It's trans history week, so about time I got back to this. 93 years ago on the 6th of May: the *Deutsche Studentenschaft* (German Student Union) prepare for the flagship event of their “Action against the Un-German Spirit” campaign. Two years after electing a NSDAP candidate for their President, and two months after Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany, the militarised students march in Berlin with the accompaniment of a brass band outside the *Institut für Sexualwissenschaft*. Assisted by the SA, they proceed to ransack the building and loot its contents. > [!multicol|img] > ![[1933-05-06 Berlin institute raid 01.jpg|]] > > ![[1933-05-06 Berlin institute raid 02.jpg|]] This is our history. It was all here. Magnus Hirschfeld, owner of the Institute, was the earliest pioneer in studying, treating, and recording trans people. Besides being a centre for research and medical treatment of trans people, the Institute was a community hub that offered social support and employment to the queer community, and a centre for activism and advocacy. Dora Richter, who worked there as a housekeeper, was the first trans woman to undergo vaginoplasty; Lili Elbe also had first-of-a-kind surgery there. It offered sexual health services to the LGBT community, meeting spaces for gay rights organisers — Ernst Röhm, whose brownshirts now oversaw its pillaging, was himself an outspoken campaigner for the cause (and later murdered in a coup against him fuelled by a homophobic media campaign). ![[1935-05-06 Berlin institute raid 0.jpg|]] The Institute of Sexology housed an immense archive of scientific, cultural, creative, and administrative items concerning transgender people and identities. It was the first collection, and more or less the entire body of knowledge, of its kind. The students spent the next three days trashing the place and giggling at pictures of genitals and transvestite magazines, but the SA were there for the boring stuff. The archive also held identity documents, records of patients and meetings, group memberships... all sorts of things that would come to make compiling their ==pink lists== easy. --- Britain used to crow about Gender Recognition Certificates being a world-leading approach to not violating the human rights of transsexuals, but Weimar Germany had a fairly well-established system by the 1920s that was quite similar. Transvestitism, or crossdressing, was a crime in Germany as in most places — it wasn't strictly prohibited by law there nor in England, but that's what *outraging public decency* is for. Magnus Hirschfeld held enough authority on the matter to determine that for some people, this was effectively criminalising them as a *person*, not their behaviour. There was no intent to offend or outrage, no perverse motivation behind it, but an honest expression of something that appears strange to some. - <span class="bmark"></span> <span class="from">zagria.blogspot.com</span> [Transvestitenschein - Part II Third Reich](https://zagria.blogspot.com/2022/09/transvestitenschein-part-ii-third-reich.html?m=1) ^jkr-3688 The *Transvestitenschein*, “transvestite pass”, was a document issued by local police authorities that (in theory) exempted someone from being charged with public disturbance on this basis. Each one was with the personal approval of Hirschfeld early on, starting in 1908-09, eventually becoming a standardised practise across various police departments with recommendation from a doctor. The Nazis didn't cease issuing the passes; keeping obvious suspects of homosexuality and prostitution under closer scrutiny only helped their cause. Today's transphobes like to try and keep the history of trans people's existence buried by playing silly language games. They may well believe that all trans people are just crossdressers, but they know we're quite adamant that we're not. So to claim something like this as a part of our history is nothing more than a point scored to them, an admission that they were right all along. Similarly with the canard that we're all “just” confused or repressed gay people. It's the other side of the coin from *“there never **used** to be trans people,” where did they all come from all of a sudden? Very suspicious*. There were always trans people, we've just never been able to have any say on how we're referred to before. We all got the same pink triangle. - [→] [[transmission/syntheses/katastrophenkammer/10th May, 1933|10th May, 1933]]