Anonymous asked: Rowling isn't denying holocaust. She just pointed out that burning of transgender health books is a lie as that form of cosmetic surgery didn't exist. But of course you knew that already, didn't you? |
I was thinking I’d probably see one of you! You’re wrong :) Let’s review the history a bit, shall we?
In this case, what we’re talking about is the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, or in English, The Institute of Sexology. This Institute was founded and headed by a gay Jewish sexologist named Magnus Hirschfeld. It was founded in July of 1919 as the first sexology research clinic in the world, and was run as a private, non-profit clinic. Hirschfeld and the researchers who worked there would give out consultations, medical advice, and even treatments for free to their poorer clientele, as well as give thousands of lectures and build a unique library full of books on gender, sexuality, and eroticism. Of course, being a gay man, Hirschfeld focused a lot on the gay community and proving that homosexuality was natural and could not be “cured”.
Hirschfeld was unique in his time because he believed that nobody’s gender was either one or the other. Rather, he contended that everyone is a mixture of both male and female, with every individual having their own unique mix of traits.
This leads into the Institute’s work with transgender patients. Hirschfeld was actually the one to coin the term “transsexual” in 1923, though this word didn’t become popular phrasing until 30 years later when Harry Benjamin began expanding his research (I’ll just be shortening it to trans for this brief overview.) For the Institute, their revolutionary work with gay men eventually began to attract other members of the LGBTA+, including of course trans people.
Contrary to what Anon says, sex reassignment surgery was first tested in 1912. It’d already being used on humans throughout Europe during the 1920’s by the time a doctor at the Institute named Ludwig Levy-Lenz began performing it on patients in 1931. Hirschfeld was at first opposed, but he came around quickly because it lowered the rate of suicide among their trans patients. Not only was reassignment performed at the Institute, but both facial feminization and facial masculization surgery were also done.
The Institute employed some of these patients, gave them therapy to help with other issues, even gave some of the mentioned surgeries for free to this who could not afford it! They spoke out on their behalf to the public, even getting Berlin police to help them create “transvestite passes” to allow people to dress however they wanted without the threat of being arrested. They worked together to fight the law, including trying to strike down Paragraph 175, which made it illegal to be homosexual. The picture below is from their holiday party, Magnus Hirschfeld being the gentleman on the right with the fabulous mustache. Many of the other people in this photo are transgender.
There was always push back against the Institute, especially from conservatives who saw all of this as a bad thing. But conservatism can’t stop progress without destroying it. They weren’t willing to go that far for a good while. It all ended in March of 1933, when a new Chancellor was elected. The Nazis did not like homosexuals for several reasons. Chief among them, we break the boundaries of “normal” society. Shortly after the election, on May 6th, the book burnings began. The Jewish, gay, and obviously liberal Magnus Hirschfeld and his library of boundary-breaking literature was one of the very first targets. Thankfully, Hirschfeld was spared by virtue of being in Paris at the time (he would die in 1935, before the Nazis were able to invade France). His library wasn’t so lucky.
This famous picture of the book burnings was taken after the Institute of Sexology had been raided. That’s their books. Literature on so much about sexuality, eroticism, and gender, yes including their new work on trans people. This is the trans community’s Alexandria. We’re incredibly lucky that enough of it survived for Harry Benjamin and everyone who came after him was able to build on the Institute’s work.
As the Holocaust went on, the homosexuals of Germany became a targeted group. This did include transgender people, no matter what you say. To deny this reality is Holocaust denial. JK Rowling and everyone else who tries to pretend like this isn’t reality is participating in that evil. You’re agreeing with the Nazis.
But of course, you knew that already, didn’t you?
in one of those phases of crippling existential self-doubt where the nervous horse that controls my productivity is just lying down in the mud and won’t get up. the horse is asking questions like do I deserve carrot for big jump if big jump meaningless and is it wrong to be a horse. I’m trying to goad it with compliments and treats but so far the horse won’t bite, it’s too busy ruminating about the cosmic value of horses
we’re telling the horse you can make the jump, you’re such a special horse for being able to do the big jump, everybody loves it when they get to watch a big jump, you will get so many carrots, and the horse is not buying it. it’s just snorting at us. the horse is saying well there are other horses and flicking mud at us with its tail without getting up. we’re telling the horse: but not for us! you’re the only horse in the world to us! what must we offer you, nervous horse? o, nervous horse, take pity on your believers!
the horse is questioning the validity of a system in which carrots are rewarded to horses who make the big jumps, seeing as every horse wants a carrot and big jumpers are few, and wants to know why we can’t love it for its talents in identifying threats like plastic bags blowing in the wind & being so alert it has a nervous breakdown, instead of expecting it to jump all the time, and perhaps the horse would enjoy a career in calligraphy or nursing instead of this jumping for carrots rigamarole. our negotiator was forced to state that the horse is, nonetheless, a horse. the atmosphere remains tense.
“W.H. Hudson says that birds feel something akin to pain (and fear) just before migration and that nothing alleviates this feeling except flight (the rapid motion of wings.).”— Lorine Niedecker. Between Your House and Mine. (via themovinglip)
i hate to be that guy, but the idea that gender, sex, and sexuality are ontologically pure concepts that can be rigidly defined if we simply police our language enough (our english language, because of course) is—i cannot stress this enough—a total waste of time. you may as well spend your afternoons teaching a brick how to swim
karol l. jensen, from lesbian epiphanies: women coming out in later life, 1999
[“Respondent #1, age thirty-six, describes the feeling of limited options— almost an inevitability— she had when she ventured to imagine her own future:
So my daughter was born when I was twenty and I was an at-home mom; I didn’t work. When she was about four and the kids were getting ready to go to school, I said, "OK, now what am I going to do with my life?” Kind of a transitional thing. I decided to have another baby. So we had two more, actually, two more boys, so I have the four children, the two older and the two younger, so there are two sets and I was an at-home mom the whole time…. When the kids got older, and I’m looking at my life, like, “Well, I’m not going to be an at-home mom forever. I want to do something.” and I chose to go to a massage school…. I decided to enroll and go to school there. I got a lot of flak from my family, not necessarily the children, but my husband, my parents, his family. It was like, “Well, what do you want to do that for?” And my husband’s statement was “Well, I really wanted to start investing in some stocks and so I think that’s what is more important to do with the money than to send you to school.”
The struggle to establish her own path begins for a woman in adolescence. It certainly makes logical sense that the adolescent life stage can provide young people with the optimal situation for defining a sense of identity, providing that all the possible models and outcomes from which to choose are readily available to the adolescent and that all of those models are socially acceptable. Not yet firmly tied down by adult commitments, the adolescent may sample a variety of possible occupations, beliefs, and attitudes, eventually adopting a more or less permanent sense of who he or she is. However, even at the close of the twentieth century, we find that the range of socially sanctioned outcomes for the female is limited. If a woman’s identity develops in line with the expectations of her family and social circle, she can feel affirmed by others, comforted by her “fitting in.” However, if women are not free to consider fully what their intuition, their bodies, their motivation, and their intelligence might be telling them, their choice may be that to fit in, they must feel incoherency, emptiness, a sense of things “not being right.” Women with same-gender impulses have experienced an extra layer of limitation and therefore, an additional layer of inauthenticity.
Because of the paucity of sex information, scarcity of role models, the pressure to marry, as well as a lack of permission to exercise their individuality, many women in this study reported that their sense of themselves felt somehow “off” until they moved into a life in which they saw women as potential partners. At that point, the pieces began to fit.
It is important to note that despite the pressure of popular wisdom and expectations, there have always been female adolescents for whom marriage and/or motherhood never felt right. In addition, there have always been women who experienced a pull to their same gender with such a power that it could not be denied, despite the societal pressure behind it. The women in this study, formerly married lesbians or bisexuals, do not necessarily fit into these categories. For these women, relationships with the opposite sex and marriage to a man have either felt right at the time they were entered into— they believed there were no other options— or experienced as an inevitability.“]
one of the most challenging skills i’ve had to learn as an adult is the art of figuring out whether i’m proportionally annoyed with someone or just tired and overstimulated and looking for reasons to be pissed off
“you should be at the club” i should be by the sea. i should be in the mountains. i should be awestruck and rendered speechless by the majesty of the natural world. if you even care
I know it is my father’s first time on this Earth, too. And I know He had it worse when he was little.
But I was little too.
— Franz Kafka, from letters to his father
Toni Morrison? Alice Walker? Zora Neale Hurston? Ralph Ellison? James Baldwin? Lorraine Hansbury? Maya Angelou? Octavia Butler? Langston Hughes? Bell Hooks? Many many many many others? Go fuck yourself you lazy, anti-intellectual asshole
here’s a list by Book Riot of 100 classics by non-white authors