Trans History Week and Germany 1933

If you can't, we know why.

Cos the Nazis hated bureaucracy and paperwork?

Maybe it's that they were persecuting transgender people so much, they didn't dare make any records, unlike all their other victims

Thus the lack of evidence confirms that the transgendered were far worse off than the Jews. Yeah, that sounds right.

Denn in dem diesem Post vorausgehenden Artikel wird nicht behauptet, dass eine systematische Verfolgung von Transpersonen in der NS-Zeit erfolgt sei, sondern dass in dieser Zeit ein Zustand der Vermischung von Schwul und Trans als perverse Krankheit zu finden gewesen sei.*

I think this is the important sentence in suggestion's link which translates (badly) as follows:
In the article that the post (by the claimant in the libel case which is the reason for this trial) responds to there isn't a claim that there was systematic persecution of trans people during NS times but that during this time there could be found a state of mix up of homosexuality (schwul) and trans as a perverse disease.

So even the article in question that is at the base of this doesn't claim there was systematic persecution of trans people.

For crying out loud. The existence of something occuring does not depend on an ability to identify a name.

Can you tell me the name of a woman who was murdered by her husband in the 8th century? If you can't does that mean it never happened?

If you can only tell me 2, does that mean that they were the only 2 in that period who were murdered by their husbands, and no other woman was?

Transgender people in Nazi Germany lived hidden lives under the radar as far as possible to try to escape persecution. They changed names, they were disowned by families, they did everything they could to avoid being publicly identified. Is it any surprise we're not going to generate a long list of identifiable names? That does not mean their persecution did not happen, and this is testified to in court and in museums in Germany and worldwide.

Courts often get it wrong.

NAME these transgender victims, please. Even two. It should be easy, as the names of Jewish victims and gay victims exist in the public record.

So go on! Put up or shut up as it were. Give the names of even just two of them. If you can't, we know why.

You can feel free to name some of these victims yourself if you like.

See if you can do a better job than Pink News.

You are really showing yourself up eh. Knock yourself out!

Did the German court name any of these trans victims?

Is the German court in the same Germany that doesn't currently believe female people exist or have sex based rights?

(The second question was rhetorical.)

“(I feel like the scale of the persecution of Jewish people is probably such that no one could seriously deny that happened, but who knows?)”

I no longer have any faith that reality will not be denied by people who appear to have mental capacity given the events of the last decade.

What exactly is post-truth about pointing out that a German court ruled that transgender people were victims during the Nazi era?

https://nrwe.justiz.nrw.de/lgs/koeln/lg_koeln/j2022/28_O_252_22_Urteil_20221109.html

Yes, I worry about this too.

I feel like the laws against Holocaust denial in Germany have been weaponised to shoehorn in trans people retrospectively despite the lack of any compelling evidence, and the likely outcome is that when it becomes apparent that supposedly respectable people and organisations have been endorsing this rewriting of history, some people will use this as an excuse to deny the very real atrocities that were committed against other groups, such as gay men. (I feel like the scale of the persecution of Jewish people is probably such that no one could seriously deny that happened, but who knows?)

So the laws against Holocaust denial, when misused by the trans rights lobby, could in fact lead to more Holocaust denial.

It's very distasteful how TRAs try to centre trans people in the Holocaust. In the 1930s and 1940s, there was no concept of 'transgender' as it exists now. The Nazis targeted homosexual men, but had some limited tolerance for cross-dressing, as long as it wasn't linked to sexual orientation. Hirschfeld's research institute was attacked mainly because he was Jewish. Although modern TRAs claim it was dedicated to transsexualism, it had a much broader focus.

Also - when Hirschfeld's books were burnt, they weren't the only ones on the pyre. Books by other Jewish writers and by pacifists, taken from other places, were also destroyed in the same incident at the Opernplatz.

This is an excellent point and very apt comparison.

I wonder what trans activists think their post-truth approach will bring? The people who nod along are likely those who already took the leap of faith required to believe in gendered souls. I think the unintended consequence could be that of discrediting holocaust histories and ultimately fueling Holocaust denial.

Great post @TheCatsTongue Really informative.

For activists it is important to spread the myth of trans people being targeted by the Nazis for a few reasons:

• There is a persistent claim that trans people have always existed. If anything this just serves as an erasure of gender-nonconfirming people. Why are you denying gender non-confirming existence?
• It creates the myth of a community and a defined group that were recognised and targeted 80 years ago.
• It also creates the myth that the "trans" identity was recognised 80 years ago. The term "trangender" didn't really exist until about a decade ago. Transsexual was widely known until the 1960's.
• It creates the myth of continued persecution.
• Trans activists always have to frame everything around trans. Even the Ukraine war has focused on "apparent transphobia". The BBC even did an article about how climate change affects trans people more.

No reference you say? I am all astonishment.

We did get a link afterwards. The case was Vollbrecht suing someone for calling her a Holocaust denier. She lost that case - she had a very big "freedom of speech" bar to clear there. The court said that both her statements and people calling her a "holocaust denier" were legal, which sounds right to me.

Going back to the first link, I'm struck by this quote in it.

Vollbrecht asserted that to discuss trans victims of Nazism is to “mock” other (that is, cisgender) victims of Nazi violence. She used the term mock, which I take to be a gesture toward the old anti-trans trope of trans people as ridiculous, objects of scornful laughter. Trans people, Vollbrecht suggested in her tweet, are ridiculous.

This sort of non-sequitur (faux?) reading comprehension problem is very common among a certain circle, I've found.

There was no triangle badge for 'transgender people' in the camps, though attempts have been made to claim the pink triangle used for gay men covered cross-dressing - no examples have been found - and the Nazis documented everything, there was no shame about the camps and the extermination programmes.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_concentration_camp_badge

There was also no shame about the enthusiastic cross-dressing by Nazi soldiers off duty.

nationalpost.com/news/cross-dressing-nazis-a-german-artist-found-so-many-photos-of-them-he-published-a-book-about-it

the main argument put forward on this forum is "There is no such thing as a trans person"
Define trans person first please. Some people think it means changing sex which we all know is impossible as nobody has ever managed it yet.

clear picture of persecution of trans people in Nazi Germany.
Again, define trans for this statement. Nazi Germany had loads of transvestites (cross dressers) and we know this because of photographic evidence, although I doubt any were persecuted for it as the photos were mainly of the nazi soldiers themselves.

I forgot to add that out of the five names Pink News came up with, not only were they all either Jewish or gay, but only a couple of them were actually killed by the Nazis.

No reference you say? I am all astonishment.

Fascinating and incorrect.

If this was true, then you must recognise the scenario that one of the top surgeons who performed sex change surgeries must have then met his patients in the concentration camps where he was performing more experiments.

To return to Malcolm's thread, Pink News may have failed to identify any trans victims who weren't Jewish and/or gay, but that doesn't mean there weren't any.

I'd guess the number of transsexual people in Germany in 1933 was in the single figures, but the Nazi regime was pretty intolerant of people who were classed as misfits or troublemakers, even if they weren't in a target group. And such a tiny subset of people was very unlikely to have been singled out as a group, but it's quite likely some people in the group could have fallen foul of the regime.

And if such can be found they deserve to be remembered.

But this reminds me a bit of Helmuth Hübener, a 17-year-old boy executed in Hamburg in 1942 as an enemy of the state. Helmuth and two of his friends, fellow members of the Mormon church, had been active in anti-Nazi pamphleteering. They didn't get any support from local church leadership, some of whom were pro-Nazi and most of whom were just keeping their heads down and trying to stay alive in the knowledge that their American connections could make them targets.

Following the war, the LDS church recognised Helmuth Hübener as a martyr and posthumously ordained him as an elder. His story has become pretty well known in Mormon circles, and LDS artists and writers return to it quite often. This is good. It's an important story to know.

But what the TQ+ community is doing is the equivalent of taking the Helmuth Hübener story and saying "Hitler comes to power: Mormons targeted for persecution", which just wouldn't be true.

That’s untrue and incredibly simplistic reasoning. The posts on this forum are very far from that standard of rhetoric.

Are you confusing us with the authors of this kind of argument? “Repeat after us Trans Women are WOMEN.” #nodebate

Trans activists also frequently use the phrase "trans genocide", apparently unironically.

Since we all know perfectly well there is no trans genocide happening today, are we supposed to believe the same people when they tell us a trans genocide happened 85 years ago?

Or Sandie Peggie?