You know what's baffling about this take is that at least mask off nazis have a very easy consistent non mental gymnastics take on it: "yes, they burned trans literature and it was good that they did so." Fascinating, now face the wall. I don't know what kind of pretzeling this moronic take requires. In fact, not only did Magnus Hirschfield's institute research queerness and transness, they undertook the first gender confirmation surgery. The woman in question, Dora Richter, is presumed killed during the attack on the institute or in custody after it. All of this information is incredibly easy to verify.
I think the terf logic here is that it's slightly more socially acceptable to just erase trans people than to be outright on the side of nazis? Posy Parker doesn't seem to mind either way lol, but also the cultural awareness of queer people as holocaust victims still seems new and relatively small, so perhaps they see it as a defensible hill to die on.
I think JK Rowling is the type of transphobe that wants to pretend transness is new. Understanding that Nazis were burning books about trans people does more than put TERFs on the same side as nazis, it also means trans people have been here a lot longer than whatever it is she blames.
Oh yeah, erasing of the history is something that all queer people are subject to, because that history tells us that we've always been here and are perfectly natural to the world, which transphobes especially just cannot have.
she's reposted a thread someone very normal made about how Magnus was actually in cahoots with the nazis because he was such a eugenics fanboy, or something
Was he? It doesn’t justify anything either way, but I just don’t know if I should mad about her pretending to care about eugenics or mad about her making such a vile false accusation.
it absolutely doesn't excuse the fucking nazis, jk & co are trying to link trans ideology with eugenics, unethical experiments, seething about the children, it's just that same line about how she felt like she would have been transed today
I said that I agree with that. I was asking if he was one or if they are lying and saying he was one. His foundational role in helping trans people obviously transcends whatever shitty opinions about genetics he might have had. I was asking if it was a lie or not.
The first chapter of Heike Bauer's The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture (available on libgen) addresses the problematic context Hirschfeld emerged from. The tl;dr almost to the point of distortion is that he was following the medical trends of the time, which included eugenics, but his conception of it doesn't seem to have been racialized. Bauer does explore the fact that he did come in contact with those kinds of ideas, though never commented on them in either way (publicly, at least).
So it’s a misrepresentation? Most doctors follow the trend in areas they aren’t specialized in and he took a mild(er) form of accepting the tread?
I’ll read that eventually (probably in a couple days, but not now). Thank you for providing a citation, I should read something about this guy regardless (given has influence and import).
The way the fascists are framing it, yes it's a misrepresentation. His interest in it seemed to mainly stem from his focus on public health (before his pivot to sexology) and saw it as a means to that end.
I'm not trying to cover for him, I'm just trying to summarize what's in the book. Eugenics is bad. That he saw validity in it is bad. It is not heavily mentioned in the book, just some brief mentions. If you ctrl+f in the pdf, there are only 7 instances of the word outside of the endnotes. The most revelant parts being,
But Hirschfeld was also implicated in discriminatory practices, most obviously in relation to eugenics. Despite his later work on racism, published posthumously in 1938, he was in favor of the efforts of racial hygienists and eugenicists because like many scientists and political activists around 1900 he believed that these sciences could improve the health of the nation. (page 8)
According to Hirschfeld the [1889-1892 influenza] pandemic had “put all the cultured nations into the enormous grip of the East,” a turn of phrase that reveals his debts to contemporary debates about the impact and feared contamination of (German) civilization through encounters with people from the borders of Europe or beyond, debates that gained momentum during the colonial expansion of the German Empire. Hirschfeld’s doctoral thesis [about the symptoms of influenza] at first glance seems only tenuously linked to the German colonial project, but it was clearly framed in relation to the imperial and scientific discourses that gathered in its wake. The influence of these debates can be traced to Hirschfeld’s later work. He openly supported eugenics, for example, if not for “racial refinement,” then as a way of improving health via selective reproduction,* and returned to questions about the acclimatization of colonizers to the weather and (perceived and real) endemic diseases of the tropical regions as late as the 1930s, when he speculated about the suitability of the bodies of “the white man” and “the white woman” to life in the tropics. (pages 18-19)
* Endnote to the previous passage,
The phrase is “das Naturprinzip der Rassenveredlung” in the original. See Hirschfeld, Naturgesetze der Liebe, 132. There has been some debate about whether the support of eugenics by sexual reformers such as Hirschfeld directly contributed to the emergence of Nazism. Rather than such reductive and somewhat far-fetched arguments about a one-way flow of influence from homosexual culture to Nazism, it is more accurate to point out that both sexual reformers and right-wing hatemongers were animated by the scientific positivism of the turn of the nineteenth century. See, e.g., Marhoefer’s excellent critique of the debates in Sex and the Weimar Republic, 137.
Bauer moreso focuses on the fact that Hirschfeld's career was initially built by working with German soldiers and that he was exposed to the horrors of German colonialism, and the horrors of colonialism in general through the extremely racist world fairs of the time, yet he chose not to comment on them. Hirschfeld and the Institute were unique, first of their kind pioneers that started the work on developing a way to medically transition, along with all the advocacy for queer and reproductive rights that they did in tandem with the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee, but they were very far from perfect. Hirschfeld was a cis white male doctor from Germany in the late 19th and early 20th century with all the expected baggage that would entail.
You know what's baffling about this take is that at least mask off nazis have a very easy consistent non mental gymnastics take on it: "yes, they burned trans literature and it was good that they did so." Fascinating, now face the wall. I don't know what kind of pretzeling this moronic take requires. In fact, not only did Magnus Hirschfield's institute research queerness and transness, they undertook the first gender confirmation surgery. The woman in question, Dora Richter, is presumed killed during the attack on the institute or in custody after it. All of this information is incredibly easy to verify.
She's probably operating under the assumption that trans people were invented in 2016.
I think the terf logic here is that it's slightly more socially acceptable to just erase trans people than to be outright on the side of nazis? Posy Parker doesn't seem to mind either way lol, but also the cultural awareness of queer people as holocaust victims still seems new and relatively small, so perhaps they see it as a defensible hill to die on.
I think JK Rowling is the type of transphobe that wants to pretend transness is new. Understanding that Nazis were burning books about trans people does more than put TERFs on the same side as nazis, it also means trans people have been here a lot longer than whatever it is she blames.
Oh yeah, erasing of the history is something that all queer people are subject to, because that history tells us that we've always been here and are perfectly natural to the world, which transphobes especially just cannot have.
she's reposted a thread someone very normal made about how Magnus was actually in cahoots with the nazis because he was such a eugenics fanboy, or something
Was he? It doesn’t justify anything either way, but I just don’t know if I should mad about her pretending to care about eugenics or mad about her making such a vile false accusation.
it absolutely doesn't excuse the fucking nazis, jk & co are trying to link trans ideology with eugenics, unethical experiments, seething about the children, it's just that same line about how she felt like she would have been transed today
it's disgusting
I said that I agree with that. I was asking if he was one or if they are lying and saying he was one. His foundational role in helping trans people obviously transcends whatever shitty opinions about genetics he might have had. I was asking if it was a lie or not.
The first chapter of Heike Bauer's The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture (available on libgen) addresses the problematic context Hirschfeld emerged from. The tl;dr almost to the point of distortion is that he was following the medical trends of the time, which included eugenics, but his conception of it doesn't seem to have been racialized. Bauer does explore the fact that he did come in contact with those kinds of ideas, though never commented on them in either way (publicly, at least).
So it’s a misrepresentation? Most doctors follow the trend in areas they aren’t specialized in and he took a mild(er) form of accepting the tread?
I’ll read that eventually (probably in a couple days, but not now). Thank you for providing a citation, I should read something about this guy regardless (given has influence and import).
The way the fascists are framing it, yes it's a misrepresentation. His interest in it seemed to mainly stem from his focus on public health (before his pivot to sexology) and saw it as a means to that end.
How would a comrade frame it? Feel free to tell me to just shut up until I read it btw. I realize the question might be answered by that.
I just don’t get how that decouples things and am curious. As in I don’t understand the difference between public health eugenics and other eugenics.
It’s all just eugenics at the end of the day.
I'm not trying to cover for him, I'm just trying to summarize what's in the book. Eugenics is bad. That he saw validity in it is bad. It is not heavily mentioned in the book, just some brief mentions. If you ctrl+f in the pdf, there are only 7 instances of the word outside of the endnotes. The most revelant parts being,
* Endnote to the previous passage,
Bauer moreso focuses on the fact that Hirschfeld's career was initially built by working with German soldiers and that he was exposed to the horrors of German colonialism, and the horrors of colonialism in general through the extremely racist world fairs of the time, yet he chose not to comment on them. Hirschfeld and the Institute were unique, first of their kind pioneers that started the work on developing a way to medically transition, along with all the advocacy for queer and reproductive rights that they did in tandem with the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee, but they were very far from perfect. Hirschfeld was a cis white male doctor from Germany in the late 19th and early 20th century with all the expected baggage that would entail.
Literally jk Rowling is very eggy
It's the same tactic transphobes use when they harp on about John Money and David Reimer.
Back then, there were unfortunately a lot of otherwise very smart people who were in favor of eugenics.
Riding the high of Darwin’s revelations and pushing too far?