The War on Trans People: Part 5, How the Nazis Destroyed German Queerness

In part 5 the crew heads back in time to look at the development of the original gay rights movement in Germany and how it was destroyed by the Nazis.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Oh boy, welcome to America. The podcast. Wait is that?
Is that what we're calling it now? I don't think
that's true. We just had like two episodes on international
tourfs that think we are going to we're trying to
be a little beyond America. I fucked it up. I
fucked it up. Well that's the podcast. Goodbye, everybody. See

(00:29):
Usually at this point you say, Garrison take over. All right,
well let's let's get into this. What are we talking
about today? Who are we? Where are we? What is life?
Where it could happen? Here? Where is God? Final episode
of the war on transpeople? Which means when this episode,
when this episode is done, that means the war will
be over. We did it, everybody, and whatever God's wants were,
if long abandoned this place. We did get pretty good

(00:51):
news about the governor of Utah, kind of surprising me here.
Uh yeah, that just hit. It's nice. There's the there's that.
I mean. Luckily, look, some of some of the bills
that we've talked about actually have been shut down at
this point. The Wisconsin Wisconsin bill got shut got got
signed down surprisingly and in very very recently, like yeah,

(01:14):
the past few days. Yeah. Um, there's a looks like
there's still going to be injunctions on any investigations in
Texas until the case gets put up. Still very much
in the air. It's it's still in the courts, but
it's like it's it's trying. It's at least it's kind
of paused right now, and it's going to get settled
at some point in either the lawsuit or in the

(01:36):
higher courts. So we'll see, we'll see how that develops.
But for right now, seems some things seem to be
paused and some states are not are not fully passing it.
I know there was a walkout by Disney employees today
about over there don't say gay bill, and we're gonna
see if that's gonna get signed. Um. So, yeah, it's
still still up in the air, but we're gonna be

(01:57):
talking about something a little bit different, gonna do some
We're gonna do some time travel. Oh boy, that's that's
what I had to say. So we're going we're going
to go back to another time in which there was
a for a very brief period, a massive expansion in
the knowledge about and sort of but both knowledge about

(02:20):
and appearance of and safety of trans people and then
it all catatrophically came crashing down. Oh good. And to
help us with that is Robern Evidence my boss. Hi, everybody,
how are we doing, Garrison? How? How how are we doing? Oh?
I'm doing actually fine, I'm just I'm just waiting for

(02:40):
you to do your job and not passing over all. Right.
So the important thing to understand is that like the
kind of very concept of not just gay rights, but
like our our modern attitudes towards like what it means
to be homosexual and trans all have their origins in
Germany in the not not just in the post war period,

(03:03):
but really the last couple of decades of the Kaiser
and the Weimar Republic. Like that is where kind of
the modern Western attitudes towards what it like is to
be homosexual really get formed, because obviously, like gay people
have existed for forever, there's quite a bit of documentation,
but if you look at like, for example, you know,

(03:25):
two spirit folks within some indigenous American cultures, that's a
very different attitude towards um, like what like trans people,
I suppose the Western exactly. Yeah, so this is like
they're there's Western quote unquote you know whatever. Yeah, there's
the actual thing that's going on, and like the the
individual sexuality, and then there's kind of the the public

(03:45):
concept of what it is um and and that is
really forming. In Probably the seminal moment that kind of
starts this progress is in August sixty seven, when a
lawyer named Karl Heinrich Riks go before the sixth Congress
of German Jurists in munich Um to urge them to
repeal laws forbidding sex between men. So again there is

(04:08):
still a kaiser and like this is this is before
Germany is actually fully a nation, right because eighteen seventies
when that happens, so Germany doesn't even really exist at
this point. There's a series of like kings kind of
being welded together slowly into a German state. And there
is a lawyer getting up in front of like the
council of different German jurists to urge an end to

(04:31):
the laws that make it illegal for for men to
have sex with each other. And one thing that's important
to notice that obviously there are lesbians in this period
of time, as again there have been throughout all of history.
That's not really a legal problem, right, They do not
face really legal repression and and I mean not to
say that like there's not repression and things that they're
dealing with, but it's not the same as as it

(04:51):
is for like men who want to be in relationships
with men. That's it's in fact a lot easier for
women to be kind of like and this is not
just Germany to be built to like kind of say
like we lived together, right, like we're on and we
live together like where. Yeah, that that because in part
because men, just like I think a lot of like
the men in this period just assume it's impossible like

(05:13):
that women would do that or or the other side
of it is like femininity is always presentuary, it's always
like it's un as soon as the beauty symbol. So
it makes more sense for women to find other women
attractive because that's what beauty is is when is performative femininity,
So like that's like way more obvious and it doesn't
make sense for but and it makes less sense for

(05:33):
men to find other men attractive, and that's way more
taboo because of the way that messages with like patriarchy. Um,
so yeah, I think there could be a like gender
studies and sexuality studies can have a lot of theorizings
for how this is developed. But yeah, this this idea
you can even see in like Victorian era and like
run Us on Sarah of yeah, women who lived together
and are very good friends, very very very close friends.

(05:56):
I hope people don't feel like I'm trying to like
flatten the history of like the concept of being a
lesbian in the West, to to that at all, or
trying to for that matter, flattened like homosexuality between men.
But I am kind of making the point, and I
am not the person who are kind of initially made
this point. The scholarly work that I'm kind of basing

(06:17):
my research on this on largely right now, and we're
going to do an episode behind the Bastards that gets
in two more of this, I think in the near future.
But it's a called Gay Berlin by Robert baccy Um
and in in the book, one of the things that
Beach argues is that even though obviously same sex love
is as old as the existence of quite a bit
older actually than the existence of human beings, um, the

(06:39):
public discourse around it, and like the political attempt to
win rights for gay people starts in Germany in the
late eighteen hundreds, and it starts in this conference in
eighteen sixty seven. Um And and the guy who does
this rix is a number one, is a gay man.
Um And he had he had been open kind of
to his relatives. He had started in the period before

(07:01):
he gets up in front of all these lawyers to
be open with like his family members that he was homosexual.
Um but he had never like, he was not publicly out.
And so on the same day that he appeals for
a change in the legal code to make homosexuality legal
in the German States is the day he comes out
publicly as a gay man. Like. He does both of
these things at the same time. And I want to

(07:24):
from a New york Yeah, it's quite a moment. Um.
I want to read a quote from a New Yorker
article that's covering all of this, and that's based again
on the book Gay Berlin quote. He faced an audience
of more than five hundred distinguished legal figures, and as
he walked to the lectern, he felt a pang of fear.
There was still time to keep silent, he later remembered

(07:45):
telling himself, then there will be an end to all
your heart pounding but Ulrix, who had earlier disclosed the
same sex desires and letters to relatives, did not stop.
He told the assembly that people with a sexual nature
opposed to common custom were being persecuted for impule is
that nature, mysteriously governing and creating, had implanted in them.
Pandemonium erupted and Rix was forced to cut short his remarks.

(08:08):
Still he had an effect. A few liberal minded colleagues
accepted his notion of an innate gay identity, and a
Bavarian official privately confessed to similar yearnings and a pamphlet
titled Gladyus Furans or Raging sword or Rix wrote, I
am proud that I found the strength to thrust the
first lance into the flank of the hydra of public.

(08:29):
It feel like that sometimes but incredibly based. Wow, what
if there's a heaven? I hope this dude made it there,
because one absolute unbelievable. So no, but like what it like, like, yeah,
the astonished, Like the astounding bravery that that takes. Um

(08:50):
And he's essentially the first gay activist in a modern
Western political context. Um, And it's interesting, like uh, within
kind of the the next couple of years, things start
to happen very quickly. Two years later in eighteen sixty nine,
uh and Austrian an Austrian writer I know right named
Carl Kurt Benny um, who is kind of fighting sodomy

(09:12):
laws and and and sodomy laws are laws that make
everything that's not like missionary position sexily targeted towards towards
gay men primarily. Um. So Carl Kurt Benny create like
he's the guy who invinced the term homosexuality, like like
two years after this is part of his like fight
against these anti sodomy laws. Um. The eighteen eighties of

(09:35):
Berlin police commissioner makes the decision to stop prosecuting gay bars. Um.
And in fact, not only does he stop doing this,
but he starts leading tours of the gay districts in
Berlin just to like show off, like look at how
it's kind of wow, what a weird picture of putting

(09:55):
your head at least even like yeah, especially copy and
like why are we arresting these people? Let's show this off?
Yeah yeah. So in eighteen nineties six, the very first
gay magazine starts publishing in Germany in Berlin. Really do
you want to know what it's called? Of course? Why
of course, the German name is derrk eigen h and

(10:18):
that means the self owning. That's great, it's pretty it's
pretty cool. Um. So the very next year, eighteen nineties seven,
one of the primary heroes of the early gay rights struggle,
physician Magnus Hirschfeld uh starts the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, which
is the first organized gay rights group in Western history

(10:40):
at least. Um So, by the start of the twentieth century,
a lot of stuff is in place, right And I
think I'm even have been a little bit guilty of
this in the past, of kind of focusing so much
on Weimar Germany, um and all of the stuff that
happens around game by rights there, and how progressive it was.
This is building in Germany. Again, we don't consider the
Kais or Reich as a particularly progressive place, but all

(11:03):
of this is happening under the Kaisers. And there's there's
so many things that are happening in the eighteen nineties
and the start of the nineteen hundreds that directly mirror
things that are happening in the United States in the
nineteen eighties. In fact, right as the century turns, um
you start getting an advocate one of the first gay
rights advocates in gay literature uses the phrase coins the

(11:24):
phrase staying silent is death to like talk about the
importance of gay literary, which is essentially the same slogan,
the same stuff we're talking about right now with all
of like the with with all the book bandings taking
you know, doing a massive sweep of that the past
the past few years. Yeah, this is nineteen hundred, like

(11:47):
basically that this is starting. Um, so yeah, and there's
you know, there's even there's a lot of um. Activists
start to complain and to try to complain both within
like their own magazines and within like more public magazines
about things like negative depictions of gay people in popular novels.

(12:08):
They start to be the first arguments about whether or
not it's morally right to out people who are gay
but who are attached to anti gay organizations, because that
starts happening absolutely, Um, it's it's sucking wild howld off.
This is nothing new or than the sun. Yeah, but like,
but this is also like the first time it happened
in these types of countries, in these societies. Yeah, yea,

(12:31):
but it is that is so yes, times of flat circle.
But this is also like the first time it's happened,
and it's just kind of been rehappening ever since. Then.
It's important to note I didn't I didn't covers. When

(12:51):
we start talking about Rix, well, there's a lot of
people who get angry, and obviously Rix is not successful
in repealing the anti homosexuality laws. Um when he makes
his speech. In addition to the people who are like
yelling at him to sit down, there are like German
deputies yelling no, no, no, let him continue, let him continue,
like he needs to be allowed to talk. Um. So
even like in this period of time, there are non

(13:13):
gay people at a fairly high level in German politics
who are like vocal allies and starting to become vocal allies.
You know. Um, yeah, it's it's it's pretty fascinating. So um. Obviously,
World World War One happens, um doesn't go great for Germany,
but you know, we we get after that. The Vimar

(13:35):
Republic and the Viimar Republic is kind of the traditional
era in which we talk a lot about, you know,
gay rights starting to really move forward in significant ways.
And uh so there's a lot of um, even kind
of into the early nineteen thirties, some pretty interesting things
that are happening in German society and like the mainstream
elements of it. There's a film called ma Chin in
Uniform in nineteen thirty one, which is the first like

(13:58):
positive portrayal of lesbians in Western cinema. Um. Like thirty
one is like again we're talking like right before uh
Z the nazis kind of kind of come around. Um.
And yeah, there's these like this this this police commissioner
that we chatted about earlier. I think it's one of
the people who's most interesting to me. We're gonna get

(14:19):
to Hirshfeld a bit in in a little bit, but
this this guy is named Leopold von Muerscheite Wholsheim. Um,
I'm not going to get that right. But he's a
big part of when we talk about gay Berlin, particularly
during the Weimar years. Even though he's like during what
while the Kaiser's in, He's why gay Berlin really happens
in a lot of ways. Um. And it's in part

(14:40):
because like he decides to stop cracking down on on
gay people. Um. And like he's not gay, although his
boss is, which is part of like what makes it easier. Um.
For him to do this, and there's like a lot
of debate about why he does this because he's not
like a gay rights activist. Some people say that it's
because is um he's worried that like gay people will

(15:02):
become politically radicalized by the Reds and so if you
stop cracking down on them, they won't go communists like that.
There's a lot of like debate about like why he
does this. Um. He's also there's a number of things
that he like, he takes a lot of data on
on gay people in Berlin, and he does this on everybody.
He's a big data guy. So it's not particularly uh

(15:23):
um harmful in his era, but it's some of the
stuff that he gathers will be used by the Nazis
later um, which is kind of a broader thing about
like the wisdom of not letting the government get access
to this like he has he founds a department of
Homosexuals in eighteen eighty five that like lists the people
that they know are gay, and and again like this
is all so it's really a complicated thing that's that's

(15:45):
happening here because he's not he's not this like thoroughly
sympathetic figure. He's doing a lot of stuff that's that's
weird and that will later have negative outcomes. But he's
also by ending police persecution of gay people, um, at
least in an organized way, really allowing gay culture to
to blossom um in Berlin. Uh. And it's it's it's yeah.

(16:08):
I'm gonna read another quote from that New Yorker article here.
For whatever reason, Mr scheid Holsenheim took a fairly benevolent
attitude towards Berlin's same sex bars and dance halls, at
least in the better healed parts of the city. He
was on cordial terms with many regulars, and none other
than Odious Strindberg testified in his autobiographical novel The Cloister,
which evokes the same sex costume ball at the Cafe Nationale.

(16:30):
And this is a the police inspector and his guests
had seated themselves at a table in the center of
one end of the room, close to which all the
couples had to pass. The inspector called them by their
Christian names, and some and some of the most interesting
among them to his table. So he's kind of like
going on safari like among the gay people in Berlin.
Like there's a lot of weird. It's it's weird in

(16:51):
a lot of way. Um, But he's also one of
the things he does is he provides police help to
gay people who are being blackmailed and like threatened withouting, um.
And he'll even like counsel them on how to handle it,
Like he provides like counselors and stuff. And he does
this in part because like he's worried about, um, them
committing suicide because they're being blackmailed, which is like a

(17:13):
real problem in Germany in a bunch of other places. Um. Yeah,
and this guy, like why this police commissioner winds up
killing himself kind of in the early nineteen hundreds, I
think because he wound up getting found to be taken
bribes from some millionaire who gets in a lot of
legal trouble for raping somebody. So again, he is a
sketchy dude, but he's also like because he's he's got

(17:35):
this weird almost like voyeuristic fascination with gay people, um,
and some legitimate because there are legitimate humanitarian concerns. He's
really worried about people committing suicide as a result of blackmail.
So he's one of these figures we don't talk about
enough in history where it's like the overall outcome of
this guy's at work is pretty positive, but he does

(17:55):
it for this like really confusing mix of reasons. He's
just a very strange figure in history. Well, I think
it's interesting looking at him, like like comparing him to
like if you look at like what the US is
doing in the fifties, right where there's this whole thing
about like gay people are getting are gonna get are
getting blackmailed, and the you know, the the US, the
entire U S Security state loses his mind and becomes

(18:16):
convinced that like these people are all going to become
Soviet agents and you know, and instead of like doing
counseling that there's the thing that they do is they
they do the Lavender Scare and they start purging every
gay person they can find from the entire US government.
And it's like, no, it's it's it's interesting that like, yeah,
this is this is a guy in like late eighteen hundreds,

(18:37):
early nineteen hundreds like like literally ruled Bay Monarch Berlin,
and his policies are enormously better than like anything you're
going to see for like half a century. He's he
is way more woke on on this than like any
New York police officer for a century today, upped up

(18:58):
to the present day. In a lot of way, it's like, yeah,
so let's talk about Magnus Hirschfeld a bit. Um. Hirshfield
is very influenced by Ulrich, the guy we started the
story with. His first like publication on the matter is
called Sappho and Socrates and eight nineties six, which is
again it's a story of a gay man who gets
coerced into marriage. So this like uh, and who commits

(19:20):
suicide as a result. So there's like a big with
both um, you know, his police commissioner, with Hirshfeld, with
a lot of people who are becoming activists in this period.
A big part of why is, for one reason another
the suicide rate among gay people, um, which is a
huge problem today for for trans people in particular. And
this is what it's interesting, like that that Utah governor

(19:41):
you know, made the announcement today that like he's vetoing
this trans sports ban in Utah, and he specifically cites
like the suicide rate among trans people is so like
high and it he could not morally conscience doing anything
that would like make these kids feel othered and likelier
to commit suicide. I mean, okay, well let's let's let's

(20:02):
let's not go that far. He he he was, he
was willing, He was willing to do the commissions. She
just wasn't willing to do a full band. Yeah, I'm
just saying the the justification he gets for what he's
doing is like, um, is the rate of suicide attempts
among trans people. Um. Not to like whitewash that guy
or utah. Like again, we've been doing this whole week's episodes,
but it's interesting that you get um again, It's just

(20:23):
kind of like the the issue for a long time
has been that when you like other people and make
it dangerous for them to be who they are openly,
they will kill themselves. Um, a lot of them will.
And that's that's a thing that is even by very
problematic people in Germany in the eighteen nineties, folks recognize that,
like this is a huge issue. UM. So yeah, Hirschfeld

(20:47):
um starts this first organization that's like gay rights organization. Um.
And he also is doing like a huge amount of
of research. Um. He is fall again, he's following in
l Rick's footsteps, he too believes that that homosexuality is congenital, right,
it's something you're born with, as opposed to like a
choice people make because of Dvans or whatever, which is

(21:09):
still the big fight that we're having to this day.
And he's also like, it's hard to there's a lot
that like you can criticize about Hirschfeld scientifically and a
lot of the research he does, among other things, there's
like difficulty with like control groups and actually like being
the kind of scientific sort of detachment that is necessary
to study that. There's like critiques of his of his

(21:31):
research that are valid, But one of the he's he's
really like, it's wild how far ahead of the curvey
is because one of the things that Hirschfeld introduces is
the idea that sexuality is a spectrum um where there's
what he calls sexual intermediaries between male and female. Um.
He doesn't believe that like those are even particularly useful
terms that sexuality kind of like it it again, that

(21:53):
it's a spectrum, which is this thing that we are
just now really starting to have good wider, kind of
ranging conversations about today. Um Dan Hirschfeld is very much
like kind of utopian and his belief that if you
can scientifically study and understand where homose, like what homosexuality is,

(22:14):
and that it is an innate characteristic, that people will
stop being bigoted against gay folks right like his his
belief is that science will end prejudice, um, just because
the German people are so scientific and like they'll have
to accept this if I could just like prove it
with enough rigor, which is heartbreaking, heartbreaking that he was
very very wrong. Um, And yeah, there's a number of

(22:38):
things that are like really worth kind of within sort
of the because he's not he's kind of come down
now as this sort of um like saint like hero
of the gay rights movement for good reason. But that
does tend to flatten the fact that within his his
day and within kind of the gay culture in Berlin
in particular, there were a lot of people who were
frustrated with him for a lot of reasons. Um, there

(23:00):
were a lot of So there's this there's this split
in gay culture in this period of time between um,
gay men who are seen as more effeminate and what
are called the masculinists, um and the masculinists they are
not all or even mostly Nazis, but all of the
gay Nazis are what you'd call masculinists, right, who are

(23:22):
like I'm not having like like like I am so
manly that the only person I can have sex with
as a man, right, Like that I'm flattening even that
quite a bit. But like you have guys like um
Ernst Rome, who is the head of the Brownie Shirts
and is is a is a gay Nazi and is
like that's that's a significant, not an insignificant chunk of
the Nazis. They will get murdered in the Night of

(23:43):
Long Knives. And it is interesting that that Rome was
outed by anti fascists. Yeah, he sure, like two years
before he was murdered, and it was it was, it
was he was specifically outed to so division within the
Nazi party. Yes, and that does like also just playing it,
you know, you're you're you're talking about like, you know,
people having debate over whether it's okay to out somebody,

(24:05):
um if they you know, are part of that organization's right.
That was something we mentioned previously and yeah, just like
an interesting historical tidbit. Yeah, and it's it's um so
uh again among like one of the things that the
masculinists are doing is like a lot of them are
married to women, and they're they're actually fine with this
because again they think that like, well, you still need

(24:26):
to like procreate and have Like no, it's not even
all just about being having like a beard or whatever
you wanna call it. Some of it is just like
this attitude that you have a responsibility to make more
Germans for the fatherland. But like then when it comes
to it's kind of like the Greeks, they were not
wildly dissimilar concepts, and a lot of the masculinists ideologically
are wrapped up in the work of Max S. Turner

(24:48):
Um and in fact, like the Self Owners that first
gay magazine that was I was like, oh, that sounds
like Start's egoism. Yeah, yes, yeah, there's a lot of
that going and we we we again. I went to
at some point provide a lot more detail on this
because it's it's all fascinating, um. But there there are
these big sort of like this big split, and there's

(25:09):
he gets a lot of ship from the masculinists for
because he also studies lesbians heavily, Like there's a decent
chunk of the gay male population in Berlin who's against
the research in the medical practice he's doing to help
trans people, who was against his research on lesbians because
they're like, well, this is this is the fight, right,
Like we're the ones who were being legally cracked down
on or whatever like. Um. So there's a bunch of

(25:30):
like different cleavages and fractures kind of within the community
at this time in Hirschfeld is not universally beloved and
there are people kind of within the gay community who
have a lot of issues with him. Um And I
just think it's important to note that because we often
do again kind of flattened things, because the Nazis flattened things, right,
because these were all it was all the same to them,

(25:51):
um and and we often flatten them in a different
way to where like, yeah, you've got this guy and
he's the he's the hero of the of the of
gay ber Lynd and he's this like thoroughly positive. No,
there were a lot of people who hated him for
like all these different reasons because this was uh, these
like all people had a million different kind of fractures
and ideologies sort of running within Um what what someone

(26:14):
who was not looking in from the outside, would have
just called gay Berlin, you know. Um. And yeah, obviously
this all falls apart or is is cracked down horribly
when the Nazis come to power. Um, Hirshfeldt is doing
a lot of some of them, I mean, all of
the very earliest research on like what it is to
be transgender, and he is performing surgery on like gender

(26:37):
operations on on trans people for the very first time. Um.
And and that gets all kind of destroyed in in
May of nineteen thirty three, which is about three months
after Hitler becomes Reich's chancellor. Uh, Nazis sack hirshfeldt Institute
for Sexual Science. They burn its library. Um, they go
after a lot of of of his of the people

(27:00):
he had been working with an on are killed, others
have to flee. Um. Hirschfeld is thankfully out of the
country on tour when the Nazis rise to power and
just you know, doesn't come back. Um he sees he
watches his institute get burned and all of his his
research get burned, and a newsreel in Paris. Uh and
he dies the next year. Um. Yeah, So that's the

(27:25):
that's the the broad details of kind of the story
of this early period, um of of the birth of
kind of like a lot of our our legal fights
around you know, gay rights, and like the birth of
kind of Western gay identity, like this is where it
comes from. And and uh yeahum, there's a lot that's

(27:46):
important and understanding this. And this is one of the
points that gets made in Gaberlin. We often see the
Weimar years is this kind of inevitable march towards fascism,
And the reality is that there was fifth something years
of of incredibly progressive movements on on gender and sexuality. Um.

(28:07):
And you know, even outside of gay rights, just in
terms of like attitudes towards democracy and attitudes towards the
nature of like the state, that we're very progressive and
very powerful and very popular. Um. And they do get
you know, it's important to understand both that like the
Nazism was not inevitable, the regressivism and the violence and
the the the like, that kind of flattening of human

(28:31):
life under the fascists was not an inevitable progression for Germany. Um.
But it's equally important to understand that like a tremendous
so much progress had been made in German culture by
the period of time when the Nazis rise and it
does get wiped out, you know, it does not recover
right away. It's still recovering now still um. And in fact,

(28:52):
one of the groups of people when when the Allies
liberate the concentration camps, we don't free imprisoned people. They
go back to prison because what they were doing was
still seen as criminal. If you have the is the
pink triangle, you don't just get out because the Nazis
because you were in a concentration gap with these other people,

(29:13):
because the alleys to a large extenter like well that
was it was okay for them to punish those people. Anyway.
That's the story. And another interesting thing is like kind
of on the same note, is that if you look

(29:35):
through all old German war photography from World War Two,
you will actually see a higher than average rate of
men cross dressing inside photos. Now, there's always cross dressing
during war is not uncommon, especially during performances for like
theater and stuff, um, because there's not as much women around.

(29:57):
But specifically comparing like the documentation and of the Nazis
and all of all of the German soldiers, there was
like yeah, absolutely higher than average amount of of people
comfortable cross dressing, despite you know, being a soldier for
the Nazis. Uh it is. And it's like, yeah, it's
an interesting thing in terms of how how some of

(30:18):
those kind of more advanced us and sexuality still carried over,
um at least like in terms of like gender presentation
among you know, even even if you fear among this
genocidal group who's imprisoning gay people by the hundreds of thousands. Um,
it's it just it just it just it just it
just like kept happening. Yeah. It also sort of points

(30:40):
to just like how bad everywhere else was also. Yeah,
like it's yeah, Berlin just got so progressive that even
when suppressed, there was enough like stuff there that things
could kind of there was there was still there was

(31:01):
still a bit there's still a bit of some remnants. Um.
And I mean and it still it got it did
get horribly obliterated, and and we're still recovering now in
terms of our views and medical knowledge on like gender
and you know, social contructs, um, susuality, you know, all
all this kind of stuff. Um. But yeah, the German
law code that made homosexuality illegal, Um, again after it

(31:25):
was briefly more okay than it had been. Doesn't get
repealed until Yeah. I mean a lot of a lot
of sodomy laws do not get repealed until the nineties,
and a lot of cases they're actually still around, we
just don't enforce them, like a lot of this a
lot of laws that are actually just still just hanging out.

(31:45):
Texas had anti sodomy laws on the book until a
two thousand three Supreme Court case invalidated all sodomy laws. Right,
That's that's why there's something They're still in the books,
but they but they're now invalid. Yeah, esecute people. Um
yeah yeah. Feld was pretty based though, so it was

(32:07):
fucking rix some pretty based this really interesting stuff. And
then that's why we wanted to talk about this is
to kind of show the historical background and show like
there's a precedent for all of the same stuff happening before. Um,
and you know, there's ways people have fought fought against
it back then who didn't necessarily succeed, but also did
have a lot of progression in a lot of like

(32:29):
views socially on these types of topics. You know, you
just need to make sure that you're also very very
aware of of the rise of fascism and being also
counter that as well, because they can just do so
much damage in such a shorthort amount of time, despite
you know, fifty years of progress. Yeah. Yeah, and I
think I think understanding the fragility of everything that exists

(32:53):
that I don't know. I mean that there's this is
you know, one of one of the sort of American mythosis, right,
is that like the moral arc of the unit firs
bence towards progress, then everything is getting better. And that's
not true. Nope, it's not like every every everything good
that you see in this world is there because people
fought for it was, Yeah, and if they lose it
all goes away. Yeah yeah, we we we absolutely could

(33:17):
go back. It's like you have that I mean, he
back pedaled, but you have that Republican uh legislator who
was like, um, making comments about how he didn't think
the state should be forced to honor interracial marriages. Um.
And it's like, yeah, there's people who want to go
back on all of that stuff, and they could do it.

(33:37):
It doesn't even and it doesn't matter. I like when
people criticize kind of like some of the the attitudes
we have, the fear we have towards this, Especially on
on the subreddit, I've seen people be like, well, look,
these are not popular laws, and it doesn't matter. They
weren't they were, they weren't as popular. They weren't like
necessarily all that popular in in in Germany, you know

(33:58):
when someone like a lot of the thing not specifically
even talking about what was done to gay people, but
a lot of the things that were done by the
Nazis were not necessarily popular. It doesn't matter. What matters
is power, And this like plays into how like what's
is worth focusing on on electoralism and being like, yeah,
these laws obviously aren't being uh pushed as far in

(34:19):
blue states because there's not enough electoral power there. But
that doesn't mean that we can flip Texas blue if
we will. It into being like, there's so many other
cultural factors that are keeping red states red, and yes,
of course, ability suppression, all of those things, gerry mandering,
all these things are contributing factors. But the overall political

(34:39):
bent of those states right now seems to be pretty
firm because there's so many people invested in maintaining that power.
So when we complain about kind of how electoralism is
not often a super reliable solution to securing these things
over the long stretches of time. It's more kind of
talking about that because even though we have you know,
democrats and power in the executive ranch, and they you know,

(35:01):
make statements about trying to secure things, they make, they
make some gestures, they follow through, and those things is
always so minimum and so bare um, and there's it's
like it's it's it's the thing that like Trump was
able to do so much um and now we have
Biden so less willing to use executive powers. Is the

(35:24):
same thing that like like with with with Obama and
the Supreme Court, when the Senate would refuse to put
through any any candidates, Obama technically had the power could
because the Senate refused to do to do their job.
There is a very strock argument that Obama could just
put someone into the Supreme Court because of the failure
of what the Senate was doing was specifically doing a
thing that meant because they were not doing the job

(35:47):
at all, that he can't get he can't get fully
put through and we so we could have that could
have happened and Obama just didn't because you know, you
want to play, You want to be the good guy,
like you want to be the person who follows the rules.
But the other side doesn't care about that. They're not
playing a genuine game. They're not following the rules. They're
doing whatever they can to win. So this this isn't

(36:07):
about being plugged into lefty Twitter. I get almost I
get almost none of my takes from lefty Twitter. I
get them from like reading, reading stuff and thinking about
how electoralism affects all of these issues and where to
focus my attention because no matter what I say or
what I do, that's not going to affect whether Texas
is blew a red. Yeah, and there's this I think

(36:28):
like one of the things that is an argument against Obama,
you know, intervening in that way is like, well, that
would have created precedent that would have like further centralized
executive power and could have been used by their refused
to do their job. Yeah, but you know, I mean,
look at what we got, Look at the Supreme Court
that we have, which now has a six to three
bent conservatively. No, there was just another fucking shadow ruling

(36:51):
today that was about jerrymandering and god I Wisconsin. Um,
one second, I'll look it up. But yeah, like you're
you're getting like we're we're already living through that scenario. Um.
And it's like like in this I meantime terms of
centraliation to power, like Obama claimed the legal authority to

(37:12):
kill any man, woman, or child, regardless of their citizenship
as as a US citizen, without trial the moment they
left the United States, Like that that is that is
the that is the authority that he claimed, like when
you know, in order to introder to run the drone
assassination program. And it's yeah, so like at that point,
like yeah, okay, we we we literally have a person

(37:32):
who can go I'm going to press a button and
kill you, like like we might centralize me. Probably, it's
just I mean, it's it's not even a centralization because
it was specifically within the context of the Senate not
doing their job. Um. And it kind of all places
into like it seems like Democrats are more politically successful
when they're losing, Like it seems like they want the

(37:52):
other side to be in power because that's when they
actually do things politically than when they have power. They're
just so scared to use it that they don't even
do anything to really people that much. And and I
mean this is the other thing is that like, yeah,
the Democrats like like most of the their actual constitute,
like they have they have two constituencies, right, they have
like you know, they have the people they're passing tax

(38:13):
breaks for, and then they have a bunch of they
have a bunch of consultants. And the consultants like the
thing that they care about is campaign donations, right, because
that's how they get paid. And yeah, hey, guess what
happens when you're in power. Oh, people don't give you
any people don't give you much money. That this is
this is this is a problem to progran into in
the eighties. They get more power when they're they get

(38:34):
more money when they're not in power because then they're
trying to organize to get in power. But then once
they're in there, it's like, oh, wow, you're not really
using the same power capabilities that the other side does
when they're in charge, and they're all willing to play
dirty politically, and we and for some reason that Democrats
are not that kind of like they don't like this
something like they don't actually care about any of this stuff. Right,

(38:55):
The stuff is useful for them in terms of fundraising, right,
but it's like, yeah, I don't know, like they they
don't like if if every trans person in the United
States was killed, right, the Democrats would be sad for
a little bit, and then they wouldn't move on. Like
it's not that's that's that's not a thing that if
you're in a hard blue state, we know, what's more
important than actually voting for supportive like this kind of

(39:16):
stuff is actually just giving trans people money like that
is going to have much more of a positive political effect.
Is just give trans people money. Whenever you see a
go fund me for a trans person, donate to that instead.
That's gonna have a much more uh lasting effect than
voting if you're in you know, New York or if
you're in Oregon, right, because like that those states are
they're they're gonna be blue. That's always gonna happen, um.

(39:40):
But other states like uh like I Texas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Alabama,
like these are gonna be red states like there's and
as much as we would be nice if yeah, if
Democratic senators and and people in the House were in
there instead, then yeah, these trans pips probably wouldn't be
happening as much, but that's not gonna happen. So if

(40:02):
that's not going to happen, we should focus on other
ways to do that politically. And yeah, sure fixing jerymandering
will be great, but I don't think you need me
to tell you that anyway. We should Probably that's that's
probably more or less aisode that is as I will
I will, I will plug next week if similar similar
on a similar train for for kind of talking about

(40:24):
queerness and fascism um, which yeah, we are. We are
planning it to a two parter, which is a pretty
going to be extensive deep dive into explaining the curious
case of Nazi catboys and grisons, Garrison says. We as
if any of the rest of us had any choice
in this, Garrison Garrison forced this on us through violence. Yes,

(40:46):
but yes, we will be talking about this, which kind
of touch us on some similar topics in terms of
like gender and sexuality and how it intersects with politics
and how there can be you know, seemingly contradictory claims
that you know, game Nazis and all that kind of stuff.
So similar, similar train will be kind of discussing that
and how that works. Um. But yeah, this is a

(41:08):
end of trends week. Honestly at this point that's we're ending.
As we're ending it. I'm kind of more optimistic than
I what than I than I was when we started
trans weak um, in terms of like watching kind of
how some some of these bills have played out, how
some of them were not We're not fully carried through. Um,
there is protests and stuff being organized. I know for March.

(41:29):
I believe it's March thirty one, which is a trans
Day of Visibility. There's gonna be protests in a lot
of conservative states. Um, I know there's gonna be let
me let me actually let me check because I know
there's there's gonna be there's gonna be multiple, multiple things happening,
and I will I'm gonna be trying to I'm gonna
try to be in Idaho next next week for that

(41:50):
because there's going to be a protest in Boisy, which
I think Boise, Idaho, that's the place. But there's gonna
be Yeah, there's gonna to be events in Austin, Tallahassee, Montgomery. Um,
so yeah, I will look up tear it Up dot
org for events. For info on all of the events

(42:13):
at different at different in different states. For for trans
Day of Visibility March March one, and Yeah, be gay,
do crime, Yeah, throw bricks at transphobs, Yeah, all that stuff.

(42:34):
It could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
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