TRANSlation

Sep 22nd, 2023 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Oh so that’s how they get there – simple – just claim that “transvestite”=”transgender” and breeze right past all the differences.

New Research Reveals How the Nazis Targeted Transgender People

The author is Laurie Marhoefer, a historian at the University of Washington.

In the fall of 2022, a German court heard an unusual case.

It was a civil lawsuit that grew out of a feud on Twitter about whether transgender people were victims of the Holocaust. Though there is no longer much debate about whether gay men and lesbians were persecuted by the Nazis, there’s been very little scholarship on trans people during this period.

The court took expert statements from historians, including myself, before finding that the historical evidence shows that trans people were, indeed, persecuted by the Nazi regime.

This is an important case. It was the first time a court recognized the persecution of trans people in Nazi Germany. It was followed a few months later by the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, formally releasing a statement recognizing trans and cisgender queer people as victims of fascism.

Wtf are “cisgender queer people”? What’s the German for that?

In 1933, the year that Adolf Hitler took power, the police in Essen, Germany, revoked [Toni] Simon’s permit to dress as a woman in public. Simon, who was in her mid-40s, had been living as a woman for many years.

The Weimar Republic, the more tolerant democratic government that existed before Hitler, recognized the rights of trans people, though in a begrudging, limited way. Under the republic, police granted trans people permits like the one Simon had.

In the 1930s, transgender people were called “transvestites,” which is rarely a preferred term for trans people today, but at the time approximated what’s now meant by “transgender.” 

Ahhhhh there it is. It’s a simple trick. Just pretend that what was meant by “transvestite” then is exactly what is meant by “transgender” now and go on your way rejoicing.

But it isn’t the same. It isn’t remotely the same. Transvestites, however deeply they felt “like” the other sex internally, didn’t run all over the landscape trying to force the rest of the world to agree that they were indeed the sex that matched their clothes.

Hey I have an idea, why don’t we all just go the Maoist route and make everyone wear drab uniforms with no sex/gender differentiation. Problem solved.

The police permits were called “transvestite certificates,” and they exempted a person from the laws against cross-dressing. 

Clothes clothes clothes, it’s all about the clothes.

I was thinking about this today, nudged by that nonsense from Neil Tyson about How We Know What Sex People Are and the fact that I said “not me” to every single one of his cues for Who Is Woman. I don’t generally have to think about it much because I don’t generally have to get dressed up or put on Appropriate Business Attire or anything like that…but if I did have to it would be awkward. I worried about that a little back when I was invited to speak at conferences now and then. Did I look too casual or sloppy in my non-feminine “presentation”? The thing is, and was, I couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t dress in the approved-for-women way. In that sense I maybe understand what is meant by gender dysphoria. If I were somehow forced to put on the woman-appropriate glad rags it would feel profoundly uncomfortable…which is quite irrational. It should be no big deal, but it isn’t. And the only reason it would feel so creepy is the This Is Not Me feeling, which is such a narcissistic thing to worry about in the first place. Who cares? No one. But it would feel ooky anyway. So in that sense…I don’t know, maybe I can grok what people are so worked up about.

H/t Mostly Cloudy

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