And a crime in Germany?
I’m pretty sure Willoughby is lying about this.
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.
They name 3 “trans” persons targeted. Put that up against 6 million Jews. We know the Jews were murdered JUST FOR BEING JEWS.
As for the descriptions given in the article, it seems more likely they were targeted for acting like women than for being trans. It is misogyny, not trans persecution, because a man acting like a woman is a travesty in a lot of cultures.
It seems to me that:
1. An assertion that a person living in Nazi Germany who met the modern definition of “trans” (even though that term would presumably be unfamiliar to them) would, in fact, be treated badly by that regime — correct.
2. An assertion that the Nazis “targeted” trans people — a matter of interpretation. It’s inaccurate in that they could hardly be “targeting” a group that they didn’t even have a concept for. But they did “target” groups (transvestites, gays, and lesbians) that presumably had substantial overlap with the modern definition of “trans,” so I would hesitate to say that it’s flat out wrong.
3. An assertion that someone who disputes assertion #2 is a “Holocaust denier” = ridiculous, and clearly a bad faith attempt to smear one’s ideological opponents with one of the worst labels available.
I think 2. is pretty much what I argued. “For flouting gender norms and even laws against cross-dressing, yes, but for being trans in the contemporary sense, no.” I’m certainly not arguing that the Nazis were friendly to people who would now be called trans.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear — my comment wasn’t intended to be disagreement with your post, just organizing my own thoughts.
It appears (though everything must be conjectural in absence of specific evidence) that JKR did some kind of legal threat behind the scenes that caused Rivkah Brown to recant her original accusation. While I agree with your reasoning regarding it being inappropriate to label JKR a “holocaust denier” for questioning that trans people were “targeted” specifically, it does seem like her (apparent) move to legally squelch this is backfiring on her; it seems to have activated a “Streisand Effect” where all sorts of others are accusing her of holocaust denial on Twitter/X (it’s even trending), and unlike most recent times when she has trended, the haters are dominating the fans.
If JKR had sued somebody with the resources and inclination to fight back, then this could have led to some courtroom drama and perhaps a definitive ruling on whether a reasonable person can regard it as “holocaust denial” to question that there was targeting of a group that wasn’t even conceived of in modern language yet and for which there are only scattered anecdotal examples of such persecution. (This would tend to favor her side.) However, threatening to sue somebody likely to roll over and surrender leads to a “win the battle and lose the war” situation.
From what I recall reading about Magnus Hirschfeld some time back I can understand the interpretation that at least some of the people he helped would today identify as trans. Then again, the pressure to identify as trans, rather than simply as gay or lesbian is pretty strong these days. Hirschfeld, being gay, was really wanting people to enable their natural sexuality without persecution. In the context of the time it would have seemed quite natural to say to femme gays ‘act like a woman since you want to have sex with men.’ Similarly for butch lesbians. There is pretty clear daylight between that and actually having dysphoria and believing yourself to be the opposite sex. isn’t this exactly what a part of the discomfort with trans ideology is all about – that in part at least it’s about training away the gay? That attitude that Hirschfeld had, or was at least dealing with, in 1930’s Europe is very similar to Iran’s current stance where they will enable cross sex transition for those who have homosexual attraction, because that is preferable to homosexuality.
Screechy – no problem!
H. Bode:
Liddy Bacroff:
The Nazis persecuted homosexual men. There was a triangle for them and everything (the famous pink triangle.) I would argue that that is why these men wound up in concentration camps.
I’ve seen no evidence that there was a wholesale targeting of transvestites just for being transvestites.
Cross-dressing in public was illegal under the Nazis, but so far as I know only a few of them wound up in camps (as opposed to jail)–and the ones I’ve heard of were all either having gay sex or were Jewish (or both.)
Lesbianism wasn’t even criminalized in most of Nazi Germany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesbians_in_Nazi_Germany
Dan T.:
If JKR had sued somebody with the resources and inclination to fight back
Well, someone with the resources to fight back is more likely to get legal advice beforehand and be told that they would lose in court. As it is, the lie that Rowling is a Holocaust denier had already gotten plenty of attention without the assist of the Streisand Effect, and the fact that the charge was recanted is a good outcome, both for her and for countering the lie that there was a trans Holocaust even remotely comparable to the Shoah. I am damned sick and tired of every historical event being transed because TRA’s in the present demand it.
Screechy Monkey #2
My father served in WWII and many militaries had big concerns about prostitutes – fears of STDs being spread. Anything needed to treat STDs used up medical supplies that might be in short supply for the war effort. I wonder if some of the arrests of male prostitutes in Germany had more to do with fears of disease spreading rather than fear of cross-dressing men. Also, some prostitutes might rob or blackmail their clients. Men seeking sex from other men would have been less likely to go the police back then.
Actually, the situation is more complicated than described in the article by Tagesspiegel.
A biology PhD student (who is the focus of a lot of TRA criticism and hate since she dared trying to give a talk about the biology of sex) said that the Nazis did not pursue trans people. TRA activists then accused her on Twitter to be a holocaust denier.
The court clearly said that she is not a holocaust denier in the normal sense or anything like that, but that if you are a trans activist focused on this topic only (and only then), your opinion that the Nazis did pursue trans people is an opinion you are entitled to, even if it is not factually correct.
The court also stated that trans activists are trying to re-frame the holocaust to center trans people (“Deutungshoheit” is the wonderful German word for this). And because they do this, they are free to call you a holocaust denier if you say that trans people were not targeted by the holocaust.
And as Lady Mondegreen said, being a transvestite was not a problem in Nazi germany (as you can see by the fact that you could even get a certificate for that), there are also lots of pictures of Wehrmacht soldiers dressing as women for fun and giggles. Being homosexual (especially gay) was what the Nazis persecuted as Lady Mondegreen also said.
See
https://www.nzz.ch/international/nur-transaktivisten-duerfen-vollbrecht-leugnung-von-ns-verbrechen-vorwerfen-ld.1726045
PS: I’m not a historian, so take it all with a grain of sceptical salt…
Sonderval – good grief. Because trans activists are Just Making Shit Up about the holocaust and trans people, therefore they get to tell libelous lies about people who dispute the Shit They Just Make Up.
That. is. crazy.
Good grief indeed. The whole story of this PhD student (Marie-Louise Vollbrecht) and her treatment by activists and even her university (which she had to sue because it chastised her views quite nastily) is quite crazy.
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