You know the old saying, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” well are we there yet? Is history repeating itself?
The right-wing conservatives all swear that there were no trans people before, that we are a new phenomenon… yeah right. Maybe if you got your head in the sand.
The internet didn’t create the garbage that the right-wingers call Rapid Onset of Gender Dysphoria but internet did allow for us to network with other trans people.
I first met Rev. Canon Clinton Jones at the Christ Church Cathedral in Hartford when I first went to a Twenty Club, ever since then I was one of his “Girls.”
Rev. Cannon Clinton Jones used to tell the story about Project H, when they first started meeting at the YMCA it was called Project Homosexual, the administrators came up to him and pointed to the sign in the lobby of the YMCA that say Project Homosexual pointing to the room where they met, the administrator said we support you bit can you change the name? Hence Project H was born.
There were men who attended the meeting and they swore that they were women, Rev. Jones was curious and started looking into it. From that the Gender Identity Clinic of New England was created, back then surgery was done at. I believe, at Mt Sinai Hospital in Hartford, the doctor who did the surgery interned under Dr Harry Benjamin. The Hartford Courant wrote;
A little bit of Connecticut history.The Forgotten History of the World's First Trans Clinic
The Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin would be a century old if it hadn’t fallen victim to Nazi ideology
Scientific America
BY BRANDY SCHILLACE
May 20, 2021Late one night on the cusp of the 20th century, Magnus Hirschfeld, a young doctor, found a soldier on the doorstep of his practice in Germany. Distraught and agitated, the man had come to confess himself an Urning—a word used to refer to homosexual men. It explained the cover of darkness; to speak of such things was dangerous business. The infamous “Paragraph 175” in the German criminal code made homosexuality illegal; a man so accused could be stripped of his ranks and titles and thrown in jail.
Hirschfeld understood the soldier’s plight—he was himself both homosexual and Jewish—and did his best to comfort his patient. But the soldier had already made up his mind. It was the eve of his wedding, an event he could not face. Shortly after, he shot himself.
I knew the reverend from when I used to attend the meetings at Twenty Club, he was the moderator. Scientific America goes on to write...At the precipice of the modern LGBTQ+ movement, an Episcopal priest in Connecticut named Canon Clinton Jones spearheaded one of the first major LGBTQ+ advocacy organizations and mental health supports in the state. He revolutionized community care and support—inspiring generations to come.
Perhaps even more surprising was Hirschfeld’s inclusion of those with no fixed gender, akin to today’s concept of gender-fluid or nonbinary identity (he counted French novelist George Sand among them). Most important for Hirschfeld, these people were acting “in accordance with their nature,” not against it.
If this seems like extremely forward thinking for the time, it was. It was possibly even more forward than our own thinking, 100 years later. Current anti-trans sentiments center on the idea that being transgender is both new and unnatural. In the wake of a U.K. court decision in 2020 limiting trans rights, an editorial in the Economist argued that other countries should follow suit, and an editorial in the Observer praised the court for resisting a “disturbing trend” of children receiving gender-affirming health care as part of a transition.
But history bears witness to the plurality of gender and sexuality. Hirschfeld considered Socrates, Michelangelo and Shakespeare to be sexual intermediaries; he considered himself and his partner Karl Giese to be the same. Hirschfeld’s own predecessor in sexology, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, had claimed in the 19th century that homosexuality was natural sexual variation and congenital.
Hirschfeld’s study of sexual intermediaries was no trend or fad; instead it was a recognition that people may be born with a nature contrary to their assigned gender. And in cases where the desire to live as the opposite sex was strong, he thought science ought to provide a means of transition. He purchased a Berlin villa in early 1919 and opened the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (the Institute for Sexual Research) on July 6. By 1930 it would perform the first modern gender-affirmation surgeries in the world.
I first met Rev. Canon Clinton Jones at the Christ Church Cathedral in Hartford when I first went to a Twenty Club, ever since then I was one of his “Girls.”
Project H
In partnership with Trinity College psychology professor Dr. George Higgins and attorney Donald Cantor, Jones formed Project H in 1963. Project H provided educational and counseling services for gay people in the Christian community. The group met at the Hartford YMCA with social workers, psychologists, and clergy providing services. The origins of the name derived from the need for secrecy—YMCA administrators were concerned about how signs that said “homosexuality” would look around the building. They asked for the group to come up with a more discreet name—hence, Project H.
There were men who attended the meeting and they swore that they were women, Rev. Jones was curious and started looking into it. From that the Gender Identity Clinic of New England was created, back then surgery was done at. I believe, at Mt Sinai Hospital in Hartford, the doctor who did the surgery interned under Dr Harry Benjamin. The Hartford Courant wrote;
Jones, who has a doctorate in divinity from Bard College, began a counseling ministry for transgender people in the mid-1960s. Working with Dr. George Higgins, a professor at Trinity College, he helped create a support group for transgender people called The Twenty Club, which met at the cathedral for 30 years until it moved to the Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Community Center two years ago.
Kathleen Sterner, president of the Gender Identity Clinic of New England, said Jones helped to found the clinic and over the years counseled and recorded social histories of hundreds of people preparing for sex-change surgery.
“His work was very significant,” she said. “Transgender people often have very tough lives and years ago it was even more so. He provided resources and a place for them.”
Meanwhile some thirty years earlier…
The institute would ultimately house an immense library on sexuality, gathered over many years and including rare books and diagrams and protocols for male-to-female (MTF) surgical transition. In addition to psychiatrists for therapy, he had hired Ludwig Levy-Lenz, a gynecologist. Together, with surgeon Erwin Gohrbandt, they performed male-to-female surgery called Genitalumwandlung—literally, “transformation of genitals.” This occurred in stages: castration, penectomy and vaginoplasty. (The institute treated only trans women at this time; female-to-male phalloplasty would not be practiced until the late 1940s.) Patients would also be prescribed hormone therapy, allowing them to grow natural breasts and softer features.
That such an institute existed as early as 1919, recognizing the plurality of gender identity and offering support, comes as a surprise to many. It should have been the bedrock on which to build a bolder future. But as the institute celebrated its first decade, the Nazi party was already on the rise. By 1932 it was the largest political party in Germany, growing its numbers through a nationalism that targeted the immigrant, the disabled and the “genetically unfit.” Weakened by economic crisis and without a majority, the Weimar Republic collapsed.
Adolf Hitler was named chancellor on January 30, 1933, and enacted policies to rid Germany of Lebensunwertes Leben, or “lives unworthy of living.” What began as a sterilization program ultimately led to the extermination of millions of Jews, Roma, Soviet and Polish citizens—and homosexuals and transgender people.
Are you scared? I am. Is history repeating itself?
I have met a Holocaust survivor, the Governor's Hate Crime Advisory Council that I am on met to hear the story of Rabbi as he made it through concentration camps. and now there is an article in the Star Tribune in Minneapolis,
By "that," she means any of the three genocides that have shaped her life. She still cannot imagine why humans would do such things to fellow humans.First was the Holodomor, the Josef Stalin-induced famine that killed millions of Ukrainians around the time Jablonsky was born in a village in eastern Ukraine. It is a miracle, her family says, that a baby survived that time. In school, she got in trouble for defacing a photograph of Stalin, an almost unfathomable act of childhood defiance.[…]Now, half a world away, Jablonsky mourns Ukraine's newest devastation: Russia's invasion that some observers — from President Joe Biden to a bipartisan group of lawmakers — call a genocide. For a while, Jablonsky had a doormat adorned with Vladimir Putin's face that read, "WIPE YOUR FEET HERE." But she couldn't stand seeing Putin daily, so she gave it to her eponymous granddaughter, Nina Thueson, a 24-year-old law student at Mitchell Hamline School of Law.
But what got my attention was...
"Stalin, Hitler, Putin — it's happening again," Thueson said. "She's living in her house, she's peaceful, she has us. And now she has to see this all happen again. It's been very hard."
It is happening again around the world, the onslaught against minorities continue. History is repeating itself.
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