Adolf Hitler was named chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. Donald Trump was sworn in as the president of the United States for the second time on January 20, 2015. It took Hitler 97 days to make international news for going after homosexuals and transgender people. It took Trump five days.
On 6 May 1933, the Institute of Sexology, an academic foundation devoted to sexological research and the advocacy of homosexual rights, was broken into and occupied by Nazi-supporting youth. Several days later the entire contents of the library were removed and burned.
The institute was initially occupied by The German Student Union, who were a collective of Nazi-supporting youth. Several days later, on 10 May, the entire contents of the library were removed to Berlin’s Bebelplatz Square. That night, along with 20,000 other books across Germany, they were publicly burned in a symbolic attack by Nazi officials on their enemies.
The Institute of Sexology was the brainchild of Magnus Hirschfeld, a doctor, a Jew and a homosexual, who was a pioneer of gay and transgender rights. It’s worth telling the story of how he got his start as an advocate:
Late one night on the cusp of the 20th century, Magnus Hirschfeld, a young doctor, found a soldier on the doorstep of his practice in Germany. Distraught and agitated, the man had come to confess himself an Urning—a word used to refer to homosexual men. It explained the cover of darkness; to speak of such things was dangerous business. The infamous “Paragraph 175” in the German criminal code made homosexuality illegal; a man so accused could be stripped of his ranks and titles and thrown in jail.
Hirschfeld understood the soldier’s plight—he was himself both homosexual and Jewish—and did his best to comfort his patient. But the soldier had already made up his mind. It was the eve of his wedding, an event he could not face. Shortly after, he shot himself.
The soldier bequeathed his private papers to Hirschfeld, along with a letter: “The thought that you could contribute to [a future] when the German fatherland will think of us in more just terms,” he wrote, “sweetens the hour of death.” Hirschfeld would be forever haunted by this needless loss; the soldier had called himself a “curse,” fit only to die, because the expectations of heterosexual norms, reinforced by marriage and law, made no room for his kind. These heartbreaking stories, Hirschfeld wrote in The Sexual History of the World War, “bring before us the whole tragedy [in Germany]; what fatherland did they have, and for what freedom were they fighting?” In the aftermath of this lonely death, Hirschfeld left his medical practice and began a crusade for justice that would alter the course of queer history.
With his Institute, Hirschfeld developed modern ideas about gender fluidity and bisexuality. The Institute gained “a global reputation for its pioneering work on transsexual understanding and calls for equality for homosexuals, transgender people and women.” Hirschfeld coined the term ‘transvestite’ and one of his major accomplishments was getting the the German government both under the monarchy and the Weimar Republic to issues “transvestite passes,” which granted certified individuals the legal right to cross-dress in public. He even carried out the first gender reassignment surgeries.
When the Nazis came for the institute on May 6, 1933, Hirschfeld was out of the country. [His partner, Karl] Giese fled with what little he could. Troops swarmed the building, carrying off a bronze bust of Hirschfeld and all his precious books, which they piled in the street. Soon a towerlike bonfire engulfed more than 20,000 books, some of them rare copies that had helped provide a historiography for nonconforming people.
The carnage flickered over German newsreels. It was among the first and largest of the Nazi book burnings. Nazi youth, students and soldiers participated in the destruction, while voiceovers of the footage declared that the German state had committed “the intellectual garbage of the past” to the flames. The collection was irreplaceable.
Ownership of a transvestite pass was used in some instances as justification for arrest, assignment to a concentration camp and death. Hirschfeld suffered a stroke and died in 1935 while in exile from the Nazis in France. Shortly thereafter the Nazis strengthened Section 175 of the legal code to ban all forms of homosexual contact and began a severe persecution of gay men.
In total, around 50,000 gay men were detained under these draconian laws. Once confined in jail, they were routinely exposed to inhumane treatment for their sexuality. Around 10,000 to 15,000 were also deported to concentrations camps, where many were forced to wear a pink triangle, and subjected to castration and medical experimentation. Over half of these prisoners would die from the extreme conditions they were subjected to in the camps.
Unlike Hitler, Trump did not wait three months to make aggressive moves. On his first half-day in office, Trump issued an executive order stating that “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.” The order banned government use of the term “gender,” insisting it be replaced with “sex.” And, among other things, it ordered the Attorney General to prevent any medical procedures in the federal prison system aimed at “conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex.
As the New York Times reports, Trump has followed this up by ordering “federal prisons to house inmates who are transgender women in men’s facilities.” This is despite federal data demonstrating that “transgender prisoners are 10 times as likely to report being sexually victimized as other prisoners.”
Other noteworthy developments from the fifth day of the fascist regime include their argument in federal court that Native Americans are not entitled to birthright citizenship and the Anti-Defamation League belatedly deciding that Elon Musk is, in fact, too pro-Nazi.
This will not stop until the fascist regime is defeated.
