Know Your History!

It is very important that we know our history so we know the lies the Republicans make about us. They make it sound like being trans was an invention of the internet and cross-sex hormonal treatment is brand spanking new.

But the right-wing conservatives forget about Lili Elbe, Christine Jorgensen, and Renee Richards, the pioneers of our community.

Backlash to transgender health care isn’t new − but the faulty science used to justify it has changed to meet the times
The Conversation
By G. Samantha Rosenthal: Associate Professor of History, Roanoke College
January 30, 2024

In the past century, there have been three waves of opposition to transgender health care.

In 1933, when the Nazis rose to power, they cracked down on transgender medical research and clinical practice in Europe. In 1979, a research report critical of transgender medicine led to the closure of the most well-respected clinics in the United States. And since 2021, when Arkansas became the first U.S. state among now at least 21 other states banning gender-affirming care for minors, we have been living in a third wave.

In my work as a scholar of transgender history, I study the long history of gender-affirming care in the U.S., which has been practiced since at least the 1940s. Puberty blockers, hormone therapies and anatomical surgeries are neither experimental nor untested and have been safely administered to cisgender, transgender and intersex adults and children for decades.

On the other hand, the archives of transgender medicine demonstrate that backlash against these practices has historically been rooted in pseudoscience. And today, an anti-science movement that aims to discredit science altogether is fueling the fire of the current wave of anti-trans panic.

In the 1930s the Nazis banned us, they made treating us a crime, they destroyed the libraries that held the medical research on us. The photo below is the Nazis burning the books on us us, lesbians and gays.

In the 1920s, the new science of hormones was just reaching maturation and entering mainstream consciousness. In the field of sexology – the study of human sexuality, founded in 19th century Europe – scientists were excited about research on animals demonstrating that removing or transplanting gonads could effectively change an organism’s sex.

In 1919, the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld founded the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin, which became the world’s leading center for queer and transgender research and clinical practice. Hirschfeld worked closely with trans women as co-researchers throughout the 1920s. Several trans women also received care at the institute, including orchiectomies that halted the production of testosterone in their bodies.

So all the stuff about us that the Republicans are pushing is bull! Cross-sex hormonal treatment has been around since the 1920s!

But where Hirschfeld and other sexologists saw the classification of queer and trans people as justifications for legal emancipation, eugenicists of the early 20th century in the U.S. and Europe believed sexually transgressive people should be sterilized and ultimately eradicated.

Based on this premise, the Nazis murdered thousands of LGBTQ people in the Holocaust.

Is that where the Republicans heading? Towards our annihilation.

Then in the fifties, sixties and seventies we had the modern era of research by Harry Benjamin at John Hopkins. In a study, Meyer and Reter found that,

In their results, the authors found no negative effects from surgery, and no patients expressed regret. They concluded that “sex reassignment surgery confers no objective advantage in terms of social rehabilitation,” but it is “subjectively satisfying” to the patients themselves. This was not a damning conclusion.

But the Republicans don’t want to hear that, it doesn’t fit their narrative and how harmful transition is to us.

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The Human Rights Campaign wrote,

Here are seven things you didn’t know about transgender people:

1.     Around 5000 to 3000 B.C., Gala, described as androgynous or trans priests of the Sumerian goddess Inanna, spoke their own dialect and took on feminine names.
2.     Sometime from 200 to 300 B.C., in ancient Greece, some gods were worshiped by galli priests who wore feminine attire, identified as women and have therefore been identified by scholars as early transgender figures.
3.     In the fourth century, Anastasia the Patrician fled life in Constantinople, the capital of the Roman Empire, to spend the remainder of life dressed masculinely as a monk, and has become viewed by some scholars as transgender.
4.     In South Asia, at least eight-known gender-expansive identities have historically been present in the subcontinent, the most well-known being hijra - third gender people of historical, spiritual, and cultural significance in South Asian society. Hijra and individuals of diverse gender identities have been well-documented in religious and cultural texts and legends. These individuals often form intentional communities for community as well as survival.
5.     Around the 18th century, the Itelmens of Siberia recognized a “third gender” called “koekchuch” to describe individuals who were assigned male at birth, but expressed themselves as women.
6.     The oldest Western institute studying LGBTQ+ identities was started in Germany in 1919. Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sex Research) performed some of the earliest contemporary affirming medical services. It was eventually destroyed in the rise of German fascism under the Nazi party.
7.     In Turtle Island (an Indigenous name for North America), Indigenous communities use the term two-spirit as a modern, pan-Indigenous umbrella identifier for people of another societal and ceremonial gender identity. This term was established in 1990 as a modern, collective term for a historical gender identity describing individuals not considered men or women in most, if not all Indigenous cultures of Turtle Island.

It is important that we know our history! Do you know that the computer or smartphone you are using was in part made possible by a trans woman. When I was learning programming back in 1970 on the IBM 360, a trans woman was developing a process to speed up computer while she was working for IBM (She was let go when she transitioned.). When I was in college I had to read her text book on microprocessors, little did I know it was written by a trans woman. You can read her history here, it is very fascinating!

Through out history we were there all around the world.