A Story of Trans Genocide, Now and Then, in a Single Photo
On the histories we forgot -- and who burned them
Today I am writing something that I have been thinking about for a long, long, long time. It’s really, really important.
It is also very heavy. Cis people, read this. Look with your eyes open at it. Sit with it. Feel it. Absorb it.
Trans people, take care.
This is about history. This is about violent history, Nazi history, genocidal history.
This is about the legacies we choose to forget.
There is a very famous adage that says, “those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it”.
As a student of queer history, as a student of antifascist history, as a student of feminist history, as a student of scientific history — this is true.
History is the context of the present.
Those who do not understand the history that brought us to this present cannot understand the present.
If we, collectively, are to meaningfully resist fascism in this iteration, we must learn from our forebears who resisted previous fascist regimes, and ultimately — defeated them.
We must also understand that those who oppose us, those in power currently, study history.
They study their forebears and learn from their successes.
We must study their forebears and look for weaknesses, both in the past and the present.
Nothing in this world is new. We just forget.
So today I am going to tell you a story. An old story, from almost exactly 92 years ago. A new story, from right now, outside your windows.
This is a story you certainly know already, in its revisionist history. This is a story that, like most history, is not forgotten so much as erased.
As Chinua Achebe put it, “Until the lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.”
This is a story of the hunted.
It is the story of this photo, which you have almost certainly seen before, stripped of its context.
Erasing its context just like the books burned.
This photo was taken on May 6th, 1933.
It is not coincidental that this is the only photo of this story you are likely to have seen. This photo is a tragedy, yes, but it is neither the end or the beginning of the story. Simply an image, stripped of context, propagandized into toothlessness.
That photo is of one of the first Nazi book burnings. But to understand it, we have to look back further. We have to know its history, its context, too.
Of course, history did not “start”.
But for this story, I will start in November 1923.
In the 1920s, Germany under the Weimar Republic was in crisis. The perception among the public was that the democratic republic of the Weimar government was not working. Economic crisis (due to World War I reparations and damages) spiraled out of control. Leaders were absent and insulated.
The people of Germany suffered. Out of control inflation crashed the currency. The sheer death toll and destruction of WWI (which ended in 1919) limited any progress towards stability. The government was ineffectual and insisted on staying the course rather than what the populace perceived as change
This time of political instability and the Weimar Republic’s perception of weakness allowed for a political vacuum that quickly filled with many competing interests, all arguing they had the solution for the economic crisis (which was caused by war casualties).
At first, the Nazi Party of Germany was not particularly popular. They were considered largely ridiculous and fringe, an unserious and radical group that would never gain real power.
That changed on November 8th, 1923. That day, the Nazi Party, led by Adolf Hitler, attempted a violent coup.
This attempted coup would be known as the “Beer Hall Putsch”.
Hitler himself shot the pistol that signaled “start”.
The Nazi party’s explicit intention was to storm the capital of Germany and create the “Greater German Reich”. Citizenship in this envisioned government would be based on “race”.
The Nazi party militarized its members into “stormtroopers” and attempted to seize power violently. The insurrection was put down, with police killing many of the Nazis and capturing the leaders of the attempt, including Adolf Hitler.
Adolf Hitler was convicted of high treason in April 1924 and sentenced to five years in prison. However, he was then released from prison in December 1924.
His “Iron Cross”, for bravery in service in World War I, was worn in the courtroom. He argued he was patriotic to Germany.
At Adolf Hitler’s trial for high treason in 1924, the judges gave him the lightest possible sentence due to their sympathies to him and his brand of “German Nationalism”.
Many critics at the time argued these judges were letting a serious threat go with leniency, but were ignored.
Adolf Hitler’s brief stint in prison was comfortable. He wore civilian clothes, met with other incarcerated people as he pleased (including those convicted of conspiring with him to overthrow the government), and even dictated his first volume of Mein Kampf to his personal secretary there.
All of this was condoned and known by sympathetic authorities.
The Nazi’s attempted coup had explicitly and openly intended to crush political dissidents by force, to restrict citizenship to “Nordic stock” and to remove Jewish people from any political power.
The eugenicism of the movement at this time was also open and on display. Hitler himself openly admired and regularly corresponded with many powerful eugenicists in the United States, including Henry Ford, who openly supported the Nazi regime from its earliest days.
The attempted coup members stated that they intended to legislate the “removal of all persons dangerous to security and useless eaters” and explicitly called for “Sammellager” (concentration camps) and for these people to be “turned to labor productive to the community.”
Adolf Hitler learned from the failed coup. He learned that there were a great many people in the Weimar Republic who were interested in his genocidal way of thinking, including many in powerful positions. And he decided to try again — this time legally.
Adolf Hitler subverted the Weimar Republic’s democracy against itself. So he began utilizing his most powerful weapon — propaganda.
The Nazi party were extremely skilled at advertising. They weaponized latent biases in the population to turn the public’s anger at economic crisis into violence against those already marginalized, in particular, Jewish people.
Adolf Hitler understood that his views were seen as extremist by much of the public, and especially by establishment governmental leaders.
In 1928, the Nazi party won less than 3% of the national vote.
In 1929, the Great Depression hit the globe.
The Weimar Republic, already teetering on the edge of collapse, experienced economic crisis that resulted in severe unemployment, poverty, homelessless and death among the population in the early 1930s.
Many of the people living in the Weimar Republic blamed their government for signing the Treaty of Versailles to end WWI and agreeing to pay reparations and take international responsibility for WWI. This lingering resentment exploded during the Great Depression, and the democratic government of Weimar became unable to govern due to factionalism within its leadership.
Many people of the Weimar Republic became increasingly receptive to extremist ideas. They felt the current government did not care about them, that they were ineffectual and caught up in petty disputes.
Political movements polarized rapidly. The Nazi party’s propagandists churned out content.
By 1930, the Nazi party won 18% of the national vote, a 15% gain in just two years.
Many people were in uproar about this, as they recognized Nazi party goals and ideologies as explicitly genocidal, eugenicist and racist. They resisted this rise of the Nazi party.
The Nazi party’s platform is eerily familiar. It promised:
economic repair and jobs
to return Germany to a great world power from its “shame” of defeat in WWI
conquer territory lost in WWI
create a central authoritarian government focused on “German Values”
The Nazi propagandists’ also very successfully weaponized existing prejudices in the population as insulation against criticism, consistently arguing that Jewish people and communists (today the preferred terminology is “the Left”), were to blame for all problems in the Weimar Republic, and were in the Nazi’s way.
The Nazi propaganda platform claimed to focus on “German unity”, but very aggressively excluded those it disapproved of from the definition of “German”.
Excluded groups included, but were not limited to: Jewish people, Roma people, disabled people, Black people and queer people.
The propaganda worked. By July 1932, the Nazi Party won 37% of the national vote, up from 18% just two years prior.
In their elected parliament positions, Nazi party members refused to cooperate with other parties to govern, locking the federal government into inaction.
In November of 1933, the Nazi Party won 33% of the national vote. It was the greatest majority. And, with the Nazi Party policy of refusing to collaborate with members of any other party, this effectively held the federal government in gridlock.
Then Adolf Hitler made a deal.
With the Nazi party at his back and the credible threat of the Nazis in parliament simply preventing all governing until their demands were met, Adolf Hitler demanded that the President, Paul von Hindenburg, appoint him chancellor.
Although Paul von Hindenburg, President of the Weimar Republic at the time, refused initially, he conceded and appointed Adolf Hitler, leader of the Nazi party, to Chancellor of the Weimar Republic on January 30th, 1933.
Hindenburg had been persuaded to do this by conservative members of other parties.
These conservatives argued that they could utilize the Nazi party’s popularity among the public to further their own aims. They believed that they could deal with and control Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party.
So they gave him power. They simply did not believe the republic could be destroyed, much less by someone with views so contrary to the political system they were accustomed to.
In January 1933, when Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of the Weimar Republic, he was not a dictator. Theoretically, he was still bound by the Weimar Republic’s constitution.
Laws are paper, in the end. Without belief in them, without enforcement, without power in a meaningful sense, they die.
On February 28th, 1933, the Reichstag Fire Decree was issued. This was in direct response to the German Parliament (Reichstag) building burning down due to arson the previous day. Nazi propagandists quickly blamed communists, and claimed that emergency powers were needed to respond to such a threat.
The Reichstag Fire Degree contradicted the constitution of the Weimar Republic.
It stripped people in Germany from the right to assembly, free speech, freedom of the press. It prevented any restrictions to police investigations. It allowed for the arrest and incarceration of political dissidents.
The arrest and incarceration of these political dissidents, under the Reichstag Fire Degree, did not require a trial or even a specific charge.
The Reichstag Fire Decree allowed the government to dissolve political organizations at will and to confiscate private property with no recourse. It also allowed the federal government to supersede all state and local laws, and to directly abolish state or local governments.
All of this was done technically by law. The President, von Hindenburg, gave his approval for the Reichstag Fire Decree, although Hitler increasingly held more and more authority while von Hindenburg’s meaningful power subsided.
The Reichstag Fire Decree officially began the police state of Nazi Germany, and was technically conducted legally through emergency powers. The people had no constitutionally guaranteed rights, and the SS handled more and more “investigations” rather than the official police.
This puppet democracy legislated furiously. Political opponents, especially communists and democratic socialists, and Jewish people and other “undesireables” in the Nazi viewpoint, were harassed, persecuted, oppressed and killed by both legal and extralegal means.
At the time, Adolf Hitler, leader of the Nazi party, claimed a policy of Gleichschaltung (coordination). This was authoritarianism, wherein all political parties, local and state governments, professional organizations, etc were Nazi controlled. Education and culture filled with propaganda.
On April 7th, 1933, the German government issued the “Law for the Restoration of Professional Civil Service”.
This law explicitly prevented Jewish people and other “enemies” from holding any position in the civil service. Narrow initial exceptions were soon closed.
There is another side of this story, simultaneous and important. Hopeful, loving and full of community care.
This is the story of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, and the lives he touched.
Dr. Hirschfeld was German. He was also Jewish. He was also gay.
Unlike most doctors of his time, he did not perceive queerness as a disease or moral aberration, but rather a natural variation of humanity.
While the terminology he used is old to us today, it was revolutionary to his time.
Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld was born on May 14th, 1868.
In medical school, he was traumatized by a lecture organized by his professor on “sexual degeneracy”.
In this lecture, a gay man who had been incarcerated in an asylum for 30 years was paraded naked before the class.
Dr. Hirschfeld was horrified.
No one else in his class had any problem. Dr. Hirschfeld wrote later that even his best friend argued it had been reasonable.
Dr. Hirschfeld graduated and set up a medical practice in Berlin in 1893.
One night at his practice, a young soldier came to his office.
Under German criminal law, gay men who had sex were criminalized under “Paragraph 175”.
This carried severe penalties, including public scorn and incarceration.
The soldier at his doorstep confessed himself an “Urning”.
This was a word at the time used to refer to queer men. The young soldier explained that he had arrived at Dr. Hirschfeld’s practice that fateful night because he was due to be married in the morning and he could not face it.
Dr. Hirschfeld asked the soldier to visit him in the morning.
Overnight, the young soldier killed himself.
But in his will, he left Dr. Hirschfeld a letter. The soldier referred to himself as a “curse” and wrote, “The thought that you could contribute to [a future] when the German fatherland will think of us in more just terms sweetens the hour of death.”
Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld never forgot this encounter.
He left his private practice. And he resolved himself to fight for queer rights, queer understanding, queer healthcare and medicine, queer life and queer love.
Dr. Hirschfeld argued that humans were born with natural variations in both sexuality and gender.
He even coined a term roughly analogous for how the term “nonbinary” can be understood today — Geschlecht, or “third sex”.
Dr. Hirschfeld coined the term “sexual intermediaries”, which roughly represents what we today call “gender nonconformity”.
He argued that sexuality was a spectrum and recognized attraction to multiple genders, which he referred to as “constitutional homosexuality”.
Critically, and extraordinarily radically for his time and the modalities of thinking common to his world and the field of medicine at the time, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld recognized people we now term “transgender”.
He called them “transvestites”. (The derogatory connotation came later.)
Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld argued that “transvestites” should be considered the gender they said they were, “from the point of view of their character”.
He once described a trans woman he knew, who, as a soldier, secretly wore women’s clothing, “to be a human being at least for a moment.”
Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld was ahead of many today when he also acknowledged and discussed that those he termed, “transvestites” or “sexual intermediaries” had sexualities independent of their genders that varied between individuals.
Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld acknowledged gender fluidity as well, arguing for the inclusion of those whose gender varied or was not static.
The ultimate throughline of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld’s outlook was autonomy and self determination of the individual, or as he put it, allowing people to act, “in accordance with their nature.”
Radically as well, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld was openly queer.
He and his partner, Karl Giese, both considered themselves to be “sexual intermediaries”, or gender nonconforming people, in today’s language.
Looking back at this photo, you can clearly see Karl Giese, dressed in a dress and holding Dr. Hirschfeld’s hand.
Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld understood these things not because he was uniquely exceptional.
He understood these things because he listened to other queer people and trusted them as the ultimate arbiters of their own lives and experiences.
And so he decided to help “transvestites” transition.
In 1919, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld bought a house in Berlin and opened the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (the Institute for Sexual Research) on July 6th, 1919.
A journalist of the era reported that the Institute could not be a scientific place, because it was “full of life everywhere”.
The Institute for Sexual Research was to be a place of “research, teaching, healing and refuge” where the staff would “free the individual from physical ailments, psychological afflictions, and social deprivation.”
From this Institute, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld and his staff (mostly comprised of trans people he hired who could not get employment elsewhere due to discrimination), turned to the work.
They collected every document on sexual or gender history, research, science and theory they could.
The Institute provided public sex education, contraceptive advice, did active research on gender and sexuality, and supported sex workers.
Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld worked tirelessly politically to overturn “Paragaph 175” the legal statute that criminalized gay men and those assumed to be gay men.
When Dr. Hirschfeld failed to overturn “Paragraph 175”, instead of giving up, he pivoted, instead successfully petitioning the government to allow him to give his patients “transvestite” ID cards that legally protected them from arrest for “crossdressing”.
The Institute of Sexual Sciences pioneered transgender medicine. Although it primarily focused on transfeminine medicine, hormone replacement therapies and even multi-stage vaginoplasties were performed at the clinic.
The Institute came to its end in 1933.
Trans medicine is older than antibiotics.
The Institute of Sexual Sciences had rotating offices where leading feminist scholars would work in residence, as well as a printing press and internal publication that published educational materials meant to reduce stigma and disinformation about queer identities of all types.
Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld was not the only advocate for queer people of his time and place.
Notably, however, he was one that intentionally opened the broadest community of queer individuals.
Many lesbian and gay people at the time saw queerness as something necessarily hidden, arguing that Dr. Hirschfeld was making too much noise and asking for too much.
Lesbian and gay people at the time also often argued that they had little in common and did not often see commonalities between them, an issue that, as today, leaves trans, nonbinary and bisexual people trapped without community.
Many gay men activists at the time argued misogynistically that they were “more masculine” than straight men.
Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld once calculated there were 43,046,721 possible variations of human sexuality. The point was less the number and more the simple, crystalline truth — that queerness resists definition.
Or, in his own words, “Love is as varied as people are.”
On February 28th, 1933, the Reichstag Fire Decree was issued.
At the time, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld was on a lecture tour.
Intimidation and threats to the institute by the Nazi party were common to the Institute at this point.
The Nazi party argued that the Institute of Sexual Sciences was “immoral” that it was “endangering children” by “exposing them to dangerous ideologies”. That it was “weakening the German family” and that it “was against the Christian German state.”
Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld’s Jewish identity was constantly weaponized against him. The Nazi party propagandized him into an outsized figure, producing material constantly meant to paint him as either a fool, or according to bigoted Jewish or queer stereotypes.
Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld was abroad when the Nazi party, led by student members, ransacked the Institute of Sexual Sciences on May 6th, 1933.
The stormtroopers, officially sanctioned by the federal government, took the library outside to the street.
Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld watched the propaganda newsreels, from another country, of his life’s work going up in flames.
The Nazis burned over 20,000 volumes of research on gender and sexuality, many of which were unique to the Institute’s collection.
The queer library of Alexandria went up in flames on May 6th, 1933.
This is a photo of it.
This photo, now published in history textbooks the world over, is almost never attributed its history.
That history is burned today, by omission, as it was burned then by kerosene. Queer history. Trans history.
This photo shows trans genocide by the Nazi party of Germany in 1933.
World War II was declared on September 1st, 1939.
In those six years, Dr. Hirschfeld died in exile, and the Nazis used revisionist history of the Institute’s legacy as a propaganda tool.
Just as your history textbook did.
As Chinua Achebe says, “Until the lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.”
Trans people had and have our historians.
The Nazi party of Germany burned their library.
Then they said queer people have no history.
I am a trans historian. I am an activist and archivist. I am a scientist.
The Trump regime of the United States is destroying trans history wherever they can.
Now they claim, via their report from the Department of Health and Human Services, that we are new, experimental, fake.
The anti-trans propagandists of the United States have been hard at work. Since 2021, the Trans Formations Project (
https://www.transformationsproject.org/
) has tracked over 1500 explicitly anti-trans bills since 2021 at the state level in this country.
The Trump campaign, in 2024, spent over 19 million dollars on only two of the many anti-trans ads.
The Williams Institute estimates 0.6% of the US population is transgender, approximately 1.6 million people.
Trump spent $11.87 per trans person in this country to target us, in only two ads.
In 2022, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention declared the “gender critical” movement to be explicitly genocidal against trans people, here.
Statement on the Genocidal Nature of the Gender Critical Movement's Ideology and Practice
November 29, 2022 The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention voices its concern over the growing number of laws…www.lemkininstitute.com
On March 13th, 2025, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention released a “Red Flag Alert for the Anti-Trans Agenda of the Trump Administration in the United States”, here:
Red Flag Alert for the Anti-Trans Agenda of the Trump Administration in the United States | Lemkin…
The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security condemns the anti-trans agenda of the second Trump…www.lemkininstitute.com
The Trump administration, on January 20th, 2025, the day of Trump’s Inauguration, released an Executive Order titled, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”
It defines transgender, nonbinary, intersex people out of legal existence.
The Trump administration says trans people have no history. They say we are a fad, an “ideology”.
They say that as they burn our history around us, and rewrite it to suit their uses.
Park Service erases 'transgender' on Stonewall website, uses the term 'LGB' movement
The website deleted all mentions of "transgender" and "queer" in its history of the Stonewall riots, and only referred…www.npr.org
The propaganda report from the Department of Health and Human Services argues explicitly for conversion therapy and argues that transgender and nonbinary people do not exist.
It claims our healthcare is “experimental” and “unproven”.
The Trump administration cancelled transgender health research.
Notice how those who erase history benefit from that erasure, from the twisting of the narrative context that we live in to suit their version of events, to paint themselves as the hunters, and to, above all — point the finger for governmental failure towards someone more vulnerable.
So I say to you again.
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
It is long past time to decide who you are, what you believe in, and what you are willing to love enough to fight for it.
After all. “Love is as varied as people are.”
Thank you for reading.
If you are interested in more queer history, and the broader context of the story of the Institute of Sexual Sciences, please consider this piece: https://medium.com/an-injustice/the-story-of-pink-31919ba57b61
If you are interested in understanding queer US history in particular, please read this:
Finally, here is a piece I’m very proud of about the psychology of radical kindness, the vulnerability of radical love, and how it pierces the veils those who do violence seek to hide behind.
A love letter to those who want me dead.
If you think transgender people are a threat to your way of life, this is for you. Happy Valentine’s Day.medium.com
Sources below:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-forgotten-history-of-the-worlds-first-trans-clinic/
https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/this-week-in-history-sex-scientist-magnus-hirschfeld/
https://hmd.org.uk/resource/6-may-1933-looting-of-the-institute-of-sexology/
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/hitler-comes-to-power
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/beer-hall-putsch-munich-putsch
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-propaganda?parent=en%2F11449
Foundations of the Nazi State
Following Hitler's appointment as chancellor, the Nazis began laying the foundations of a state based on racist and…encyclopedia.ushmm.org
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-reichstag-fire
https://www.proquest.com/docview/1689887188?sourcetype=Scholarly%20Journals
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-anti-trans-ads-spending/
https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-adults-united-states/