I can't wait for you to operate

March 2, 2023 4:19 AM

The Forgotten History of the World's First Trans Clinic [ungated] - "The Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin would be a century old if it hadn't fallen victim to Nazi ideology." (Magnus Hirschfeld -- and Li Shiu Tong -- previously: 1,2,3,4)

This story begins late one night in Berlin, on the cusp of the 20th century. Magnus Hirschfeld, a young doctor recently finished with his military service, found a German soldier on his doorstep. Distraught and agitated, the young man had come to confess himself an urning, a word used in Germany to refer to homosexual men. It explained the cover of darkness; to speak of such things was dangerous business. The infamous “Paragraph 175” in the German criminal code made homosexuality illegal; a man so accused could be stripped of his ranks and titles and imprisoned.

Hirschfeld understood the soldier’s plight; he was, himself, both homosexual and Jewish. He had toured Europe, watched the unfolding trial against Oscar Wilde, and written an anonymous pamphlet asking why “the married man who seduces the governess” remains free, while homosexual men in loving and consensual relationships—men like Oscar Wilde—were imprisoned. Hirschfeld did his best to comfort the man, but upon leaving his doctor, the soldier shot himself. It was the eve of his wedding, an event he could not face.

The soldier bequeathed his private papers to Hirschfeld, along with a letter: “the thought that you could contribute to [a future] when the German fatherland will think of us in more just terms,” he wrote, “sweetens the hour of death.” Hirschfeld would be forever haunted by this needless loss; the soldier had called himself a “curse,” fit only to die, because the expectations of heterosexual norms, reinforced by marriage and law, made no room for his kind. These heartbreaking stories, Hirschfeld wrote, “bring before us the whole tragedy [in Germany]; what fatherland did they have, and for what freedom were they fighting?” In the aftermath of this lonely death, Hirschfeld left his practice to specialize in sexual health, and began a crusade for justice that would alter the course of queer history.

A pioneering gender-affirming health institute opened in 1919 in Berlin - "The Institute for Sexual Research, founded in 1919, pioneered modern gender-affirming health care. NPR's Ailsa Chang speaks with medical historian Brandy Schillace on this piece of queer history." (@bschillace: "I'm working on a book about this history," viz. cf.)

There was counseling and there were classes, but it was also a beautiful space and people talked about the inside of it as being kind of magisterial and yet homey at the same time. So it was a place that really mixed the two different fields of interest. On one hand, it felt like a familiar home, a place for you to be, and on the other hand, it was a scientific establishment.

So one of their greatest achievements was actually their attempts to educate everyday people to understand that homosexuality and gender nonconforming people -- today we would call that transgender, at the time they didn't have that word, but people who wanted to live as the opposite sex or who perhaps didn't even have a specific sexual understanding of themselves -- that that was actually normal and that, in fact, it had a history. But the other side of what they did is they were trying to figure out how to help those who wanted to transition, what would help those people live healthier, happier lives. They didn't have what we have today, but they did have a burgeoning understanding of hormones and they understood that some parts of the body could be augmented and changed surgically.

You know you might think that at the time there would be a great deal of resistance and only a few people that were accepting. In fact, I find that there were a lot of people willing to accept this and it was much more understood that the doctors that were speaking on behalf of these patients had a lot of authority. Unfortunately, homosexuality was still technically illegal under paragraph 175 in the German rules and laws. But you could actually get a pass, a kind of license for what they considered cross dressing and that was something if you had one of those then you could be recognized as your female self if you had been assigned male at birth or vice versa and could go about your life with this license and your identity was secured. And Hirschfeld was largely responsible for that...

So you might think that there would be not a lot of acceptance and yet frequently there was. And one of the things that was quite sad for me to read was it did seem to depend on where in the social hierarchy you were. There were many cases of working class people accepting their homosexual children. But those who had something to lose -- for social climbing or you know involved in government -- they were the ones who found it much more difficult to accept their children who had homosexual tendencies.

[On Nazi book burning:] They didn't burn the whole building, they decided to use part of the building. They burned only the libraries. They basically took all of the books and papers and these contained protocols for surgery, you know extensive reports on people's lives they were tracking -- how did people respond to different things, a really scientific understanding of transgender issues -- they piled them in the center of the square and they set it on fire. And believe it or not, many of your listeners probably know about this footage. They probably seen pictures of Nazi book burnings and it's when they were burning the library of the Institute. But it's been so effectively erased most people don't realize that's what they're seeing. It's actually the moment they destroyed this material.

It's really troubling. First, when I began reading about Hirschfeld and his Institute and the public response I thought they were so ahead of their time. And then I thought: That's not the right way to put it. We just haven't moved very far. And that's really the tragedy to think what might have been achieved if they had continued as they began. So instead we're seeing so much backlash, so much ground has been lost already, and they're threatening to lose more. You know essentially the Nazi ideal had been based on this kind of white, cis-gender, heterosexual masculinity, and they considered that superior? And they considered anyone who deviated from that as worthy of eradication. So when you see this kind of language returning, it's almost like watching it again and thinking this is where you're starting, where will this end, what violence is coming. So it's deeply disturbing for me because I feel sometimes as though what I'm doing isn't history. It feels like journalism.

It's a human story, you know. This is about all of us. As Hirshfeld himself said at one point, there's as many kinds of love as there are kinds of people. That ought to be honored. Not hatred. Not fear. Because fear ultimately leads to violence because people attack the things they don't understand. So the more knowledge we have, and the more we realize that LGBTQ people have been around since there were people, all the way back into history. This is not a trend, it's not a fad, it's not going to destroy anything. It's been with us always. It's just being human.

further reading...
-THE HIRSCHFELD ARCHIVES (pdf)
-Magnus Hirschfeld | Holocaust Encyclopedia (Wikipedia)
-Magnus Hirschfeld's 1899 psychobiological questionnaire: the paradoxes of de-narrativizing sexual and gender nonconformity
-One of the world's first gay rights activists was racist and sexist. The author of a new book explores how much should it bug us

also btw...

• Between World Wars, Gay Culture Flourished In Berlin - "In Gay Berlin, Robert Beachy describes the rise of a gay subculture in the 1920s and '30s, how it contributed to our understanding of gay identity and how it was eradicated by the Nazis."
• Jason Lutes' Berlin:* "Though the situation is bad enough for the characters in the moment, the drama is heightened because we the readers know what lies ahead, and what's likely to become of anyone who is a political dissident, gender-queer, or member of a targeted religious minority or immigrant community."

Current events in the real world may have amplified the sense of dread beyond what Lutes originally intended when he began working on Berlin in the now-inconceivably prehistoric year of 1996. But even without today’s troubling parallels to the political conditions of 1920s Germany, Berlin captures the drama of ordinary people living through a turning point in history, contributing to our understanding of what happened without intruding on the individual stories of human struggle.[1,2,3,4]

posted by kliuless (6 comments total)

I have a lot of complicated feelings that are hard to articulate about how cis media discovers Hirschfeld periodically and, then, I don't know, decides to blame the Nazis for the fact we don't live in a transphobia-free utopia. So I'll just say Gay Berlin is eminently readable and worth a read. The trans history bits are occasionally a bit awkward (it's not Beachy's specialty), but not particularly cringeworthy.
posted by hoyland at 4:42 AM on March 2, 2023 [11 favorites]

Hirschfeld is a fascinating, complicated person. He did a lot of good but also messed up a lot, sometimes fairly catastrophically. If Europe had not fallen to fascism, and the German queer world had really bloomed, he would probably be seen as a pioneer who gradually slipped into the old guard. That’s not the world that we got, and Hirschfeld gets to be maybe more of a hero than he deserves (the chapter in the book Bad Gays or the podcast of the same name is a great quick summary). It’s always worth remembering that the famous picture of the Nazi book burning shows the destruction of Hirschfeld’s library, which straight and cis writers pretty much never mention.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:55 AM on March 2, 2023 [8 favorites]

It’s always worth remembering that the famous picture of the Nazi book burning shows the destruction of Hirschfeld’s library, which straight and cis writers pretty much never mention.

I bring this up at every possible opportunity, particularly when talking to self-identified "moderates" inclined to both-sides/"Its a complicated issue" the ongoing assault on the rights of our trans friends.

"Hey, you know that famous picture of the Nazi book burning? Do you know which books they were burning? Do you know who they came for first?"

This doesn't mean a thing to conservatives, who are already well into "Actually, the Nazis got some things right" territory in a terrifying and shameless way. But it will rattle the fuck out of some centrists who kid themselves about where we are and where we are headed. Never ever miss a chance to do that. Absolutely everyone should call out Nazi shit when they see it. Always and forever.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:43 AM on March 2, 2023 [25 favorites]

Cool post!

I submit for addition, Leah Tigers, On the Clinics and Bars of Weimar Berlin. If you read one essay about Magnus Hirschfeld and his milieu, consider making it Tigers'.
posted by latkes at 8:22 AM on March 2, 2023 [4 favorites]

"Sexual Healing" title reference FTW
posted by kirkaracha at 8:32 AM on March 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

Holy shit. I’m a 48 year-old cisgender white male and I had no idea about this history until this post.

Thank you!
posted by Big Al 8000 at 7:08 PM on March 2, 2023 [1 favorite]