https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1767912990366388735
You know what's baffling about this take is that at least mask off nazis have a very easy consistent non mental gymnastics take on it: "yes, they burned trans literature and it was good that they did so." Fascinating, now face the wall. I don't know what kind of pretzeling this moronic take requires. In fact, not only did Magnus Hirschfield's institute research queerness and transness, they undertook the first gender confirmation surgery. The woman in question, Dora Richter, is presumed killed during the attack on the institute or in custody after it. All of this information is incredibly easy to verify.
She's probably operating under the assumption that trans people were invented in 2016.
she's reposted a thread someone very normal made about how Magnus was actually in cahoots with the nazis because he was such a eugenics fanboy, or something
Was he? It doesn’t justify anything either way, but I just don’t know if I should mad about her pretending to care about eugenics or mad about her making such a vile false accusation.
it absolutely doesn't excuse the fucking nazis, jk & co are trying to link trans ideology with eugenics, unethical experiments, seething about the children, it's just that same line about how she felt like she would have been transed today
it's disgusting
I said that I agree with that. I was asking if he was one or if they are lying and saying he was one. His foundational role in helping trans people obviously transcends whatever shitty opinions about genetics he might have had. I was asking if it was a lie or not.
The first chapter of Heike Bauer's The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture (available on libgen) addresses the problematic context Hirschfeld emerged from. The tl;dr almost to the point of distortion is that he was following the medical trends of the time, which included eugenics, but his conception of it doesn't seem to have been racialized. Bauer does explore the fact that he did come in contact with those kinds of ideas, though never commented on them in either way (publicly, at least).
So it’s a misrepresentation? Most doctors follow the trend in areas they aren’t specialized in and he took a mild(er) form of accepting the tread?
I’ll read that eventually (probably in a couple days, but not now). Thank you for providing a citation, I should read something about this guy regardless (given has influence and import).
The way the fascists are framing it, yes it's a misrepresentation. His interest in it seemed to mainly stem from his focus on public health (before his pivot to sexology) and saw it as a means to that end.
How would a comrade frame it? Feel free to tell me to just shut up until I read it btw. I realize the question might be answered by that.
I just don’t get how that decouples things and am curious. As in I don’t understand the difference between public health eugenics and other eugenics.
It’s all just eugenics at the end of the day.
I'm not trying to cover for him, I'm just trying to summarize what's in the book. Eugenics is bad. That he saw validity in it is bad. It is not heavily mentioned in the book, just some brief mentions. If you ctrl+f in the pdf, there are only 7 instances of the word outside of the endnotes. The most revelant parts being,
But Hirschfeld was also implicated in discriminatory practices, most obviously in relation to eugenics. Despite his later work on racism, published posthumously in 1938, he was in favor of the efforts of racial hygienists and eugenicists because like many scientists and political activists around 1900 he believed that these sciences could improve the health of the nation. (page 8)
According to Hirschfeld the [1889-1892 influenza] pandemic had “put all the cultured nations into the enormous grip of the East,” a turn of phrase that reveals his debts to contemporary debates about the impact and feared contamination of (German) civilization through encounters with people from the borders of Europe or beyond, debates that gained momentum during the colonial expansion of the German Empire. Hirschfeld’s doctoral thesis [about the symptoms of influenza] at first glance seems only tenuously linked to the German colonial project, but it was clearly framed in relation to the imperial and scientific discourses that gathered in its wake. The influence of these debates can be traced to Hirschfeld’s later work. He openly supported eugenics, for example, if not for “racial refinement,” then as a way of improving health via selective reproduction,* and returned to questions about the acclimatization of colonizers to the weather and (perceived and real) endemic diseases of the tropical regions as late as the 1930s, when he speculated about the suitability of the bodies of “the white man” and “the white woman” to life in the tropics. (pages 18-19)
* Endnote to the previous passage,
The phrase is “das Naturprinzip der Rassenveredlung” in the original. See Hirschfeld, Naturgesetze der Liebe, 132. There has been some debate about whether the support of eugenics by sexual reformers such as Hirschfeld directly contributed to the emergence of Nazism. Rather than such reductive and somewhat far-fetched arguments about a one-way flow of influence from homosexual culture to Nazism, it is more accurate to point out that both sexual reformers and right-wing hatemongers were animated by the scientific positivism of the turn of the nineteenth century. See, e.g., Marhoefer’s excellent critique of the debates in Sex and the Weimar Republic, 137.
Bauer moreso focuses on the fact that Hirschfeld's career was initially built by working with German soldiers and that he was exposed to the horrors of German colonialism, and the horrors of colonialism in general through the extremely racist world fairs of the time, yet he chose not to comment on them. Hirschfeld and the Institute were unique, first of their kind pioneers that started the work on developing a way to medically transition, along with all the advocacy for queer and reproductive rights that they did in tandem with the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee, but they were very far from perfect. Hirschfeld was a cis white male doctor from Germany in the late 19th and early 20th century with all the expected baggage that would entail.
Back then, there were unfortunately a lot of otherwise very smart people who were in favor of eugenics.
I think the terf logic here is that it's slightly more socially acceptable to just erase trans people than to be outright on the side of nazis? Posy Parker doesn't seem to mind either way lol, but also the cultural awareness of queer people as holocaust victims still seems new and relatively small, so perhaps they see it as a defensible hill to die on.
I think JK Rowling is the type of transphobe that wants to pretend transness is new. Understanding that Nazis were burning books about trans people does more than put TERFs on the same side as nazis, it also means trans people have been here a lot longer than whatever it is she blames.
Oh yeah, erasing of the history is something that all queer people are subject to, because that history tells us that we've always been here and are perfectly natural to the world, which transphobes especially just cannot have.
Super cool that we live in the timeline where advocating for an end to the genocide of the Palestinians is anti-semetic but denying the crimes of the Third Reich is just a reasonable opinion.
if you don't want to genocide every fucking Nazi bastard on this planet, you aren't a communist
Pest removal doesn’t count as genocide imo, but otherwise agree and would encourage you to go further. :Starmer:
this is true
Get organized, then watch your glorious progress as the steel union beats the shit out of the local fascists
And here I was thinking letting the welders at them would be best, but steel workers do have that muscle…. :blush:
but when it gets down to it, is there anything as hot as an anti-fascist?
A welder turning a fascists face into that lost ark scene? Up to 400 F.
Fr tho, anyone who genuinely wants to bash the fash can make me overlook many things
I do for sure. And I do support a quick death, but... I have thought about reeducation. However the reeducation would be something like forced mushroom trips or something, basically retrain the brain to feel empathy and forcibly make them feel mental anguish, if only because when I've spent the time thinking about it, they're a nihilist and death is simply too easy to grant a nihilist. Or turn them into a thinking feeling vegetable ala One from Metallica. Like even rip out the teeth so they can't even bite, and they can be a weird human sex toy pillow thing(yeah... It was really really weird, it was on some hentai artists page, found it while trying to find some of the artists milder stuff on Reddit...)
This is my messed up 'how could we be worse to them than they've been to humanity' take though. Feel free to steal, don't give me any credit please lmao.
How common is it for the Holocaust to be seen as a genocide against exclusively Jews? I feel like Zionist propaganda has done a lot to revise and mythologize the atrocity.
Yep, liberals conveniently forget that leftists, slavs and POC were exterminated by the Third Reich in just as great/or greater numbers for the delusion of "lebensraum" (it's not a competition, but what I mean is that it's basically forgotten and ignored by liberal's history)
Rewriting What Was: Distorting Pastor Niemoller’s Words
Yet at the Holocaust museum and elsewhere, the word “Communist” has been dropped, replaced with “socialists,” as though Niemoller had written so, though he did not (for in 1945, even anti-communists recognized that communists were targets of fascism). This might seem like a quaint point in our post-Cold War time. Perhaps the change was made by those who fear the word might “confuse” those who equate Communism with fascism, Nazi Germany with the Soviet Union, thereby ignoring a truth, also widely accepted in 1945 and not by the left alone, the intimate connection between fascism and capitalism. Although “socialists” might seem to simply indicate a more commonly recognized left radicalism, its use removes the specificity of Niemoller’s original. Distortion, after all, distorts meaning.
The change in language contributes to the sense that social conflicts past and present are morality plays: good people on one side, bad people on the other, and never the twain shall meet. The air of self-satisfaction embedded in such simplifications reduces political questions then to an easily ignored morality, much like the Christian injunction to “love thy neighbor,” repeatedly uttered without context by those whose deeds condemn countless to hunger, illness and the ravages of war (unlike Martin Luther King’s same use of that phrase which had meaning for it was always and explicitly tied to context and content).
...
The pattern of developments noted above was familiar to Niemoller and others of his generation. The attacks on Communists, Social Democrats, unions, attacks on working-class institutions and communities, led each to be isolated. This was interwoven with attacks on populations (Jews, later Roma, Slavs, the disabled, gays and others) that were even more vulnerable. In the process, civil liberties were lost (including liberty of conscience) which finalized his fate and that of may others who spoke up too late.
...
But when “communists” are removed by those who otherwise quote Niemoller as he wrote because they are “unwanted” victims, then a sign is given of a partial solidarity that fails the test of solidarity altogether. Perhaps an analogy can be made when defenders of vulnerable populations ignore the plight of a vulnerable population closer to hand – such as those who are (or have been) in prison, for it means the support that is given is itself contingent upon impression and circumstance. Moreover, eschewing Communists as victims is part of the process of separating defense of liberties — freedom of speech, assembly, press — from active use of liberties to create more social justice, to make use of democracy to advance popular power, social justice, and freedom through equality. Niemoller never abandoned his rejection of anti-Communism, even when it quickly resurfaced in Germany during his lifetime.
I use that as making a point when discussing propaganda. Asking people how many died in the Holocaust , most of the time you get the answer 6 million. Pointing out why they forgot the other 6 million usually makes people think.
99% of burger education is "the jews". I had to wait u til senioe year of high school when a teacher flippantly said "yeah they gassed the gays and crippled too"
Joanne Rowling has reached the holocaust denial phase of facism.
Okay what if he does it in the channel so that it yeets half of France into Poseidon's realm instead?
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
it’s some terf’s actual human hair styled into a portrait of their favourite bigot author
thanks, that explains the name but also what in the actual hell is wrong with these people
Hirschfield seems like he was a cool dude but it always bugs me that there are so many famous CISGENDER MEN in the history of trans people :/
As much as I love the guy, what gets overlooked in popular understandings of the Institut für Sexualwissenchaft's work was that a great deal of it was the result of trans people coming in and advocating for themselves about what they wanted and the people at the institute working to find a solution. So in that sense, the creation of a somewhat primitive proto-gender affirming care regimine was done in direct collaboration with trans people, despite the fact that, like you say, a lot of cisgender men like Hirschfeld and Levy-Lenz got the credit for it.
Also, I had no idea we finally got a Hirschfeld emote, that rules
So who are the cool and rad trans people who self-advocated and helped to create the Institut? Has history recorded many of their names?
The most famous name is probably Dora Richter. She worked directly with Hirschfeld and she's usually regarded as the first known person to receive a vaginoplasty (in 1931). She had a very difficult life and disappeared off the face of the Earth in 1939 though.
Unfortunately though history wasn't great at recording the names of the various queer people who were clients at the institute. For one, most of them wanted privacy. 1930s Germany wasn't exactly the greatest time to be a publicly known queer person, so many of the records used pseudonyms or abbreviations of names. A lot of the recorded names are just a first name, last initial, and address, for instance. Second, the Nazis burned the Institut's archives, so much of the notes/research are lost.
I should also point out that Hirschfeld himself was a gay man. His partner, Karl Giese, was the Institut's head archivist and he was killed by the Nazis at the Lodz ghetto in 1942. Any amount of research you do into the history of this place will probably fill you with terrible sadness and I'm sorry. They were really ahead of their time, reaching near modern levels of understanding of queer people, and yet the entire thing was stomped to death by fascist scum.
Even just this does fill me with terrible sadness, it is depressing but it's a really critical part of our history to know. We're still here!
It is a great read, I loved the diversity of perspectives and stories in it. Even when it's depressing, it's amazing and humbling to learn about our history.
Like axont said, the unfortunate reality is that the vast majority of these people are anonymous to the historical record. If you're interested in this history then I highly recommend Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity by Robert Beachy and The Hirschfield Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture by Heike Bauer, both of which are on libgen. The latter has a little bit about Dora Richter in chapter 4 under the heading A Space for Transgender, pages 86-87 in the hardcopy (not sure if the libgen version aligns with that or not). Another very interesting, albeit short, source on this kind of self-advocacy can be found in the account of an American doctor, William J. Robinson, who visited the Institute in 1925: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015011423632?urlappend=%3Bseq=397%3Bownerid=13510798887791650-401 (pages 391-396 if that didn't link properly). He inaccurately uses the term 'homosexual' for every queer person he talks about, but it's pretty easy to pick up on who's trans from what he descibes. His description of Hirschfeld and the Institute is absolutely glowing, he seemingly can't heap enough praise on the work they were doing. One of my favorite parts is how he laments that he would love to set up a similar institution in the US, but deems American society to be far too reactionary to allow it,
"The scope of the Institute is a much wider one, embracing as it does the entire field of sexology. It is an institution absolutely unique in the whole world. It is an institution of which I dreamed for many years and which I hoped to establish in the United States but which I felt would not thrive on account of our prudish, hypocritical attitude to all questions of sex. In such an institution one has to have a free hand; the advice given must be unhampered by any fear of violating some medieval law or of colliding with a stupidly childish, and for that reason all the more tyrannical public opinion. What can be done in barbarous Europe cannot always be done in ultra-civilized North America. [...] The United States could certainly use five or six such Institutes—say one in New York, one in Boston, one in Chicago, one in Atlanta, one in San Francisco. They would all have plenty of work to do, and less ignorance and consequently less misery in sex matters would be the result. When I get back to New York I may try to establish the first Institute of this kind in the United States—thus doing on a large scale what I have been doing on a small scale for a quarter of a century. And then again I may not: too much hard, nerve-wrecking work."
Anyway, a bit more on topic: his article ends with a very bittersweet sentiment that I think about all the time, "May the [Institute] be built on a permanent, never to be shaken foundation." Fuck this billionaire freak for denying this horrific tragedy that saw the loss of invaluable queer history and research, and set us back decades in medical development and understanding of queer people.
Thank you! I have updated my reading list, and those are some really good excerpts.
it's one of those things where it just feels obvious that an effort should be made at every level to actually include trans people in the research about themselves. like my scientific training is in space shit, and let me tell you, if i could teach a blackhole how to research itself i fucking would have.
Damn you think she'd know the history of the people who bombed the living hell out of her parents / grandparents houses
Okay, but that was just scary foreigners hating England for its freedom.
I thought that was what they thought about the Irish though? Pretty sure before they were love bombed they would've bent over backwards to suck Hitler off. Maybe it was just the first widely documented (in glorious black and white photography) abusive relationship between two deeply in love countries?
Pretty sure before they were love bombed they would've bent over backwards to suck Hitler off.
Sure, but they're not going to teach that to you in English grade school during the 1980s.
Maybe it was just the first widely documented (in glorious black and white photography) abusive relationship between two deeply in love countries?
England's biggest beef against Germany was that the Germans got to do Trans-European colonialist empire building during the 1930s/40s while the English commitment to right-wing economic policy left them shitting in their own bed for 30 years.
