The Rise and Fall of the Weimar Transvestites & the Threat to Our Own Trans Community
This article was first published on the Chrysalis Quarterly website.
The Weimar Republic was a semi-presidential representative democracy that arose after World War I and ended with the rise of National Socialism (Nazism) in 1933. It was a period marked by a progressive government, increasing social liberalism, and increasing resentment by social conservatives, who blamed the Weimar government (and not the German Republic which had actually been in power) for the humiliating terms of the Versailles Treaty that had ended the war.
Throughout the 1920s night clubs and bars flourished in Berlin and other German cities, and the arts, from music to cinema to music to painting to architecture, flourished. Women began to wear makeup and bob their hair and smoke in public, outraging conservatives. The government increased health insurance coverage for its citizens and instituted child abuse protections and protections for workers, including unemployment insurance.
In 1933 the Weimar Republic fell with the appointment of National Socialist Adoph Hitler as Chancellor in January. Within a week a suspicious fire at the Reichstag (the equivalent of our Capitol building) allowed Hitler to cancel most of the protections granted under the 1919 Weimar Constitution. The Republic is widely considered to have ended two months later with the The Enabling Act, which allowed Hitler to bypass the Constitution and the Reichstag (parliament).
During the years of the Weimar Republic people who called themselves transvestites — many of whom lived day to day in their gender of identification — were highly socially active, out and proud, and in pursuit of social acceptance and legal reforms. In alliance with gay men, lesbians, and supporters, they were on the verge of overturning Paragraph, 175, German’s antihomosexuality law.[i] Katie Sutton, who specializes in German and gender studies at Australian National University, has written extensively about this community, which was an early twentieth century analog of today’s community of trans and gender-nonconforming people:
…the term Transvestit/in, “transvestite” was used in the early decades of the twentieth century to refer not just to cross-dressing but to a broad spectrum of what would now be described as “transgender” experiences and identifications; from self-defined heterosexual male transvestites with wives and children who cross-dressed only at home, to biological males and females permanently as a member of the “opposite” sex… by the late Weimar period the the sexological label “transvestite” had, for some readers (of transvestite magazines) at least, acquired the status of an essential identity…
—2015, p. 85
We will never know what might have become of Germany’s fledgling transvestite community because the rise of Nationalism Socialism resulted in immediate and violent suppression of Jews, racial minorities, atheists, socialists, communists, intellectuals, perceived political enemies, and, yes, GLBT peoples. Members of the community fled the country, assimilated into the greater community, hid their inclinations from others, or, if male, ended up wearing upside-down pink triangles in work and concentration camps.[ii] A vibrant and growing and diverse community of artists, intellectuals, liberals, and LGBT people was swiftly and forcefully eradicated. It would be decades before trans people in Germany again began to speak out and organize.
Trans Communities in the United States, 1950-2017
Following World War II, the trajectories of early trans communities in the U.S. were not dissimilar to the Weimar transvestite community. Heterosexual male crossdressers began to meet in the 1950s and by the 1960s were publishing magazines and gathering in the Catskills, urban Los Angeles, and elsewhere. Until the formation of the first gender identity clinics in the mid-1960s, transsexuals had only one place to turn in hopes of community and acceptance — gay nightclubs. More than 90% of those who applied to the clinics were turned away without treatment.[iii] Nor, thanks to the influence of Virginia Prince, were they welcome in the growing community of heterosexual crossdressers (Denny, 2006).[iv]
When the crossdressing and transsexual communities were finally unified in the late 1980s it did not take long for both crossdressers and transsexuals to realize the two available identities were restrictive and inadequate to describe the ways they felt about themselves. It took only a couple of years for transgender, a term which had been batted about for decades, to emerge as an umbrella under which all sorts of gender identities could comfortably rest.[v]
Throughout the 1990s and through the twentieth century to the present the transgender community grew. At first, like the Weimar transvestites, we told our stories to the world and to each other (and we still do) — but soon we were pressing for political change. The voices of our scholars, which had been until then been barred from academia, began to be heard, and a new field of transgender studies began to emerge. We allied with GLBT organizations, with politicians, with civil rights organizations, and with the spouses and family members who until then had rejected us.
The last few years have seen what the May 29, 2014 issue of Time Magazine termed the transgender tipping point (Steinmetz, 2014). We suddenly achieved a visibility and level of acceptance that would have been unimaginable to the Weimar transvestites, or even to us just a decade ago. With the notable exception of outliers like Psychiatrist Paul McHugh, right-wing Republicans trying to outdo one another in making ridiculous claims about us, evangelical groups, and rogue bakeries, we have achieved widespread support and acceptance from businesses, civic and religious organizations, the media, and the general public. We have, thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court, the right to marry, and, thanks to the Obama administration, the right to serve in the U.S. Military. (See Weiss, 2014, for a review) And even our umbrella term, trans, is proving to be insufficient to serve the many gender questioning, nonbinary, and agendered people who have lately found their own voices.[vi]
At the same time our very visibility has made us high-profile targets. The battling bathroom bills in state legislatures and city governments and conflicting stances taken by school districts around the country have lately surpassed in the news the struggles for rights by LGB people and rivaled coverage of Islamophobia and Black Lives Matter in the media.
In a few years, as has happened with once-controversial gay marriage, trans bathroom issues might have been resolved and we might have adapted our movements to be more intersectional, but we will not have that opportunity, for we are now faced with a political and Constitutional crisis that equals and perhaps even surpasses that of Weimar Germany.
The Threat
We are now facing a charismatic and authoritarian President who is dismissive of violence against minorities of all sorts;[vii] has targeted Mexicans and Arabs as undesirable and promised to deport them and build a wall along the southern border to keep them out; has threatened to imprison a political opponent; has publicly wondered why the use of nuclear weapons is unthinkable (and has proposed giving them to Japan and other countries); has mocked the disabled and antagonized a Gold Star military family, bragged about sexually assaulting women and verbally abused women on and off camera; suborned treason by urging Russia to hack American computer servers and by revealing details of top secret security briefings; earned the support and admiration of white nationalists and energized their movement; and repeatedly denied and lied about all of the above. He is now busily assembling an Executive Branch filled with fundamentalist and right-wing zealots and at least one white nationalist who have stated their intent to, among other things, bring back abusive policing practices, deport aliens, and dismantle or privatize the Affordable Health Care Act, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, environmental and workplace protections, and reproductive rights. With a majority Senate and House of Representatives and a U.S. Supreme Court short one person, this administration is poised to destroy pretty much everything that has made America great..
White male cisgendered heterosexual Christian American citizens have much to lose and in all likelihood will soon be suffering in a strange and un-American country. Everyone else — women, Jews, Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, gay men and lesbians, and trans and gender nonconforming people stand to lose much more — the progress and freedoms we have fought for for more than one hundred years.
The flourishing and innovative Weimar transvestite community came to a crashing end with Adolph Hitler’s rise to power. Our trans community, and many other American communities, face the same grave threat.
Works Cited
Crowley, Michael. (2016, 10 August). Trump’s long dalliance with violent rhetoric. Politico. (Retrieved 22 November, 2016).
Denny, Dallas. (2006). Transgender communities in the United States in the late Twentieth Century. In P. Currah, R.M. Juang, & S.P. Minter (Eds), Transgender rights, pp. 171-191. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Retrieved 22 November, 2016).
Steinmetz, Katy. (2014, 29 May). The transgender tipping point. Time Magazine. (Retrieved 22 November, 2016).
Weiss, Jillian T. (2014, November). The transgender tipping point: An overview for The Advocate. American Constitution Society for Law and Policy Issue Brief. (Retrieved 22 November, 2016).
[i] As was the case in the U.S. in the second half of the century, the work of sexologists like Magnus Hirschfeld, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and Havelock Ellis both positively and negatively impacted the fledgling Weimar transvestite community. The sexologists’ interest in case histories, combined with individuals’ needs to tell their stories, resulted in hundreds of autobiographies, fueling the rise of transvestite publications, and the sexologists provided information and assistance to many and supported the growing community—for instance, the first documented cases of male-to-female gender reassignment surgery were supervised by Hirschfeld. On the negative side, the sexologists worked within a medical model which objectified and limited the autonomy of the transvestite community.
[ii] The pink triangle, usually worn right-side-up, has since become a symbol of gay pride and liberation.
[iii] In the late 1970s I was turned away by the gender clinic at Nashville’s Vanderbilt University because I was not, in the view of the clinicians there, dysfunctional enough to qualify for assistance. I have written about his.
[iv] Not all organizations for crossdressers subscribed to Prince’s no gays, no transsexuals philosophy, but they did not have the national visibility of Prince’s Society for the Second Self.
[v] Not all crossdressers nor all transsexuals embraced this term, and some still despise it. Still, it unified the communities and led to increased visibility and eventual societal acceptance. Until now, this has been a good thing.
[vi] See the website genderfork.com for an amazing display of this diversity.
[vii] … and has tacitly condoned it in his public speech.
Category: Transgender History, Transgender Opinion, Transgender Politics
Hi Kool!
Nice to see you again. It’s very quiet around here without you. 🙂
And I, for one, appreciate your sane and non-hysterical perspective on our country’s current political situation, Godwin’s Law and all that. LOL
Merry Christmas LesleyAnne, I’ve been on other boards defending trans freedom and trans-intellectualism .
Can things go wrong with Trump? Sure.
Germany 1933: Hmmm let’s see
Reichstag Fire 1933: A Dutch communist commits an act of arson. Hitler then pressured President Hindenburg to basically revoke all civil rights for everyone.
So is Trump going to do this after a terror attack?
No, as the county would not even let him if he tried.
Then you get the Enabling Act, Jewish Boycott, camps, Nuremberg Laws, Night of the Long Knives, Kristallnacht, annexation of Czechoslovakia, invasion of Poland, France, Russia, 6 million Jews killed in camps, 6 million Russian and 1-2 million more.
So I guess the author expects Trump to do what?
Trump order tanks to Midtown Atlanta, West Hollywood, Brooklyn’s Hasidic neighborhoods, round ups in East LA, and Dearborn MI of Palestinians?
Invade Mexico and kill 6 million Mexicans.
Let’s encourage young people to stay in school, stay off drugs, avoid reckless promiscuity, learn about civics and how to be an active citizen.
After all what did Jews do after their nightmare in 1930’s, 40’s Europe..they taught their children,
“Don’t get mad, don’t get even get ahead”
It’s about time transgenders did the same.
Right you are, Kool.
The odd thing about all the hysteria is that Trump isn’t even all that conservative, compared to, say, Cruz. Even now the ‘never Trumpers’ don’t trust him, not because he is Hitler reincarnate but because he’s pragmatic, not ideologically conservative.
Cruz, of course, would be getting the same treatment – probably even more fevered – from the left had he been the nominee.
I do believe the liberal reaction continues to be one of absolute shock; they really believed they would never again relinquish the White House, what with their ‘permanent demographic majority’.
Not so permanent, after all. 🙂
Hope you have a wonderful Christmas and a great 2017!
I expect Trump and his Executive Branch to systematically dismantle/roll back the Affordable Health Care Act, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, protections for workers, and legal protections for LGBT Americans; create a climate of suspicion about people with less than lily-white skin and heteronormative appearance that will lead to violence; round up and intern or deport immigrants; aggravate world tensions by recklessly ignoring political protocols; increase tensions between law enforcement officials and Black Americans by pushing stop-and-frisk policing; attack womens’ right to choose and equality in the workplace; encourage dictators who operate outside the rule of law; ignore his governmental duties in favor of attacking anyone who criticizes him; terrorize the press and damage the first amendment; tacitly encourage violence against his detracdtors; give huge tax breaks to the wealthy while putting the screws to everyone else; conflate his businesses and the business of the United States to line his own pockets; staff the White House with non-experienced sycophants instead of professionals; and inflame it all with late-night tweets. Trump and his cronies have promised to do all the above, have already done some of it, and are clearly girding up an administration bent on it.
Will we see tanks in Midtown Atlanta? I hope not, but who in Weimar Germany foresaw what would happen to that country under National Socialism?
“women, Jews, Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, gay men and lesbians, and trans and gender nonconforming people stand to lose much more”, absurd comparison of modern day America to Hitler’s Germany. Why fill the mind of young trans people with such gross distortions of history.
You can pump out this poison if you choose. I spend my time teaching others how to succeed in America. I usually like to write a little more to rebuke this kind of absurdity; it’s just not worth it on this column.
Final message to young people, be independent break free of this trans-victimhood that plagues our community.
Let’s see how absurd the comparison is four years from now.
And why educate people about this? First, so they can protect themselves. Second, so they will fight to keep their rights.
And please tell me how I have distorted history.
I have removed the content of this post by KoolMcKool, who apparently cannot engage in a discussion with someone with a different opinion without resorting to personal defamation.
— Dallas