And a crime in Germany?

Apr 15th, 2024 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

I’m pretty sure Willoughby is lying about this.

https://twitter.com/Phoebe2403/status/1779894174898172336

Smithsonian Magazine did an article on the Nazis and “trans people” last September, except that it admits up front that it’s not exactly about “trans people” for the simple reason that they weren’t a thing at the time.

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 before issuing an opinion that essentially acknowledges that trans people were victimized by the Nazi regime.

“Essentially” – that is, if you pretend that the Nazi regime meant X when it said Y.

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.” 

Oh really?

What if it’s the other way around? What if people have taken what used to be called “transvestism” and magnified it into a whole bonkers ideology? What if femme men were then just one way of being a gay man and butch women were just one way of being a lesbian? What if both were just one way of living as a same-sex attracted person, without any grandiose ontological claims, let alone threats?

In Berlin, transgender people published several magazines and had a political club. Some glamorous trans women worked at the internationally famous Eldorado cabaret. The sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who ran Berlin’s Institute for Sexual Science, advocated for the rights of transgender people.

But we don’t know that they were transgender people. We have zero reason to think that butch lesbians and femme men thought of themselves in the terms that people who now claim to be transgender do. It’s not something Smithsonian Magazine should just assume.

Simon was a brave person. I first came across her police file when I was researching trans people at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Essen police knew Simon as the sassy proprietor of an underground club where LGBTQ people gathered. 

No they didn’t. They didn’t call themselves that. No one did. Not least, it’s not even German.

At the Hamburg State Archive, I read about H. Bode, who often went out in public dressed as a woman and dated men. Under the Weimar Republic, she held a transvestite certificate. Nazi police went after her for “cross-dressing” and for having sex with men. They considered her male, so her relationships were homosexual and illegal. They sent her to the concentration camp Buchenwald, where she was murdered.

Liddy Bacroff of Hamburg also had a transvestite pass under the republic. She made her living selling sex to male clients. After 1933, the police went after her. They wrote that she was “fundamentally a transvestite” and a “morals criminal of the worst sort.” She too was sent to a camp, Mauthausen, and murdered.

None of which magically makes them what the people of 2024 mean by “trans people.” They couldn’t be that kind of trans people, because the meanings of that label did not exist 90 years ago.

For a long time, the public didn’t know the stories of trans people in Nazi Germany.

Earlier histories tended to misgender trans women, labeling them as men. This is odd given that when you read the records of their police interrogations, they are often remarkably clear about their gender identity, even though they were not helping their cases at all by doing so. Bacroff, for example, told the police, “My sense of my sex is fully and completely that of a woman.”

No, it’s not “odd.” There was no such thing as “gender identity” in Nazi Germany. Men who said they felt like women were just men who said they felt like women. They didn’t spark a new vocabulary and ideology.

So, no, Willoughby is wrong to say the Nazis targeted people “purely for being trans.” For flouting gender norms and even laws against cross-dressing, yes, but for being trans in the contemporary sense, no.

I’m also skeptical that there’s a law that says “Denying trans persecution by the Nazis is Holocaust revisionism and a crime in Germany.” Frontline has a long article on laws restricting Holocaust speech and it says nothing about “trans persecution” – it says nothing about “trans” at all.

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