One of, if not the first major book burning in Nazi Germany occured on May 6th, 1933, at the Institute of Sexology, a foundation known for their advocacy for transgender and homosexual equality.
“Trans people didn’t exist in the past.”
You literally destroyed our history to perpetuate this myth. We’ll never erase your history, just show how it was a lie undeserving of respect.
It’s quite interesting that academics back then knew homosexuality and transgenderism are completely normal and not aberrations. Even Sigmund Freud also agreed.
It’s just that society as a whole has been completely anti-lgbt. I always say it is the relic of homophobic teachings from Abrahamic religions. Ancient Greeks and Romans were completely fine with homosexuality until Christianity became enforced in Europe and elsewhere; then later Islam came along and did the same.
Eh, this is a bit of a half-thruth. Ancient Romans did not really categorize by sexual preference, but by gender roles taken on during sex. They basically had a penetrator-penetrated dichotomy, and taking on a “female” role was definitely shameful for men in their society, and taking on a “male” role as a woman would have been seen as a pretty big transgression, too.
This more or less continued into medieval and early modern times, until homosexuality was understood and categorized as an identity and concept. Together with a complete ignorance towards women’s sexuality, this lead to punishment of lesbians being rather rare (non-penetrative sex was basically not recognised as sex), while homosexual men were punished for basically perverting gender roles of sex (also for “forcing” a “female” role on another man), instead for viewing them as having a differing identity.
While religion played a huge role to justify the discrimination of homosexuals, I’d say the root cause is the ideological imperative of maintaining sexuality as something to produce offspring, patriarchical dominance, and having women maintain their identity for sexual gratification and reproduction unless they manage to get into a monastery or similar exceptional roles (and an inherent fear of men to fall out of the male gender identity and being objectified in the same ways). That’s why this is also not just an abrahamic phenomenon, but has been pretty widespread in patriarchal societies overall, although often with exceptions for “penetrating” men maintaining their status and power.
Thanks for the comprehensive reply. I am aware that some cultures are homophobic in spite of having little influence from Abrahamic religions; such as the case with East Asia. I omitted the latter because i couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I guess patriarchy is largely the major factor for homophobia. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I noticed that cultures that are less patriarchal and egalitarian are more tolerant to lgbt. These cultures are noticeably less sedentary. For example, Philippines recognise the gender “bakla” and Native Americans also recognise “two spirits”, before European colonisation came.
To be fair that’s mostly a case of “even a broken clock is right twice a day”. Psychology was still in its infancy back then and they had so few ideas how to actually help people that insulin shock therapy and lobotomy seemed like good ideas. When looking at it with modern knowledge it’s easy to say they already knew when pointing at the bits of decent ideas back then. In reality that’s cherry picking between the heaps of wrong and outright dangerous ideas prevalent at the time.
Yes. Look up Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld and his gender affirming care in early 20th century Germany. The Berlin “Institut für Sexualwissenschaft” was the world’s first trans clinic from 1919 until the Nazis destroyed it 1933.
Watch Eldorado: Everything the Nazis Hate about Berlin’s vibrant trans community and how the rise of the nazis destroyed them.
