Every year, we remember the horrors that would be inflicted on over six million people who were no different than the group of people who persecuted them, other than being Jew and LGBTQ. The difference is one group knew and aspired to be their true selves and the other would be unaware of who they are for decades, even now in 2018.

The Aaryan’s don’t exist, well not in the sense we have been forced to believe for decades in a school textbook. Who were those unaware people who killed and were so defensive over their race, but the wrong identification of who they were; The Aryans. Aristotle once taught that conflict is rarely based on those with confidence and intelligence but to beware of the ignorant of those that have no clue who they are, yet punish or force other, for not being like them. Aaryan people are not of German descent. They are of Iranian descent. The very word, Iran means lands of the Aryans. Yet thousands tormented, raped, committed ungodly acts on live bodies before killing them all to promote a race they “thought’ they were part of.¹

Eighty-five years ago on May 10th, the Nazis sacked the Institute for Sexual Science headed by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld 1935-1868, in Berlin. Hirschfeld was the co-founder of the first LGBT emancipation organization in the world and was a pioneering advocate for transgender people.

Hirschfeld was born to Jewish parents in a Prussian town on the Baltic coast. He first studied modern languages and then medicine, obtaining a doctoral degree in 1892. After a period of travel, he returned to Germany and established a medical practice in Magdeburg in 1894. Two years later he moved to Berlin, where he would become actively involved in the scientific study of sexuality—in particular, homosexuality—and advocacy efforts on behalf of sexual minorities.

Hirschfeld maintained that sexual and gender orientation was innate and not a deliberate choice, and he believed that scientific understanding of sexuality would promote tolerance of sexual minorities. His sexology research was guided by empiricism and activism, driven by the belief that the sexual ideology of Judeo-Christian civilization was a serious obstacle to the understanding of sexuality and to the reform of laws and practices that regulated it.

Initially, Hirschfeld supported the concept that homosexuals constituted the “third sex,” although he soon moved on from that. He is best known for his subsequent theory of sexual intermediaries, which held that there were many types of naturally occurring sexual and gender variations found across the human population, such as hermaphroditism, homosexuality, and transvestism. He is also credited with coining the term transvestite.

Hirschfeld accomplished an enormous amount of work during his lifetime with regards to his research, writing, and advocacy efforts. In 1897 Hirschfeld established the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee with Max Spohr, Franz Josef von Bülow, and Eduard Oberg; it was the world’s first LGBT rights organization. Its main goal was to fight for the abolishment of Paragraph 175 of the German Imperial Penal Code, which punished sexual contact between same sex. In 1899 he started the Yearbook of Intermediate Sexual Types, the first journal in the world to deal with sexual variants; it was regularly published until 1923. He also published an important study on cross-dressing, The Transvestites (1910). Hirschfeld was one of the founders of the Medical Society for Sexual Science and Eugenics, established in 1913. The next year he published his study Homosexuality in Men and Women, which was based on the expansive statistical surveys on homosexuality that he had conducted. In addition to publishing works on sexology and sexual reforms, Hirschfeld also wrote about racism, politics, and the history of morals.

In 1919 Hirschfeld opened the first sexology institute in the world, the Institute for Sexual Science, in Berlin; the institute and the considerable holdings of its library and archives were destroyed by Nazi demonstrators in 1933. Hirschfeld also participated in the production of the first film to call for the decriminalization and acceptance of homosexuality, Different from the Others (1919). The controversial film ignited much debate and was banned by German officials within a year. In 1928 Hirschfeld founded the World League for Sexual Reform (WLSR), which had its roots in an early conference that he had organized in 1921, the First International Conference for Sexual Reform on a Scientific Basis. The WSLR called for reform of sex legislation, the right to contraception and sex education, and legal and social equality of the sexes.

Being a Jew, a gay man and a sexual liberation activist made Hirschfeld the target of right-wing supporters, and he suffered serious injuries from an attack in 1920. Later, with the Nazis’ growing power, he was regularly assaulted, his lectures were disrupted, and, upon completion of his international speaking tour in 1932, he was unable to return to Germany. He instead went to Switzerland and then in 1934 to France, where he died the next year.

The German Sexologist in the early 20th Century was known as the “Einstein of Sex” for his pioneering work in the field of sexology. He was the first person to systematically describe and work with what he described as Transvestite and Transsexual people. He considered transsexualism to be a form of the intersex condition, a view that is increasingly held by many today.

Working with surgeons in Berlin through his “Institute for Sexual Science”, (Institut füer Sexualwissenschaft) he established and operated what was in practice the worlds first Gender Identity Clinic. One of Hirschfeld’s first clients was Einer Wegener, who transitioned to become Lili Elbe, undergoing the worlds first documented male to female gender reassignment.

The turn of the 20th century saw the birth of sexology as an academic discipline. It seems that in spite of the then repressive attitudes of Victorian society towards all sexual matters throughout Europe, extensive efforts to research and understand the entire spectrum of human sexual behavior emerged.

In Germany in 1886, Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing established sexology as a scientific discipline with the publication of Psychopathia Sexualis. In England, Havelock Ellis established himself as the founding father of sexology with the publication of Sexual Inversion in 1897 which describes the sexual relations of homosexual males, including men with boys.

However, it was Magnus Hirschfield who probably contributed most to the initial study of Homosexuality and Transsexuality and to separate them as sexual and gender identities.

“Between 1899 and 1923, Hirschfeld and his staff compiled a 20,000-page anthology. The “Yearbooks For Sexual Intermediaries” were intended to show that between the “full man” and the “full woman” there are an infinite number of gradations and combinations. Hermaphrodites, transvestites, homosexuals are the necessary natural link between the two poles of man and woman. The homosexual is a kind of “third sex”. He founded the “Institute for Sexual Research” in 1919 in order to provide a solid framework for this research. “

Following his publication of Die Transvestitenin, in 1913 Havelock Ellis proposed an alternative label of “sexo-aesthetic inversion” which did not catch on. In 1902 he suggested another term, Eonism, inspired by the Chevalier D’Eon De Beaumont following the model established by Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing in popularizing the term Sadism from the novels Marquis de Sade and masochism from the name of  Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.

At this time Hirschfeld also began working with Eugen Steinach, a surgeon from Vienna, to develop early Gender Reassignment Surgery techniques. Over the next 20 years, a number of incomplete male to female and female to male surgeries were reported and then in 1931, the first complete male to female reassignment surgery was performed by Dr. Levy-Lenz, and Dr. Felix Abraham, two of Hirschfield’s co-workers at the Institute of Sexual Science which had been established in 1919. The patient was Dorchen Richter (previously Rudolf), who lived and worked in the Institute as a housemaid.  That same year the institute also reported two men undergoing gender reassignment surgery and had developed the technique of phalloplasty that would take several decades to re-create his work again, after his documented work was destroyed by the Hitler’s Nazi party.

Another of Magnus Hirschfeld’s patients, Danish artist Einer Wegener, was also undergoing what would be a series of five operations at that time. Einer became Lile Elbe and the first publicly acknowledged male to female gender reassignment and caused a media sensation in Denmark and in Germany. The picture at above left is of Lili with a nurse, and Hirschfeld after surgery.  Sadly she died following the final surgery in 1931 intended to enable her to have children, but a book based on her personal writings about her experiences and a subsequent novel, The Danish Girl, which became an Academy Awarded Film in 2014, made Lili the most famous pre WWII transsexual, although, in reality, she was probably intersex.

The Day the Ignorant Bigots came

Unfortunately, in the early 1930s, the political climate in Germany was dramatically changing with the rise of Hitler’s Alt-Right Nazi Party and Magnus Hirschfeld and his Institute for Sexual Science was becoming a primary target.

Hirschfeld’s activities as an LGBT rights campaigner and founder of the world’s first LGBT rights organization, the World League for Sexual Reform, had made him vulnerable to the homophobic behavior of the far right and he was violently attacked a number of times.  Hitler himself had described Hirschfeld as “the most dangerous Jew in Germany.”  Dangerous not only because he was a Jew, but a Gay scientist empowering transgender, lesbian and gay people to accept themselves and instill a belief that a happy successful life is possible for even us. A propaganda we see even today in world politics, from Putin to Trump; to destroy what they don’t know or too ignorant to try to understand.

When in May 1933 Police, German Students and Hitler Youth began burning un-German books, it was Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science that was the first target on May 6th, 4 days before the main book burning event on the 10th. The image to the above left, which is well known, is believed to be the burning of Hirschfeld’s library and research and in the middle of the fire, the bust of Hirschfeld himself.

When his institute was destroyed, Hirschfeld was no longer in Germany.  He had left in 1931 on a global speaking tour and when he returned to Europe in 1932, was advised by friends not to return to Germany.  He settled in exile in France, first in Paris and later Nice, where he died of a heart attack on his 67th birthday on May 14th, 1935.

He died a broken man, denied to finish his most important work of liberating the souls of innocent people seeking personal happiness. He died knowing in his heart, that his patients were more than likely wearing the dreaded pink triangle, awaiting their deaths, in one of the dozens of concentration camps around Germany and Poland.

THE PINK TRIANGLE  MUST NOT BE FORGOTTEN

Not all of Hirschfeld’s records were destroyed. Over 100,000 gay men and trans women were arrested for breach of paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code, the crime of homosexuality, and 15,000 were sent to concentration camps where they were required to wear a pink triangle to identify them as homosexual. There they were subjected to extensive medical experimentation. Many were drugged and subjected to electric shock treatments in the search for a cure for homosexuality. Others were simply seen as disposable subjects for wide-ranging medical experiments or as target practice for SS troops, who aimed for the pink triangle on their chests. Some of the medical experiments were performing sex changes on effeminate men, but men who identified and wanted to be a man. Hirschfeld’s work on female to male Phalloplasty was extremely decades ahead of its time with only one known successful surgery before the war. Without the progress of his work that was destroyed by the Nazi Party, FtM bottom surgery would not again reach the success of his first surgery well into the 21’s century in 2001.

Sadly In the 1945 Nuremberg war crime trials that followed the liberation no mention was ever made of crimes against homosexuals. No SS official was ever tried for specific atrocities against pink triangle prisoners. Many of the known SS Doctors, who had performed operations on homosexuals, were never brought to account for their actions. One of the most notorious SS doctors was Carl Peter Vaernet who performed numerous experiments on pink triangle inmates at the Buchenwald and Neuengamme camps. He was never tried for his crimes and escaped to South America where he died a free man in 1965. Did American bigotry’s play it parts in this only unpunished Nazi?

Today the Pink Triangle, originally intended as a badge of shame has been reclaimed as an international symbol LGBTQ Pride and the LGBT Rights Movement, a movement that owes a great deal to a Gay Jewish doctor, Magnus Hirschfeld. It has also been adopted as the background to the Transgender Triangle with the symbols for male, female and “Third Gender”.

Yesterday’s mark in history for many means nothing, but for LGBTQIA people’s it brings many emotions. Anger, because had this man not been stopped by ignorant bigotry, imagine how each of our transitions would have gone today, with little or maybe no shame. Trans men would have no issues, or worries of major complications as phalloplasty by now would have been perfected. It brings sadness to mind of these young group of scientists and participates, just like any of us today attending a support group or health convention, imagine those sitting next to you now, but not sitting next to you in a support group or on the streets protesting, but in a gas chamber awaiting your death simply for who you are. It would have been TDOR on a world global tragedy. Thousands of names to read and yet the Alt-rt is growing again. The Southern Law Poverty Center says Neo-Nazi groups have tripled since 2003, those sympathetic to the Alt-right’s rhetoric, along with the help of Russian Czar, Putin who currently knows and conceals a concentration camp for gay men in Chechnya, help elect #notourpresident Trumpzilla for the #FakeWhiteHouse

Since his election, always attempting to sanction our bodies and have been put into place. Protection, equality in health care, housing and employment have been eradicated. Trans military personnel still worry about their future. Hate crimes against LGBTQIA people are breaking records. The alt-right is spreading its propaganda from nation to nation.

Two ways we can combat this. One is to never forget those that came before us that made each genderation lives one step better than the next, or we fail to let ourselves be repeated victims of people too ignorant to know who they are, and maybe the most ignorant of all is not to search out your truth. Lastly, and possibly the hardest, unity. We must stop fighting among each other, especially at times when enemies are making their plans against all of us. It’s time for the LGBTQIA community, to put away petty differences, even different political difference, cause what does it matter what’s the important political issue you support if no one sees you as a human being?

LGBTQIA peoples are of every race, religion, nationality, every gender or no gender at all, we are on every inch of soil in every land, every nation, every town, large and small. The next time they seek us out to destroy, I hope they see a billion person army, united as one, ready to defend our right to love and live our lives in peace.

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1. The Aryans By MoAshmang: A documentary in which an African-German gets to the bottom of right-wing movements worldwide – and their completely wrong interpretation of “Aryanism” – a phenomenon of the tall, blond and blue-eyed master race established by the French philosopher Gobineau, It went on with the Nazis, and  still promotes hate and racial murders today. Filmmaker Mo Asumang sets out for a tour de force into the abyss of the political evil in Germany and the US. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08ia79bArCw
2. Magnus Hirschfeld Foundation 1935-1868
3. Havelock Ellis
4. Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing
5. Magnus Hirschfeld:
   Panhumanism and the Sexual Cultures of Asia
6. The Magnus Hirschfeld Archive of Sexology at Humboldt University E-learning Course
7. Gay men have been rounded up and thrown in concentration camps in Chechnya, APRIL 2017
8. Southern Poverty Law Centers map of  the radical growth in Alt-rt hate groups

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EDITOR’S RECOMMENDED CONTINUE READING:

 Auschwitz’s-The Pink Triangle-Never Forget