Trans History Repeating Itself

Every once in a while I use this blog to dig into deeper issues than gardening, the arts or simple opinion pieces. Right now there is so much currency in cancel culture. The divides are getting vast, to the point that they are now impacting lives that had at one point been safe. The push and pull in our cultures seems to be ebbing much more into the past. This particular article really struck me in that we are not going back years or decades. Instead, this is exactly where we were as a civilization a century ago. These same stories were wiped away and erased. This makes us not only ignorant, but an absolutely cruel species.

 Magnus Hirschfeld was a doctor in Germany at the turn of last century. He was at an age watching the onset of Facism and the Holocaust in his country. He was also gay. He was pioneering the field of sexual identity before the 1920s and was documenting the concept of gender fluidity and noted that some people found themselves somewhere in the middle. He was aware of bisexuality, transgender and non binary as being "in accordance with their nature" for these patients. It was not sick or abnormal to him. These terms we are now struggling with, were the same terms he dignified back then.

 In 1919 he purchased a villa in Berlin and opened his Institute for Sexual Research. Its stated purpose was to be a place of "research, teaching, healing and refuge" that could "free the individual from physical ailments, psychological afflictions and social deprivation." It provided sex education and clinics on contraception. This is decades before our Planned Parenthood clinics. It became a safe haven for transvestites and female activists. By 1930 he was performing the world's first gender -affirmation surgeries. While groundbreaking in the medical sense, it still faced persecution from any sort of legal rights. This should sound very familiar to us 100 years later.

With the rise of the Nazi party by 1932, by 1933 Hitler was in power. Thus began the extermination of anything deemed unworthy of living or assimilation. Sadly, Hirschfeld's Institute was destroyed on May 6, 1933. He was out of the country by then. But sadly, his bust and a library of 20,000 books and journals were torched in the street in a huge bonfire. The loss was catastrophic.

But what makes it even more painful, Erwin Gohrbandt, who was Hirschfeld's colleague and premiere surgeon chose to stay with the Reich and later utilized those same skills on prison camp patients with operations of mutilation. Despite surviving, Hirschfeld and his partner Giese both soon died in Paris. Magnus of a stroke in 1935 and Giese by suicide soon after. His work has been given some nods in pop culture on the show Transparent and the film The Danish Girl who was an actual patient of his - but he is never credited for his work in the novel or the film. His legacy has effectively been erased.

So here we stand 100 years later. The same ugly fears and arguments rear their heads again. This should be science supported by history and data. And yet we fling proverbs and moral judgements of righteousness to bar progress from being made. Both in our families and in our medical communities. This is a human travesty and this history needs to be not only revisited, but broadcast. Please read this entire article which is amazingly documented from what ashes remain.

The Forgotten History of the World's 1st Trans Clinic