Azarova

thats wild, holy shit

not queer and communist enough. andorians canonically have 4 genders!!! imagine how genderfucked you'd be after several lifetimes as a joined trill!! so many missed opportunities that are canon but never explored.

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.

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.

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).

Like axont said, the unfortunate reality is that the vast majority of these people are anonymous to the historical record. If you're interested in this history then I highly recommend Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity by Robert Beachy and The Hirschfield Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture by Heike Bauer, both of which are on libgen. The latter has a little bit about Dora Richter in chapter 4 under the heading A Space for Transgender, pages 86-87 in the hardcopy (not sure if the libgen version aligns with that or not). Another very interesting, albeit short, source on this kind of self-advocacy can be found in the account of an American doctor, William J. Robinson, who visited the Institute in 1925: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015011423632?urlappend=%3Bseq=397%3Bownerid=13510798887791650-401 (pages 391-396 if that didn't link properly). He inaccurately uses the term 'homosexual' for every queer person he talks about, but it's pretty easy to pick up on who's trans from what he descibes. His description of Hirschfeld and the Institute is absolutely glowing, he seemingly can't heap enough praise on the work they were doing. One of my favorite parts is how he laments that he would love to set up a similar institution in the US, but deems American society to be far too reactionary to allow it,

"The scope of the Institute is a much wider one, embracing as it does the entire field of sexology. It is an institution absolutely unique in the whole world. It is an institution of which I dreamed for many years and which I hoped to establish in the United States but which I felt would not thrive on account of our prudish, hypocritical attitude to all questions of sex. In such an institution one has to have a free hand; the advice given must be unhampered by any fear of violating some medieval law or of colliding with a stupidly childish, and for that reason all the more tyrannical public opinion. What can be done in barbarous Europe cannot always be done in ultra-civilized North America. [...] The United States could certainly use five or six such Institutes—say one in New York, one in Boston, one in Chicago, one in Atlanta, one in San Francisco. They would all have plenty of work to do, and less ignorance and consequently less misery in sex matters would be the result. When I get back to New York I may try to establish the first Institute of this kind in the United States—thus doing on a large scale what I have been doing on a small scale for a quarter of a century. And then again I may not: too much hard, nerve-wrecking work."

Anyway, a bit more on topic: his article ends with a very bittersweet sentiment that I think about all the time, "May the [Institute] be built on a permanent, never to be shaken foundation." Fuck this billionaire freak for denying this horrific tragedy that saw the loss of invaluable queer history and research, and set us back decades in medical development and understanding of queer people.

As much as I love the guy, what gets overlooked in popular understandings of the Institut für Sexualwissenchaft's work was that a great deal of it was the result of trans people coming in and advocating for themselves about what they wanted and the people at the institute working to find a solution. So in that sense, the creation of a somewhat primitive proto-gender affirming care regimine was done in direct collaboration with trans people, despite the fact that, like you say, a lot of cisgender men like Hirschfeld and Levy-Lenz got the credit for it.

Also, I had no idea we finally got a Hirschfeld emote, that rules

no, he's just actually this dumb

ITS BEEN FUCKING YEARS NOW, GET A NEW JOKE

I don't own an iron so I tried the shower trick a few times and it didn't do anything

I think those plastic-y flags are immune

Written evidence of trans people predates this sex pest cult by millennia and even predates the entirety of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition itself. Source: Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart: Poems of the Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna, which gets as explicit as "to turn man into woman / woman into man / are yours Inanna" and "priest to become woman / priestess to become man", among others such as a beautiful description of a ritualistic gender transition. The most maddening thing about all of this is that, like others have pointed out, the real "gender ideology" is the one that forbids these expressions that have been a part of humanity since at least the dawn of culture, which trans people are revolting against. Not only that, but this monsterous institution was at the forefront of eradicating similar expressions since their rise to power in Rome, in which they immediately went about murdering people like the Gallae, to say nothing of the countless cultures and non-western gender systems that were destroyed by them during colonialism.

game pill to give myself a toolgun from gmod so i can use that insanely insecure addon that allows you to spawn buttons that can run console commands, so that i can run commands in the console of the universe, becoming god