Modern day terfs would have supported the burning of the Institute of Sexual Studies if this was 1930s Germany, and then pivoted to defend the Nazi party from the evil trans activists because “not all of them are Hitlerites!”
They were the first to study sexuality and gender identity/presentation as a naturally occurring phenomenon, not a deviance. Many trans women went there for treatment and to participate in scientific studies that could have had potential to greatly advance our understanding of transgender people. Terfs would have supported the burning of this institute because their ideology is more concerned with denying trans people our rights than with any kind of liberation.
it was magnus hirschfeld’s library. he specifically did advocacy work calling for the acceptance & support of trans people. he produced educational material including a feature docudrama film called Different from the Others. it was made in 1919. not all of the film still survives, but enough for a thorough reconstruction. it stars Conrad Veidt from Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
If a script still survives please link it here as well
i can’t find a transcript unfortunately, but it’s a silent film so much of it is text anyway, & the missing parts are described in written text on screen. the audio is just music. i know this unfortunately doesn’t help for people who use screen readers, but if you don’t & you simply want to see the film, what survives is less than a hour long. if you can’t watch a silent film for even that long (i am used to them but it’s totally understandable!), the wikipedia page actually has a pretty thorough description of the plot, as well as some quotes.
it is truly a “docudrama” in that half of the film is a fictional story & half is more of an educational lecture. magnus hirschfeld himself plays the doctor in the film. conrad veidt plays a gay violinist who is being blackmailed & threatened with being outed if he doesn’t pay up. the lecture material mixes up being gay, being transgender, & being intersex, simply because all these theories of gender were still being worked out. obviously some of the language & science is dated given that the film is literally 99 years old, but it’s still amazingly ahead of its time. consider this line:
“Love for one of the same sex is no less pure or noble than for one of the opposite. This orientation can be found in all levels of society, and among respected people. Those that say otherwise come only from ignorance and bigotry.”
the main message of the film is actually meant to be a condemnation of Paragraph 175, the german law against homosexuality between men. blackmail in association with violation of 175 was especially common; to bring charges against the blackmailer, the victim would in all likelihood have his sexuality revealed, which itself was also a crime, as well as obviously a great source of personal shame. this only encouraged blackmailers, who knew they most likely wouldn’t be stopped.
not to spoil the film, but the violinist does eventually bring his blackmailer to court, & is punished for violating 175 with a very meager sentence. however, his professional & personal life is devastated by his admission, & he commits suicide. i know that’s a horribly bleak ending, but one of hirschfeld’s big goals with his film, as well as with his other work, was to PREVENT suicide in the proto-lgbt community. he noticed in his role as a physician that many of his gay & trans patients came to him bearing the scars of previous suicide attempts, & many sadly ended up committing suicide even after seeking treatment with him. sorry to quote his wikipedia, but i’d rather do that than just paraphrase it:
As part of his efforts to counter popular prejudice, Hirschfeld spoke out about the taboo subject of suicide and was the first to present statistical evidence that homosexuals were more likely to commit suicide or attempt suicide than heterosexuals. Hirschfeld prepared questionnaires that gay men could answer anonymously about homosexuality and suicide. Collating his results, Hirschfeld estimated that 3 out of every 100 gays committed suicide every year, that a quarter of gays had attempted suicide at some point in their lives and that the other three-quarters had had suicidal thoughts at some point. He used his evidence to argue that, under current social conditions in Germany, life was literally unbearable for homosexuals.
i’m sorry that this took a dark turn, but what sets hirschfeld apart as a doctor & sexologist was that he recognized that this horrendous mental anguish was not the result of people with unhealthy or unnatural desires, but of a society with unhealthy prejudices. we’re literally still trying to get the medical community today to see that with trans people.
having the protagonist of his film kill himself was not meant to leave his gay & trans audience feeling hopeless, but as a rallying cry. his last line in the film is:
“You have to keep living; live to change the prejudices by which this man has been made one of the countless victims.”
unfortunately hirschfeld’s appeal to strike Paragraph 175 from the books was unsuccessful, & it was under this law that gay men were rounded up into the death camps during the holocaust. germany did not fully repeal Paragraph 175 until 1994. you read that right.
again, in the version of hirschfeld’s views condensed for the motion picture, gay, trans, & intersex people are pretty much spoken of as one & the same. sexologists of the time still had basic essentialist views which defined male-attracted people as “feminine” & female-attracted people as “masculine,” so being gay in itself was seen as an intersex condition, & no distinction was made between being born physically intersex & being transgender. but hirschfeld recognized & acknowledged a spectrum of differences in gender identity & presentation, eventually coming up with his system of 64 possible types of sexual “intermediary.” i didn’t want to seem like i was barging into this post just to talk about gay men, but in the film itself, it is very clear that hirschfeld is talking about gay, trans, & intersex people together. as an example of dated language, he actually coined the term tr*nsvestite, but his definition would be understood today to mean transgender. he performed gender confirmation surgeries at the institute as well as giving trans people shelter & employment there.
all of this is further proof that, from the very beginning, the struggles of cis gay people & trans people have been necessarily intertwined, & we have survived by fighting for each other. terfs are literally trying to rewrite history to pretend that didn’t happen, but it did, & to throw out that evidence is to pretend the work of revolutionaries like hirschfeld never existed. which, to tie it back to the original post, is exactly what the nazis sought to do when they burned the institute’s library. 💅
(magnus hirschfeld himself, who of course was also jewish, was out of the country at the time of his institute’s destruction in 1933. he was never able to return to germany. he went into exile in france with two of his partners, & died of a heart attack in nice on his 67th birthday in 1935. his sister, with whom he had lived at the institute, never escaped germany & was killed in a concentration camp in 1942.)
In many ways this set back the trans movement back decades.
Jfc you know nothing of “terfs” you assholes.
“warriorforartemis” yeah cuz Greek mythological figures really need you denying transgendereds from using the bathroom in peace. Fucking Cringe
i’m with the whole “dont force ur children to adhere to gender rules” but please …. let them if they want to …. my whole perception of femininity was warped because my parents pushed me to literally be “not like other girls” & “alternative” but as soon as i embraced pink things and dresses & stuff i felt really good about myself
i cant tell u how upset i was when we had a medieval day at school & i wanted to be a princess but my parents were like “nah all the other girls would do that u should be a knight” & i felt super bad compared to the others ugh
also like ?? as soon as i started liking “girly” things i discovered i was non-binary & stuff, so for me it’s not so much of a “kids should like things of the stereotypically opposite gender” as it is “let kids like what they like regardless of their gender but dont force them to like things of the stereotypically opposite gender”
only now my mom discovered the racist list. despite it..literally being the first thing you see when you open my door
I thought I showed you guys months ago???
W… why are each of them on there?
I went to a convention about a year or so ago and I went to this one panel for this one guy who claimed to be a ghostwriter for these franchises. When he was doing signings I went up and asked him what his secret was to making these successes, and he told me in his words, “Wanna know the truth? I secretly make at least one of these characters in each franchise racist coded. I don’t know how it works but Hollywood eats that shit up” and the whole convention center clapped.
