cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4773410

The first scholarly publications on transgender people under [German Fascism] argued that they were not persecuted. To be more specific, one foundational essay argued that they were not persecuted, and another argued that some trans women were, but only insofar as officials mistakenly believed them to be cisgender gay men.⁸ This, however, is not accurate.

Newer research shows a more complex and more violent situation. The newer scholarship also makes the case that racial status and other factors mattered when trans people ran into trouble with the [Third Reich]. Trans people were at risk. The risks they ran varied according to other things in their lives. Not all trans people suffered violence. Yet there is a pattern of state hostility and police harassment of trans people, particularly trans women. In some cases, it ended in murder.

This change in the literature is due to the growing number of scholars working on the topic, to changes in how we conceptualize [Fascist] violence more broadly, and to changes in how scholars conceptualize transgender people. It also owes to the digitization of archival records, which has made police files easier to find.

[…]

Like “Aryan” gay men, if trans people had “Aryan” status, they were not subjected to a systematic round‐up such as what the [Third Reich] carried out against German Jews. They did, however, face state hostility, harassment, and violence because they were transgender. [Fascist] officials generally had negative views of transgender people.

In what may be the only [Fascist]‐era book on the topic, the 1938 Ein Beitrag zum Problem des Transvestitismus (Marburg: Hermann Bauer), Hermann Ferdinand Voss writes: “Their asocial mindset, which is often paired with criminal activity, justifies draconian measures by the state.”¹⁴

Prior to the [NSDAP’s] “seizure of power,” not enough could be done about trans people, he wrote, but happily now, “There is the possibility of putting the people in question in protective custody or possibly having them castrated or, via temporary ‘appropriate detention (entsprechende Internierung)’ to impress upon them that they must put their inclination on hold.”¹⁵

In 1933, Hamburg officials wrote, “Police officials are requested to observe the transvestites, in particular, and as required to send them to concentration camps.” ¹⁶ (Historians now recognize that the category “transvestite” corresponded very closely to our modern concept of “transgender.”)

[…]

[Fascist] officials did not simply think trans women were gay men. They recognized trans women as different from gay men in ways that mattered. [Fascist] officials had a concept of “transvestitism” as distinct from, though related to, homosexuality. To quote Voss’s 1938 book: “By transvestites we generally mean those persons who have the wish to primarily wear the clothing of the other sex and to act more or less as the opposite sex.”

In all of the cases I have examined, state officials refer to the accused people as “transvestites,” even when they also identified them as homosexual (which they did not always do). Officials often claimed that transvestitism was an aggravating factor, something that made the case more dire, the accused person more deserving of a heavier sentence.

(Emphasis added.)