Trans History Week and Germany 1933

[HappyNewTaxYear]

https://www.itv.com/watch/news/trans-history-week-celebrated-in-the-shadow-of-supreme-court-ruling/vw998s8

What is this thing that was alleged to have happened on 6 May 1933 in Germany that ‘Arlo’ here is talking about? A ‘trans clinic’? Were there such things in 1933? Grateful if anyone can shed any light.

Just looking into paper I posted yesterday - when I posted yesterday I'd understood the paper had been instrumental in the German court case referenced upthread.

https://history.washington.edu/people/laurie-marhoefer

Author is Laurie Marhoefer. He's also written this article:

Note the note:

Editor’s Note, September 25, 2023: An earlier version of this story noted that the author’s testimony was submitted to a German court. While the testimony was submitted to a lawyer arguing in the court case, that lawyer did not ultimately submit it to the court. In addition, the story was edited in the third paragraph to more accurately reflect the decision of the German court.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/new-research-reveals-how-the-nazis-targeted-transgender-people-180982931/

So just wanted to clarify.

He also has he/they pronouns, fwiw, so appears to identify as something other than what one would generally expect.

And is working on a book on the subject, due out 2027.

And lastly an excerpt that seems worthwhile:

'From my years of research and from the published literature, I have knowledge of about twenty-seven cases of transgender men and women in the Nazi period.
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To my knowledge this is the largest number of cases ever discussed at once.
Most scholarship deals with a much smaller number.

Often when one sees the term “persecution (Verfolgung)”in the context of the Nazi state, one thinks foremost of the persecution of Jewish Europeans. The Nazi state systematically rounded up whole communities of Jews and Roma—gay as well as straight, cisgender as well as transgender—deported them, and murdered them.

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This did not happen to “Aryans.”It did not happen to “Aryans”even if they were accused of “crimes”having to do with sex and gender, such as male-male sex (§175) or “public indecency (Erregung öffentlichen Ärgernisses)”(§183), a charge made against trans people.'

With respect, while people almost certainly felt they were trans, the actual concept of becoming the opposite sex simply didn’t exist in the 1930s, the Nazi party opposed homosexuality, amongst many other things.

It’s pretty obvious that the deeply conservative Nazi party of Kinder, kuche, kirche, which banned women from professions and exalted marriage and the production of aryan children, wasn’t keen on what they saw as the decadence and deviancy of the Weimar era. They did crack down on cross dressing, but that kind of persecution (which could be avoided by wearing men’s clothes in public) cannot be compared to the mass murder of Jews in the Holocaust or of the genocide of Roma people. I accept that these days we’d call the poor, slow-witted cross-dressing chap in the Scientific American feature trans. But he wasn’t sent to prison for being a transvestite but for being a homosexual prostitute. In one famous case a women who presented as male was given a transvestite pass by the Nazi Government and was allowed to change her name to Gerd, which was gender neutral. Laws outlawing homosexuality and cross dressing were common around the world, including in the UK & US. Think of Alan Turing. They were bad, shameful laws and people suffered dreadfully under them, but surely nobody suggests there was a ‘genocide’ of trans or gay men in England on a par which the Holocaust.

It reminds me of Rosie Duffield being investigated by the Labour disciplinary team for “antisemitism” and “Holocaust Denial” based on her retweeting Graham Linehans tweet mocking Eddie Izzard for claiming he would have been targeted by the Nazis.

There was a "transvestite" woman in Germany, somewhat well-known, who was a youth during the Nazi time in Berlin.
Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, (which is a made up name, not the real name) was born in 1928 and Charlotte's father was a local higher up in the NSDAP. The father wanted Charlotte, then not yet transitioned, to join the party's youth wing and they were arguing often. In the end, Charlotte killed the father in self-defense (that was the story at least, but considering the circumstances, it could be true) and Charlotte was sentenced to youth prison/psychiatry in the "troubled youth"/"antisocial" kind of category.

As this was in 1945, Charlotte didn't stay in jail and was freed after the end of Nazi-Germany.
Only then Charlotte started to cross-dress in public, and worked in second-hand furniture / antiques dealing and was also accused of having kept belongings from apartments of deported Jews.
Later, during socialist Eastern Germany, Charlotte opened a museum.

The German entry in wikipedia is more extensive and detailed than the English version.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_von_Mahlsdorf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_von_Mahlsdorf

There is also a newspaper article where Charlotte's family say that not all of her stories about heroically saving old buildings from looting after the war are true. It seems Charlotte was a good storyteller and the actual biography is unclear.
https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/archiv/charlotte-von-mahlsdorf-hat-ihr-leben-aus-vielen-geschichten-zusammengesetzt-keiner-weiss-ob-sie-stimmen-aber-sie-klingen-gut-das-einfache-lottchen-li.963553

However, this person was in the media sometimes and there was barely any of the topics that are associated with the TRA debate currently, about using women's spaces, for example. The only aspect was that they were referred to as a woman, but it was absolutely known they were a man, that was the whole point. No-one seriously believed they were a woman, it was more a mental gymnastics game and even the wiki article refers to them as transvestite. It was a role and everyone knew it was a role.

I am mentioning this because it is an example of someone who was probably gay during the Nazi times and had a very strict father and used the chance after liberation to start the role as "Charlotte". The problems Charlotte had with the Nazi-regime was that they wouldn't want to join them, it was a political disagreement, not about sexuality.

That was very different from current TRA.