It’s impossible to know what’s going on in America at the best of times, but what I do know is that, right now, it ain’t at all good for transgender people.
Or for the disabled, black people, women, refugees – anyone Trump can ‘other’ as being a DEI hire.
Somehow, we’ve managed to become the fifth most significant threat to the new administration, and it seems they will do everything they possibly can to wipe us out altogether, all with maximum visibility, talking points, and posts on X. In the last two weeks of the presidential election campaign, MAGA spent $US180m on TV advertising in Pennsylvania alone and 42% of that money was spent on anti-transgender attack ads the content of which was simply vile
Our mere existence was challenged on Day One with the edict via executive order that the US now only recognises two sexes and that every person much produce proof of their sex as identified at birth to gain an official ID including a passport – and that’s it.
Sport is out, along with transgender healthcare, and so is a career in the military.
There are no doubt others as well,
We’re such a threat to women’s sport that, when President of the NZAA Charlie Baker was called before congress to talk about sports betting he was ambushed by two republican senators who only want to grill him about transgender athletes in college sport. After talking for awhile about the law and after increased pressure he finally told them exactly what they didn’t want to hear, that, while there are 510,000 athletes registered with NCAA, only ten of them are transgender.
Ten.
That’s less than 0.002% are transgender which I would suggest is a bloody pathetic attempt at a takeover. Outsport confirms this at 0.003 when the numbers are spread over the past decade which gives the lie to the commonly stated talking point that its getting much worse because of Lia Thomas. Ludicrous in the extreme.
This is definitely an ongoing challenge but it’s not new and it’s certainly not the first-time attempts have been made to erase us completely. Transpeople tend to get lost in the horror and the hoohah of the Holocaust, but Hitler and his Third Reich tried it’s best to erase us too.
Be aware that much of what follows can also apply to today (and no doubt to tomorrow as well).
In 1930s Nazi Germany, transgender people were persecuted, prosecuted, barred from public life, forcibly de-transitioned, imprisoned, and even killed in concentration camps.
We were largely stripped of our legal status by the Nazi state, no different to what the Trump administration is trying to do to us in the US today.
In 1823, German playwright and poet Heinrich Heine published Almansor: A Tragedy. In it he wrote ‘where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.’
This always takes my breath away because its happened before and because it’s also happening now. Yes, in distant Trump world, but here too.
Look no further than Destiny Church. The rhetoric is identical.
While the Heine quote is certainly true to the narrative he was writing, it also eerily heralds events that were to take place exactly one hundred years later in the Fatherland.
And beyond.
Almansor is a tragic love story between an Arab man and Donna Clara, a Moroccan woman who’s forced to convert from Islam to Christianity. Shakespeare does the same to Shylock – he’s forced to convert from being a Jew to being a Christian thereby losing his claim to eternal life.
Think about that, it’s big stuff, and think about who’s doing the book burning,
Even though Heine’s chronicle was written in 1823, and his original depicts the burning of the Qua’ran which took place in Granada in 1492, his iconic quote is even now engraved in the grounds of Berlin’s Opernplatz commemorating the horrifying Nazi book burning of 1933 in Berlin, exactly one hundred years later.
By way of context, on 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler came to power as Chancellor of Germany. His government immediately cracked down on all transgender activities leading, on 6 May 1933, to a group of student members of the National Socialist German Students League marching to the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft with a view to burning all the books, PhD theses, research papers, and anything else they could find that would result in doing maximum damage to this freakish minority.
And all to the accompaniment of a brass band oompahing away.
The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Researching the Science of Sexuality) was an early, private, not-for-profit research foundation established by Magnus Hirschfeld in 1919. It was the first research centre of its type in the world.
The Institute campaigned, on progressive and rational grounds, for LGBT rights and tolerance at the start of the first homosexual movement that flourished in interwar Weimar culture. The Institute published the long-running journal Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen and Hirschfeld built a unique library on gender, same-sex love, and eroticism at the institute during the years 1919 to 1933.
The institute pioneered research and treatment for various issues relating to gender and sexuality and offered education on these matters to both health professionals and laypersons.
After the Nazis gained control of Germany in the 1930s, the institute and its libraries were destroyed by these youth brigades who burned its books and documents in the street as part of a government censorship programme.
After failing to find Hirschfeld, who was abroad, the students proceeded to shout ‘Brenne Hirschfeld!’ (‘Burn Hirschfeld!’) while ransacking and vandalizing the Institute, tearing pictures from the walls, pouring inkwells onto carpets, and destroying exhibitions while the band played outside.Some students posed for propaganda photos amidst the destruction.
It all sounds very January 6 to me.
That afternoon, the Sturmabteilung, Hitler’s Storm Troopers, whoseprimary purpose was to provide protection for Nazi rallies and assemblies, and to disrupt the meetings of opposing parties, arrived, and systematically confiscated the Institute’s materials, including thousands of books and documents from its library and archive – just like Trump’s Oath Keepers, Groyper Army, Boogaloo Bois, Last Sons of Liberty, America First, and Proud Boys, all just like Hitler’s goons, rabid white nationalists, an Aryan Brotherhood, except, of a different generation, of the late 20th and early 21st century rather than the lead up to World War II.
Maybe we’re all living through the lead up to World War III – and it’s all the fault of us trannies.
Imagine that: our own holocaust, only smaller.
The only documents spared by the Sturmabteilung were the thousands of medical questionnaires collected by Hirschfeld, either because the Institute’s staff managed to convince the Sturmabteilung that the documents were simple medical profiles, or because there were physically too many to carry out of the Institute. Dora Richter, a German trans woman and the first known person to undergo complete male-to-female gender affirming surgery was long believed to have been murdered in the attackuntil a paper trail of her life after 1933 was unearthed showing that, in 1933 she moved to Prague and in 1946 to Bavaria where she lived until 1966 when she finally passed away.
The Institute closed, and never reopened
Four days later, on 10 May 1933, as many as 25,000 of the institute’s books, many of which contained unique insights into transgender history and medicine, were burned in nearby Bebelplatz Square.
Following the closure of the Institute, some of the staff fled Germany for the safety of exile, A few of the Institute’s former personnel, including Erwin Gohrbrandt, turned to collaboration with the Nazi regime. Ludwig Levy-Lenz and Erwin Gohrbrandt were the first surgeons to perform sex reassignment surgery with vaginoplasty on some transgender patients – a pioneering experimental achievement at the time. Two of their best-known patients are Dora Richter and Lili Elbe.
Gohrbandt joined the Luftwaffe as a medical advisor and later engaged in human experimentation at Dachau concentration camp where transgender people like the ones he once treated are known to have been held as prisoners and murdered. Levy-Lenz, who was married to a Jewish woman, fled to Paris in 1933 to escape the Nazi persecution of the Jews. In the run-up to the 1936 Olympic Games, he believed that German anti-Semitic politics would relax and so he returned to Germany, only to further emigrate to Egypt in 1937. There he was able to open a cosmetic surgery practice. In 1939 he was stripped of his German citizenship.
There’s no doubt transgender people were imprisoned and murdered in concentration camps, though the exact number killed is unknown. According to historian Laurie Marhoefer, ‘The Nazi state reserved its worst violence for trans women.’
According to the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the German government ‘brutally targeted the trans community, deporting many trans people to concentration camps and wiping out vibrant community structures.’
We’ve survived in the past, and we will again. We track back to 7000BCE and, old though he is, even Trump can’t do that.
What’s really sad though, is that this government in Aotearoa New Zealand is heading in exactly the same direction.
dykiegirl 