Guest post: Nazis under the wardrobe
Originally a comment by Mostly Cloudy at Miscellany Room.
The Nazis came for trans people, burned the first trans clinic, and murdered the first trans woman who ever got bottom surgery.
To deny this is to engage in holocaust denial.
I keep hearing this claim put about by many trans activists. The obvious purpose of this claim is to smear anyone who disagrees with puberty blockers, men in women’s prisons, men competing in women’s sports, etc. as being a similar type of murderous bigot that the Nazis were.
Has anyone researched this? I know Malcolm Clark has looked into the issue.
The Nazis persecuted and murdered tens of thousands of homosexual men. A number of these homosexual men were what used to be called “transvestites”, who wore women’s clothing for most or all of the time. One of them was “Liddy” Bacroff, who has been described as a homosexual and a transvestite.
So it seems the “trans” people that Caraballo is talking about were actually homosexuals who liked to cross-dress.
Their suffering was tragic and deserves to be commemorated, but such people were not the main target of the Nazis, like Jews and Roma were. Nor is there any ideological connection with disagreement with “gender ideology” and Nazism.
It’s the “trans clinic” part that really raises my eyebrows. In the 1930s-40s?
Thanks for posting that up.
Re Caraballo’s claim that the Nazis “murdered the first trans woman who ever got bottom surgery.”
The first known person to undergo “gender confirmation surgery” was Dora Richter. Richter was a male transvestite. All through Richter’s life, a strong case of gender identity disorder seems to have afflicted Richter.
Richter had a penectomy in 1931, shortly followed by a vaginoplasty. Richter fled Germany when the Nazis took over. Richter was last recorded living in Prague in 1939: the date and cause of her death are currently unknown.
So it’s not known what happened to Richter, and for Carabello to claim that the Nazis “murdered” Richter is disrespectful to the people murdered by the Nazis.
Website about Richter (in German) here:
https://lili-elbe.de/blog/2023/04/dora-richter-taufeintrag/
Thank you for posting it in the first place!
Screechy – same. It’s just not true. The idea of “transvestite” goes back that far, I think, but trans gender, no. Trans clinic, no. It’s retrofitting history.
I mentioned Malcolm Richard Clark has written about the issue of trans activists claiming “trans people” were a “key target” of the Nazis.
He has written an article about this, “Transing the…Holocaust”. Unfortunately the second part of the article is behind a paywall, but it still has some very useful information.
https://malcolmrichardclark.substack.com/p/transing-theholocaust
Also, here’s a Twitter thread where Clark discusses some of the people pushing this idea, including Anna Hájková and Bodie A. Ashton.
https://nitter.poast.org/TwisterFilm/status/1663726178589392897#m
Clark says these historians have been only able to identify four trans victims killed by the Nazis, two of whom were Jewish and two who were homosexual.
Each of these people were victims of evil and deserve our sympathy, but they were not murdered simply because they were gender-nonconforming.
What Alejandra is calling “the first trans clinic” was The Institute for Sex Research:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissenschaft
Alejandra neglected to mention that one of the surgeons who performed that surgery went on to be a war criminal who participated in human experimentation at Dachau.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Gohrbandt
Ah, Erwin Gohrbandt. That one of the pioneers of the vaginoplasty later became a Nazi war criminal is lost on the likes of Alejandra Caraballo.
Also, what *was* the Holocaust? Definitions vary, but the one given by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum states:
What was the Holocaust?
The Holocaust (1933–1945) was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million European Jews by the Nazi German regime and its allies and collaborators.1 The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum defines the years of the Holocaust as 1933–1945. The Holocaust era began in January 1933 when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in Germany. It ended in May 1945, when the Allied Powers defeated Nazi Germany in World War II. The Holocaust is also sometimes referred to as “the Shoah,” the Hebrew word for “catastrophe.”
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/introduction-to-the-holocaust
So to disagree with Caraballo’s claims is not “Holocaust Denial”.