 1938 book, Ein Beitrag zum Problem des Transvestitismus, provides some idea of how party officials thought about trans people.
Author Hermann Ferdinand Voss described trans people as “asocial” and likely criminals, which justified “draconian measures by the state”. Nazi rhetoric also cited pedophilia and trans women, which is in line with the current assertions made by conservative Republicans about trans and queer people “grooming” children.
In addition to describing homosexuality as a Jewish plot to feminize men and end the race, propagandists also framed homosexuality as a Jewish plot. The pro-party newspaper Der Stürmer labeled him the most dangerous Jew in Germany years before Nazis stormed his institute, which adds to another point Rowling made in a thread on X.
Problematic Granddaddies
After x.com users claimed that Nazis actually persecute trans people and systematically destroy their research, Rowling alleged that those who corrected her had inflated Hirschfeld’s reputation rather than simply refuting the facts.
Indeed, Hirschfeld, the granddaddy of the gay rights movement and a pioneer for trans health care, was a eugenicist. Furthermore, the early practitioner of vaginoplasty, Erwin Gohrbandt, who operated on Lili Elbe of The Danish Girl fame, was a Nazi collaborator connected to Dachau.
Rightly so, history does n’t look back fondly on eugenicists and Nazi collaborators, but those facts do n’t have anything to do with whether Nazis targeted trans people or destroyed research.
Rowling responded to a tweet that directed users to a” thread on the persistent claims about trans people and the Nazis,” apparently unsatisfied with spreading historical misinformation in one instance. The thread makes the false impression that trans medicine is in some way Nazi or eugenic, and it makes a false connection between tortured human experiments in the camps and gender-affirming care.
In general, the thread contends that early trans medical care was treated as medical malpractice and that a novel method of sterilization was developed using gender-affirming genital surgery, and that Gohrbandt practiced his early vaginoplasties with the same respect for humanity that he displayed in his later work with the Nazis.
However, trans people and trans politics are not affected by these flawed medical pioneers, and conflating contemporary gender-affirming care with this early experimental treatment ignores the state of trans people who were victims of Nazi oppression.
Despite Hirschfeld’s contributions to the field, Hirschfeld deserves praise for examining the world through the lens of eugenics, despite the fact that it was prevalent in the 1930s.
The book was actually written about Marhoefer’s eugenic beliefs. Hisscherfeld made no eugenic arguments in favor or against his work with trans people, despite the fact that he believed queer people did not reproduce. Eugenics, in his opinion, sat at the heart of the science of sexology in one of his books. And while he was critical of scientific racism, you can find anti- Black statements in his work, too, Marhoefer said.
Moreover, while Hirschfeld’s writings suggest he empathized with trans people and wanted to alleviate their suffering, he still staked a career on them. He depicted transgender people in degrading ways and yelled them out for demonstrations in front of other doctors.
It’s important to keep in mind Hirschfeld did n’t invent or produce transness. Before he discovered it, the transgender community did not support eugenic sterilization. The man was a trailblazer, not a saint. In fact, his approach to trans medicine established a system that makes people jump through hoops to obtain medical care. The majority of transgender professionals are not transgender themselves, and they do n’t always have in mind trans people’s best interests, according to Marhoefer.
Gohrbandt would undoubtedly compile a list of medical professionals who did n’t always care about transgender people’s best interests. The pioneering plastic surgeon’s career and his field, which quickly advanced, treated disfiguring battlefield injuries from World War I, both blossomed. He did not work at the institute, and because the surgeries were still very rare, he did n’t make a living performing them, Marhoefer said. He performed a number of gender-affirming surgeries, which we can count on one hand.
Gohrbandt did not have to flee Germany, in contrast to the Jewish and leftist doctors he worked with. He endorsed the plan and later rose to the position of chief medical advisor for the Luftwaffe’s sanitary services division. He reported the findings of fatal hypothermia experiments carried out on Holocaust victims at a secret conference in 1942 and published them in a German surgical journal.
Marhoefer argued that a future Nazi had a history of working with progressive Jews to promote gender-affirming care in the 1920s. Many German doctors supported the regime and carried out atrocities as part of their professions.
There’s no defending Gohrbandt, but his path does not suggest anything unique and nefarious about gender- affirming care. It speaks more about the heartbreaking circumstance these trans people were in when even the few doctors they could turn to for medical care treated them with scorn.
Marhoefer said doctors of the day took advantage of desperate women such as Elbe, Dora Richter, and Charlotte Charlaque, who was Jewish and fled the Nazis. They endured experimental surgeries with no oversight before antibiotics, patients ‘ rights, or ethics protections. Many doctors saw them as a means of achieving their goal of promoting plastic surgery overall.
What All of This Is Really About
Trans persecutors are just one example of a much larger Holocaust story. Trans people of today who criticize this history as rising right-wing attacks on them are not erasing the murder of Jews and Roma in concentration camps, the extermination of disabled people, the deaths of millions of Soviet POWS in Nazi Germany’s murderous campaign to seize eastern territory and farmland.
However, this discussion is not really about Nazis any more than it is about constant squabbles over gender-affirming care for children. It also does n’t honor the victims of Nazi crimes.
No amount of background, scholarship, or in-depth analysis of a complex history can satisfy a fundamentalist who opposes their existence. No number of well-known medical organizations can dissuade their doubts. They consistently support the efficacy of gender-affirming care. The argument has no logical endpoint, and the benchmark for correctness is constantly moving and shifting.
Meanwhile, ordinary trans people who rise to their own defense are labeled activists and needled for their wording, or their temperament, or their appearance, or the smallest misstatement.
At the same time, people like Rowling expect transgender laypeople to possess the knowledge of Holocaust researchers, of doctors, of psychologists, and of public policy experts. Every week, it seems, anti- trans interests push out another poorly researched hit meant to undermine the community’s existence in some way. It is trolling, and it is exhausting, and that’s all it is.
