Magnus Hirschfeld, Dora Richter, and the Institute for Sexual Science in Weimar Germany

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[SPEAKER_02]: This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention.

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[SPEAKER_02]: I'm your host, Kelly Theresa Pollock.

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[SPEAKER_02]: I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do.

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[SPEAKER_02]: In mid-May, 1897, in the Berlin apartment of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, the scientific humanitarian committee was formed.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Harsh Feld, who was 29 years old at the time, was a German physician who studied human sexuality.

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[SPEAKER_02]: In 1896, he had written Saffo and Socrates, arguing that homosexuality was inborn.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Hershfeld himself was gay, but it was the suicide of one of his patients, a gay army lieutenant who couldn't live with the shame of his own sexuality.

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[SPEAKER_02]: The drove Hershfeld into what became his life's work.

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[SPEAKER_02]: One of the major goals of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, whose motto was percantium

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[SPEAKER_02]: was to advocate for the repeal of paragraph 175 of the German legal code.

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[SPEAKER_02]: When the various German states unified into the German Empire in January 1871, under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck of Prussia, they adopted paragraph 175 from the Prussian criminal code.

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[SPEAKER_02]: unnatural fornication, whether between persons of the male sex or of humans with beasts, is punished with imprisonment and the further punishment of a prompt loss of civil rights on quote.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Auguste Babel, the chair of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, brought the petition to the German Parliament, but they didn't have the votes to overturn the law.

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[SPEAKER_02]: As Hirschfeld continued his research, he expanded his work to look not just as sexuality, but also at gender.

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[SPEAKER_02]: In 1910, Hirschfeld published a book about people we would now consider transgender.

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[SPEAKER_02]: He called them transvestites, a term that he coined, to describe people who liked to dress across gender, the literal meaning of the word.

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[SPEAKER_02]: It initially surprised Hirschfeld to realize that many of these people were not homosexual and that sexuality and gender were separate.

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[SPEAKER_02]: In the book he went so far as to reject the gender binary.

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[SPEAKER_02]: In theory at least, though his writing did not always succeed in that rejection.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Hirschfeld came to understand and conceptualize of a broad spectrum of gender, sex, and sexuality.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Incomposing external genitalia and sexual drive, along with the newly discovered sex hormones.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Where Hirschfeld had written in 1904 about homosexuality as the third sex,

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[SPEAKER_02]: He now posited that there were 43 million possible combinations of gender sex and sexuality.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Cross-dressing was not illegal in Germany, but cross-dressers were often jailed for public indecency.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Harsh Feld worked with the Berlin police to develop the transvestitension or transvestites certificate.

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[SPEAKER_02]: with a medical diagnosis provided by Hirschfeld.

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[SPEAKER_02]: People could now legally cross-stress.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Although it first did not provide legal sucks or name change, it did prevent legal consequences for gender expression, at least for people with the pass.

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[SPEAKER_02]: At the end of the first World War, the defeated German Empire Fell.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated, and the Vymar Republic was formed.

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[SPEAKER_02]: It was in this newly democratic country that the Institute for Sexual Science opened in Berlin in 1919, headed by Hirschfeld.

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[SPEAKER_02]: The Institute was designed to be both a place for research and education, and a medical and

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[SPEAKER_02]: It included an immense library of books, photographs, and diagrams.

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[SPEAKER_02]: The same year that the Institute opened, Hirschfeld, co-wrote, and appeared in, a silent melodramatic film called Unders-Alstey Undern, or different from the others, in which a gay violinist is blackmailed,

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[SPEAKER_02]: Hirschfeld felt that extortion and blackmail were the real problem.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And he hoped that his film would help lead to the removal of paragraph 175.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Andres Olste-Ondern was a box office sensation, but the government reacted by instituting a censorship code that pulled the film out of theaters.

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[SPEAKER_02]: In 1923, a patient named Dora Richter arrived at the Institute.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Born Rudolph Richter in a small village in 1892.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Dora knew she was a girl from an early age, and had lived as a woman as much as she was able to, including working as a waitress and as an actress.

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[SPEAKER_02]: At the urging of a boyfriend, Dora watched her stylish film, a documentary that described glandular functions and sex organs, and showed variations in humans that hersfeld had described as intermediaries.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Those whose physical makeup and or sexuality were in the view of the day, abnormal.

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[SPEAKER_02]: When Dora arrived at the Institute, she explained that she wanted to be rid of her male genitalia.

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[SPEAKER_02]: At the Institute, she first underwent castration, removal of the testicles, and then eight years later, Penectomy, removal of the penis.

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[SPEAKER_02]: A few months after that, Dora was the first recorded person to undergo vagina plastic or the creation of a vagina.

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[SPEAKER_02]: In September 1928, Hirschfeld met with the Reich Minister of Justice, Dr. Eric Koch-Vaser, where he pushed for legal reform.

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[SPEAKER_02]: to learn more about the people they treated there.

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[SPEAKER_02]: In October 1929, the criminal law committee of the Reichstag voted 15-13 to recommend deleting paragraph 175.

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[SPEAKER_02]: But it wasn't to be.

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[SPEAKER_02]: As the Vimari public began to collapse, it was never brought forward for a vote.

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[SPEAKER_02]: the Nazi party became the largest party of the Reichstag.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And in January 1931, the aging president, Paul van Hindenburg, appointed Adolf Hitler as chancellor.

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[SPEAKER_02]: The next month, Nazis set fire to the Reichstag building.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And Hitler, claiming it was the work of communists, convinced Parliament to grant

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[SPEAKER_02]: By this point, Hirsch Feld was considered the enemy, and in May 1933, students from the German student union vandalized the Institute.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Stormtroopers rated the building, appropriating anything of value, and burning thousands of books and case histories.

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[SPEAKER_02]: The exiled Hirschfeld never returned to Germany, dying in niece on his 67th birthday in 1935.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Dora Richter, living as a woman, died in Bavaria in 1966 at the age of 74.

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[SPEAKER_03]: author of The Intermediaries of I'm Our Story.

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[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you very much.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Hi, Brande, thanks so much for joining me today.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you very much for having me.

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[SPEAKER_01]: It's good to be here.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, excited to talk to you about this book.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, the subject's not entirely exciting, but...

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[SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot more hope in it than I think people would necessarily guess from the, the subject.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, indeed.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And it's, you've written lots of books.

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[SPEAKER_02]: I'm wondering what took you down the path to writing this particular book.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Gosh, well, I myself am on the raw spectrum of gender, I suppose, and I wanted, I didn't work on an article several years ago now on the first falloplasty.

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[SPEAKER_01]: So the first time an FTM had a falloplasty surgery, and his Michael Dillon was the person, and it's a fascinating story

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[SPEAKER_01]: was also a very, very famous for plastic surgery fixes on soldiers' faces after World War 1.

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[SPEAKER_01]: And in fact, Lindsey Fitzharris wrote a whole book called FaceMaker about that doctor.

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[SPEAKER_01]: So I was researching that angle, and while I was talking about it, there was just kind of a casual, in one of the researches of casual dropping in.

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[SPEAKER_01]: of someone named Dorr Richter and Magnus Herschelden the Institute for Sexology, and I am a medical historian, and I'm, you know, somebody for whom these themes are present, and I had never heard of this, and I thought that seems strange.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Now, granted, partly because of my work in the work of others in tandem,

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[SPEAKER_01]: I do think people know those names now, but this was about not quite a decade ago.

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[SPEAKER_01]: That's six, six, seven years ago when I first encountered the story.

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[SPEAKER_01]: And the first thing I did was I thought, I'll read an article about it for scientific American, which earned me 500, like,

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[SPEAKER_01]: angry messages from people saying I should die in a field.

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[SPEAKER_01]: So this was Twitter.

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[SPEAKER_01]: This was a Twitter days, right?

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[SPEAKER_01]: Where people were like, oh no.

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[SPEAKER_01]: And all I had said was like, hey, transgenders, not new look.

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[SPEAKER_01]: We were performing gender confirmation surgeries over 100 years ago, and people were like, you should die.

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[SPEAKER_01]: I thought, well, this seems to have hit a button, maybe I should write a whole book about it, so I did, and I think at some point I'm going to have to write an essay called My Worst Best Book Experience about the process, but that it took me about three years, and it came out just last year.

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[SPEAKER_02]: I'm imagining that this story must have taken a lot of piecing together.

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[SPEAKER_02]: There's lots of disparate strands here.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Can you talk some about the sources that you're able to use, the things that you can find out, of course, some of the sources, were destroyed, so there's a lot of it.

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[SPEAKER_02]: I can't find, yeah.

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[SPEAKER_01]: This was a little bit like, I felt like an archaeologist, right, or maybe a paleontologist.

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[SPEAKER_01]: You just see these little pieces of remaining fragments, and you have to try and build a picture out of this.

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[SPEAKER_01]: So the first thing I had to do was figure out what was there, and what we, was there enough there to tell a story.

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[SPEAKER_01]: And one of the most key pieces of information is I found out door Richter, but a lot of people think Lily Elba is the first transgender woman to have the surgery, have gender confirming surgery, but she's not.

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[SPEAKER_01]: It's door Richter, but door Richter is sort of a relatively unknown.

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[SPEAKER_01]: She was not glamorous.

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[SPEAKER_01]: She was not well-money.

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[SPEAKER_01]: She was not well-supported at very blue collar.

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[SPEAKER_01]: And so I found out that her intake interview

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[SPEAKER_01]: had been preserved in an unpublished dissertation at an archive in Berlin.

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[SPEAKER_01]: And so I had to go get that story, which was so difficult to get out of Berlin.

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[SPEAKER_01]: And it was, there was COVID, and I had to, you know, go through all the things to try and and get there and then brush it and vating Ukraine, it just happened.

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[SPEAKER_01]: So you had all these people who had kind of flooded into Berlin from the Ukraine, which is only 500 miles away or something.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Accidentally, because I didn't know that Russia was going to invade the Ukraine, had gotten a hotel like right by the Russian embassy.

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[SPEAKER_01]: So there's razor-wire people with machine guns.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Like it was just a whole experience on top of the general bureaucracy of trying to get anything out of an archive and especially an archive in Germany and Berlin.

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[SPEAKER_01]: So it was very, very difficult.

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[SPEAKER_01]: But I finally got that piece.

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[SPEAKER_01]: And once I had that piece, I thought, okay, now I have something that I can hang the story on, because I didn't just want to give you a bunch of fact-wise, I wanted to tell a personal story of somebody who lived their life that who was a transgender person going through life that way.

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[SPEAKER_01]: in this period leading up to 1933 and the Nazis sort of taking over and the fall of I'm are.

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[SPEAKER_01]: And so I thought, okay, I've got my person.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Now I have to go and hunt out the ghosts and the edges and the fringes and see what else is there.

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[SPEAKER_01]: And I had a lot of help.

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[SPEAKER_01]: They were basically, it was myself and other transgender people who were searching their history.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Basically,

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[SPEAKER_01]: They were these are not researchers with the people who were willing to go and and hunt for things and all of this kind of Fanning out and then me doing the deep dive and archives and translating a lot of things out of German and finally

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[SPEAKER_01]: Putting together what I believe I can say this without fear of contradiction.

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[SPEAKER_01]: This is probably the most complete record that there is, and I also, there's a timeline that I put together in the back with all the sources and the glossaries and all these other things, and I had it fact checked actually by Raffdozo who runs the Hersheld Archive in Berlin, and he was super helpful because it's hard to keep all of these things straight.

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[SPEAKER_01]: horrible puzzle to try and put together, and I spent a lot of time lying on my floor crying, but that is part of my writing process.

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[SPEAKER_01]: I should just say, like, I do do that as part of writing, but more so with this book than other books I've written.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And in addition to having to translate from German, they're also using a completely separate set of terminology to talk about all of these topics, then we use today.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Key talks about that process of kind of sorting out what is meant by different terms and how people are thinking about themselves and their patients.

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[SPEAKER_01]: You know, the wonderful thing about language is that it's living.

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[SPEAKER_01]: and it's constantly changing, and it's constantly shifting to, and words make the world.

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[SPEAKER_01]: So what words do you use really matter?

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[SPEAKER_01]: So for instance, just to use an example, queer used to become a slur, and then queer people sort of took it back.

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[SPEAKER_01]: And we're like, no, it's not.

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[SPEAKER_01]: But you know, if you drop somebody from 1950 into today, and they found that there was like queer studies, they'd be like, I don't understand what's happening.

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[SPEAKER_01]: So you know, it's really

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[SPEAKER_01]: In this time period, you have all kinds of new words coming online, because this is a science history.

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[SPEAKER_01]: It's a history of science history of hormone science, and they were just discovering the hormone and the gene were both kind of named at the same time, basically, and so you have genetics.

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[SPEAKER_01]: You have all of these things coming, and they were looking for words.

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[SPEAKER_01]: They didn't even have the word homosexual and heterosexual was coined in this time period.

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[SPEAKER_01]: So they didn't have that originally, and there was lots of euphemisms.

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[SPEAKER_01]: They called themselves Uranians at one point, and it has to do with, well, there's a whole lot of things behind that sort of mythologies behind it.

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[SPEAKER_01]: But it really was a period of flowering in terms of linguistics.

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[SPEAKER_01]: and the use of this terminology in science.

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[SPEAKER_01]: So they didn't have a word for transgender.

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[SPEAKER_01]: That's really pretty new.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Transvestite was used for a long time.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Even Hirschfeld, Magnus Hirschfeld, who is studying all of this, is a sexologist, uses transvestite, but then realizes like it doesn't quite work.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Because he's like, well, that says it's about changing your clothes, but clearly that's not what's that's not the only thing going on here.

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[SPEAKER_01]: This is a very embodied, you know, these people feel as though they are in a body that is incorrect, he's one of the people who pioneered early surgeries and early hormone treatments, and so he was looking for a word that worked.

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[SPEAKER_01]: and he couldn't find one, but he did recognize that it was a spectrum and he thought, okay, there's no such thing as like the man man, the all-the-way man, and there's no such thing, it's like the all-the-way woman, these are fictions and everyone is on this spectrum and he thought there was like 40 million combinations that you could have, which is a lot of combinations.

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[SPEAKER_01]: But the term he ultimately lands on is the intermediaries, which is what I chose for the title of the book, perhaps incorrectly because I do think a lot of people don't want the book

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[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, the intermediaries, because he thought, okay, we are natural, naturally occurring forms, just as there are nature and there can be intermediate forms between species, between, you know, he was thinking in terms of Darwinian evolution.

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[SPEAKER_01]: So he chose it for that reason, but also he thought of himself as an intermediary for LGBTQ people.

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[SPEAKER_01]: And so that was kind of the term he typically used.

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[SPEAKER_01]: He felt it was more accurate than saying transestide, which didn't quite get there.

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[SPEAKER_02]: your subtitle is a vymar story and it's impossible to separate out this story from the wild politics and machinations of what's happening in the country.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And I think it might be surprising to people to understand just how accepted for some of this history, homosexuality is and

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[SPEAKER_01]: making things welcome and opening it that was literally the most I can that was the most shocking thing about the research was that we almost what there were almost not Nazis like we were really close to they're not being Nazis and now here we are again right there's a lot of

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[SPEAKER_01]: very strange overlap and comparison between then and now, and what we're seeing right now.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Because Nazis did not spring fully formed like Athena from the forehead of Zeus, right?

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[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it came about slowly.

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[SPEAKER_01]: It was embedded in misogyny of the 19th century.

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[SPEAKER_01]: And a kind of fear and backlash against industrialization, where you had women taking on roles that were unusual to them, right?

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[SPEAKER_01]: They were going into the workplace.

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[SPEAKER_01]: They wanted to vote crazy.

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[SPEAKER_01]: And there was a backlash against that.

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[SPEAKER_01]: And so you had people grappling around concepts of gender apart from gay lesbian transgender.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Like just in terms of them being like, women need to go back in that box, damn it.

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[SPEAKER_01]: And you had this conflict.

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[SPEAKER_01]: that then began like a snowball rolling downhill to pick up other enemies, right?

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[SPEAKER_01]: So the right backlash to these kinds of concepts started with women and then picked up like gay people and men they didn't think were manly enough and then transgender people and then oh yeah well it's good throw in minorities of other sorts you know and they accused they actually some of the Jewish hatred that they that they threw in the anti-Semitism was wrapped around

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[SPEAKER_01]: homosexual and two feminine and we're going to corrupt the boys.

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[SPEAKER_01]: And so they just mash all of these things together and went, you know, full on into this hateful kind of space.

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[SPEAKER_01]: But that happens in 1933.

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[SPEAKER_01]: This is happening slowly over time.

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[SPEAKER_01]: In the middle of the Vymar, you have this moment where people are like, we don't want that to happen and they do their best to stop it and you have

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[SPEAKER_01]: Several times where they almost overturn the anti-homosexual statutes, you have the approval of transvestite licenses, which was basically, you could carry around your pocket knowing could arrest you or harass you, because you had this license from a doctor that said, I'm allowed to dress this way and to perform the gender that feels most natural to myself.

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[SPEAKER_01]: And you also had an acceptance where you might not expect it.

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[SPEAKER_01]: There's wonderful stories that her child tells about a day labor.

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[SPEAKER_01]: I think he's like a bricklayer or something.

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[SPEAKER_01]: And his son falls in love with a dressmaker.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Dressmakers were men.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Falls in love with a man.

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[SPEAKER_01]: a rather feminine man, and brings him home, and the bricklayer dad is like, well, you know, at least he's happy, but he brings a friend, and then his other son falls in love with another dressmaker who's a friend of death.

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[SPEAKER_01]: So both his sons fall in love with other men, and the bricklayer dad is just like, eh!

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[SPEAKER_01]: They're happy, right?

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[SPEAKER_01]: He's uneducated.

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[SPEAKER_01]: He's not, you know, he's not the type that you would expect to be like welcoming with open arms.

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[SPEAKER_01]: So there were people just going, and this is okay.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Hirschfeld took all of these surveys in these stories and published them to show people, look, this is not a weird strange unusual thing.

23:25.694 --> 23:27.477
[SPEAKER_01]: Look at how many people.

23:27.457 --> 23:42.478
[SPEAKER_01]: say yeah I'm somewhere on this this giant spectrum and he loves surveys there were so many surveys but it was great because he would just you know you get stuff back from like you know the equivalent of pipe fitters being like yeah I'm kind of gay sure you know and it was wonderful

23:42.458 --> 23:47.946
[SPEAKER_01]: for him to be able to do that and people got kind of comfortable with it and kind of like, okay, maybe this is normal.

23:48.467 --> 24:05.191
[SPEAKER_01]: The new hormone science said that your brain, your, your conscious mind was not always in charge of what was happening inside your body and they thought maybe this is scientific and you could be born this way and he promoted this concept and it looked two different times like we were going to, that that was what was going to win.

24:05.251 --> 24:09.698
[SPEAKER_01]: And I sometimes think about where we would be a hundred years later if it had.

24:09.678 --> 24:15.908
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, if we hadn't to accidentally fall into the clutches of Nazis and backlash and all of this other stuff.

24:16.008 --> 24:20.275
[SPEAKER_01]: But so this was fun about reading this book as you realize, Nazis are not all powerful.

24:20.295 --> 24:21.858
[SPEAKER_01]: They were never a foregone conclusion.

24:22.719 --> 24:26.104
[SPEAKER_01]: We were so close and it would have just taken a little bit more of a tip.

24:26.545 --> 24:27.907
[SPEAKER_01]: And we might have ousted them.

24:27.987 --> 24:31.293
[SPEAKER_01]: And that means we can fight those fights today.

24:31.513 --> 24:35.179
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, you look at that and go, oh, that's not a foregone conclusion.

24:35.159 --> 24:54.619
[SPEAKER_01]: That means right now with the right politics that are pushing anti-LGBTQ and anti-trans and anti-women and anti-immigrant and all this, we can push back against that they're not all powerful, they're not a foregone conclusion either, so the turmoil and extraordinary politics of this time period.

24:54.599 --> 25:22.885
[SPEAKER_01]: It's kind of nice to look at that as it, while it's not exactly the same as what's happening now, but as an interesting blueprint to go, okay, this is how they fought, this is what gave them hope throughout all of this, because they didn't just, they didn't just fight, they had balls, they had like grand gallows, right, where everybody dressed up and were fabulous, you know, they did wonderfully got married, they, they, they were changing their, their pronouns and their genders and all of these things while this was going on.

25:22.865 --> 25:43.675
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's good to remember, I think, it's very now, very now in very United States, to remember that when you look at that unsung history, it provides you a sense of where, of where we can draw strength, you know, and that your joy is permitted and, in fact, necessary as fuel to get you through these times.

25:44.228 --> 25:49.923
[SPEAKER_02]: Hirschfeld and other people he was working with on some of these campaigns, though, of course, different on tactics.

25:49.943 --> 25:56.780
[SPEAKER_02]: And it probably didn't agree on a whole lot, which is to agree on one particular thing.

25:56.840 --> 25:59.487
[SPEAKER_02]: Like we want to repeal paragraph 175.

25:59.467 --> 26:05.214
[SPEAKER_02]: Could you talk some about the choices that Harsh felt made about the kind of tactics he wanted to use?

26:05.395 --> 26:09.099
[SPEAKER_02]: And it weighs that while understandable, we might not completely agree with.

26:10.281 --> 26:21.475
[SPEAKER_01]: So you have to think about the fact that there were factions, even among those who were not on the side of the Nazis, right?

26:21.455 --> 26:29.570
[SPEAKER_01]: One division were the masculineists, and I bet this is going to sound real familiar to people terms of today, right?

26:29.870 --> 26:32.415
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like a whole YouTube culture, but a hundred years ago.

26:32.435 --> 26:38.285
[SPEAKER_01]: So you have these, they were gay men, but they were like gay men, he-man woman haters.

26:38.325 --> 26:42.433
[SPEAKER_01]: They did not think women had any value at all, except for bearing children.

26:42.513 --> 26:43.615
[SPEAKER_01]: They thought they were

26:43.595 --> 26:46.122
[SPEAKER_01]: stupid, basically, and not worth talking to.

26:46.724 --> 26:51.116
[SPEAKER_01]: And they thought that the most manly men would only date other men.

26:51.237 --> 26:52.661
[SPEAKER_01]: Like that was kind of where they went with it.

26:53.162 --> 26:57.655
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think many of the YouTubers and TikTokers realize how close they are to

26:58.360 --> 27:13.669
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, if you manage all the women, there's kind of only, you know, so they had this idea that yes, they wanted paragraph 175 overturned, yes, they wanted gay men to be permitted to be gay men, but they didn't necessarily want to accord any of those rights to women.

27:13.649 --> 27:25.262
[SPEAKER_01]: And they also, some of them, Adolf Brand in particular, had him very, he wanted to forceably out people and do some other things were quite almost violent in tactic, which was not necessarily a great idea.

27:25.302 --> 27:27.785
[SPEAKER_01]: Did not actually go very well for him in the end either.

27:27.805 --> 27:30.608
[SPEAKER_01]: But Harshfeld, he didn't feel that way.

27:30.728 --> 27:39.178
[SPEAKER_01]: Harshfeld was considered too feminine by Adolf Brand, partly because he himself was a very, his personality.

27:39.198 --> 27:43.082
[SPEAKER_01]: He was not an, you know, upper men's right.

27:43.062 --> 27:47.346
[SPEAKER_01]: But also, he had a lot of women friends, and his sister was a suffragette.

27:47.366 --> 27:51.650
[SPEAKER_01]: She was somebody who was fighting for the right to vote, and, and achieved help to achieve that.

27:52.070 --> 27:52.871
[SPEAKER_01]: Hilling Stoker.

27:53.291 --> 28:02.520
[SPEAKER_01]: She was a huge, amazing feminist in the time period, and she sort of schools her feld repeatedly on things when she doesn't think he's pushing enough for women's rights.

28:02.540 --> 28:13.069
[SPEAKER_01]: Like for a while, he didn't really focus on lesbians, and he didn't really focus on

28:13.049 --> 28:29.590
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm like, you're gonna, you have to take everybody, so he kind of realized, okay, that was important, and he begins to ship to focus, and he accepts women and women and Hirschfeld's version of LGBTQ rights joined together as they realize they have a sort of common folk.

28:29.570 --> 28:37.862
[SPEAKER_01]: Whereas the masculinists ultimately fall away from that alliance and end up citing more with the Nazis, unfortunately.

28:37.903 --> 28:43.491
[SPEAKER_01]: Again, does not go very well for them in the end because they thought that they would be safe and then they weren't.

28:44.052 --> 28:45.774
[SPEAKER_01]: The Nazis eventually come for them too.

28:45.875 --> 28:55.249
[SPEAKER_01]: E Ernst Rome, who was Hitler's right-hand man, was an openly gay man who gets murdered on the night of long knives and then Hitler does basically a purge after that.

28:55.289 --> 28:58.193
[SPEAKER_01]: So people think,

28:58.173 --> 29:14.072
[SPEAKER_01]: And her husband himself doesn't, I mean, Elaine Stoker also has some problems, so she tends to be very, a bit racist, a bit classes, I hesitate to say that, but you know, she really kind of hurt her understanding of people was not always

29:14.052 --> 29:29.496
[SPEAKER_01]: completely open on the bright side though, both she and her cell were willing to hear from people who did take on bridge against these kind of more racist notions being like no no no no you can't have some of the women you have to you have to free all of the women you can't have some of the gay people you need all of the gay people.

29:29.476 --> 29:41.598
[SPEAKER_01]: And Hershel becomes much more focused on the problems of racism after the Nazis begin to be a problem, partly because he is suddenly attacked for his own right for being Jewish.

29:42.119 --> 29:45.706
[SPEAKER_01]: And he kind of makes a realization and he becomes more understanding.

29:45.726 --> 29:50.034
[SPEAKER_01]: But for for many years he was a social Darwinist, which is bad.

29:50.615 --> 29:51.657
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not good.

29:51.677 --> 29:52.378
[SPEAKER_01]: So

29:52.358 --> 29:57.769
[SPEAKER_01]: And unfortunately, the fissures between these groups were pride open by the right.

29:57.829 --> 29:59.052
[SPEAKER_01]: They did that on purpose.

29:59.092 --> 30:06.027
[SPEAKER_01]: They intentionally were separating the masculinists from everyone else because they knew they couldn't win against them as a unified front.

30:06.928 --> 30:12.460
[SPEAKER_01]: They knew that they would lose, and so they had to divide and conquer, and I think that's that too is a lesson for us today.

30:13.216 --> 30:38.734
[SPEAKER_02]: Let's talk about Dora Richter then, and it's fascinating to think about the life of someone who is trans, doesn't have that terminology, but, you know, she knows from an early age that she doesn't fit in the body that she has, and this is, of course, long before social media, before her ability to like, you know, Google, what's going on, or how do I find other people

30:39.170 --> 30:47.077
[SPEAKER_02]: her life, the journey she goes on, and eventually has this kind of miraculous way of living as herself.

30:47.718 --> 30:51.801
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, so I love Dora Richter for so many reasons, and she was an excellent choice.

30:52.241 --> 31:07.675
[SPEAKER_01]: So first of all, Dora is so lovable, which is this unthinkable persona, but also, and I chose her partly because there are skeptics out there, and I think she's a great case for

31:07.655 --> 31:13.925
[SPEAKER_01]: She grew up in a community called Siphon, Siphon, I think I'm pronouncing that right, and is in the or mountains in Bohemia.

31:14.546 --> 31:22.598
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is rural with a capital R. It's there's tiny little community, just a few hundred people probably.

31:22.638 --> 31:24.901
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a very small farming community on the side of a mountain.

31:25.342 --> 31:28.667
[SPEAKER_01]: They're very cut off from places and other people.

31:28.647 --> 31:29.609
[SPEAKER_01]: And she grows up.

31:29.649 --> 31:31.072
[SPEAKER_01]: She has a relatively large family.

31:31.152 --> 31:32.515
[SPEAKER_01]: Her father is quite strict.

31:32.815 --> 31:35.360
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think there's some money problems and frinking problems.

31:35.621 --> 31:36.242
[SPEAKER_01]: There's issues.

31:37.063 --> 31:43.075
[SPEAKER_01]: And she, when she's, she's the second child of the third child, that kind of forget now, forget my own work.

31:43.576 --> 31:45.880
[SPEAKER_01]: But she grows up with girls, with sisters.

31:46.482 --> 31:48.425
[SPEAKER_01]: And believe she is one of them.

31:48.486 --> 31:50.790
[SPEAKER_01]: She thinks of herself as a sister.

31:50.770 --> 31:58.638
[SPEAKER_01]: And this comes to a head when she's about four years old because between three and four, children up to a certain age kind of wore the same kind of clothes.

31:59.158 --> 32:03.062
[SPEAKER_01]: And then, once they got to a certain age, you put the boys and trousers and you put the girls and dresses.

32:03.723 --> 32:09.328
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was the first big problem because Dora was like, I don't wear trousers.

32:09.468 --> 32:11.590
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't, I'm not a boy, I'm a girl.

32:12.251 --> 32:16.575
[SPEAKER_01]: And this was a constant ongoing battle with her father.

32:16.910 --> 32:20.960
[SPEAKER_01]: She had been christened as Rudolph and he just was not going to accept anything else.

32:21.581 --> 32:30.242
[SPEAKER_01]: Now her mother was more understanding her mother actually taught her to make lace and taught her the same way she taught the other girls, but she wasn't allowed to practice it openly.

32:30.282 --> 32:33.470
[SPEAKER_01]: She couldn't sit out there making lace in front of her dad, right?

32:33.490 --> 32:35.374
[SPEAKER_01]: This was not an okay thing.

32:35.354 --> 32:45.987
[SPEAKER_01]: But she's, she's convinced she's a girl, she doesn't know why her parents won't let her wear dresses and she doesn't become aware of what the issue is until she is with some playmates.

32:46.007 --> 32:52.395
[SPEAKER_01]: She basically sees that she sees someone else's genitalia and goes, well, that doesn't look like mine.

32:52.455 --> 32:54.077
[SPEAKER_01]: What is wrong with me?

32:54.978 --> 32:58.442
[SPEAKER_01]: And her response is she attempts to remove her fellas.

32:58.422 --> 32:59.423
[SPEAKER_01]: She does this first.

32:59.443 --> 33:03.728
[SPEAKER_01]: She tries to wind a string around it really tight and thank goodness they stopped her from that.

33:04.049 --> 33:06.131
[SPEAKER_01]: That would have gone very badly later.

33:06.211 --> 33:08.334
[SPEAKER_01]: She thinks maybe she could use a razor to cut it out.

33:08.354 --> 33:12.739
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, this very, very serious situation where she just is like, I don't know what this is.

33:12.759 --> 33:13.560
[SPEAKER_01]: I need to get it off me.

33:13.580 --> 33:14.841
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not supposed to be there.

33:16.023 --> 33:27.096
[SPEAKER_01]: And after her failed attempts to do this, she's like 12 or 13, she tries to commit suicide for the first time because she just cannot live in this strange body that she doesn't

33:27.582 --> 33:34.211
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, I use this as an example, because Dora lived so remote.

33:34.392 --> 33:36.495
[SPEAKER_01]: There was, she had never met another gay person.

33:36.515 --> 33:38.738
[SPEAKER_01]: She says this openly in her intake interview.

33:38.778 --> 33:40.621
[SPEAKER_01]: She'd never met any other transgender person.

33:40.941 --> 33:44.807
[SPEAKER_01]: She was surrounded by family members who were trying to enforce very strict gender norms.

33:45.508 --> 33:49.413
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, there's no TikTok, like she didn't catch it from somebody, right?

33:49.794 --> 33:51.396
[SPEAKER_01]: She just knew.

33:51.376 --> 33:56.722
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that that makes her so easy, not that I think that's the only way this happens because it isn't.

33:57.183 --> 34:03.931
[SPEAKER_01]: But I think it makes it easy for people to kind of understand like, okay, there's just nowhere else you could have gotten this idea.

34:04.992 --> 34:08.977
[SPEAKER_01]: And she lives as much as she can, but at the time she's 16, she's away from home.

34:09.498 --> 34:11.680
[SPEAKER_01]: She lives as a woman as often as possible.

34:12.021 --> 34:13.823
[SPEAKER_01]: And she passes as a woman.

34:13.803 --> 34:25.101
[SPEAKER_01]: has boyfriends and she's pretty good at kind of getting around the problems of that, but occasionally she has a really terrible experience she gets outed by a boyfriend and it really damages her.

34:25.162 --> 34:34.697
[SPEAKER_01]: So from the rest of her life, she will basically get into relationships and then the minute they get just a little too serious and she thinks they're getting a little too close, she runs away.

34:34.677 --> 34:41.229
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is so sad because she just has this heart to love people and she always says, I wanted to be loved as myself.

34:41.369 --> 34:43.112
[SPEAKER_01]: She didn't want to be loved as a gay man.

34:43.172 --> 34:44.915
[SPEAKER_01]: She wanted to be loved as a woman.

34:44.935 --> 34:48.021
[SPEAKER_01]: And I mean, she was even had she was engaged.

34:48.061 --> 34:57.057
[SPEAKER_01]: She had marriage proposals and she would just flee these situations because she feared there was no way of keeping them in the dark about about her physical anatomy.

34:57.037 --> 35:00.962
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, but we follow her experience that she's an actress for a time.

35:00.982 --> 35:01.703
[SPEAKER_01]: She's a waitress.

35:02.044 --> 35:05.549
[SPEAKER_01]: She also works as a man sometimes too, and so she has this double life.

35:06.410 --> 35:08.212
[SPEAKER_01]: And terrible things happened to her.

35:08.573 --> 35:09.574
[SPEAKER_01]: She's assaulted.

35:09.614 --> 35:13.219
[SPEAKER_01]: She experiences what it's like to be a woman in all the ways, actually.

35:13.740 --> 35:15.622
[SPEAKER_01]: She's even attacked by a family member.

35:15.762 --> 35:18.226
[SPEAKER_01]: She's assaulted sexually assaulted by a family member.

35:18.827 --> 35:19.888
[SPEAKER_01]: An uncle.

35:19.868 --> 35:25.159
[SPEAKER_01]: and just terrible things, and yet she never gives up, she has such hope for the future.

35:25.700 --> 35:32.714
[SPEAKER_01]: And such joy, and she's a musician, she loves music and birds and flowers, and she has pet pigeons, and she talks to her pigeons.

35:33.195 --> 35:33.877
[SPEAKER_01]: She's just lovely.

35:33.897 --> 35:34.778
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I love her.

35:34.818 --> 35:40.510
[SPEAKER_01]: I think if you get out, if you read my book, there's no way that you can't just think she's adorable,

35:40.490 --> 35:48.802
[SPEAKER_01]: But what ultimately happens is now she's still living far enough away that she lives in the south part of Germany where her Shelds influences less.

35:48.862 --> 35:50.144
[SPEAKER_01]: It's much more right-wing down there.

35:50.184 --> 35:53.709
[SPEAKER_01]: And she hasn't heard about her Shelds who's made a film.

35:53.769 --> 35:57.394
[SPEAKER_01]: He's made a film about being, you know, gay and all of these things.

35:57.534 --> 36:04.904
[SPEAKER_01]: And then you have other people in his circuit with hormone science coming out with films saying like, oh, there's these intermediate kind of things going on.

36:05.345 --> 36:06.767
[SPEAKER_01]: She doesn't know this.

36:06.747 --> 36:12.115
[SPEAKER_01]: but she accidentally gets caught in her boy clothes and her man clothes by a guy she's dating.

36:12.295 --> 36:13.457
[SPEAKER_01]: And she's like, oh, this is it.

36:13.637 --> 36:15.200
[SPEAKER_01]: It's over and she's apologizing to him.

36:15.220 --> 36:20.147
[SPEAKER_01]: And he says, actually, wait, wait, no, you know, there's this film I saw.

36:20.187 --> 36:25.936
[SPEAKER_01]: And instead of casting her off, he says, oh, you need to, you need to meet this Hirschfeld guy, right?

36:25.976 --> 36:27.639
[SPEAKER_01]: You need to go, you need to go to the city.

36:27.719 --> 36:28.420
[SPEAKER_01]: So she does.

36:28.500 --> 36:29.502
[SPEAKER_01]: She goes to Brooklyn.

36:29.902 --> 36:35.691
[SPEAKER_01]: And she goes to the Institute of

36:35.671 --> 36:40.417
[SPEAKER_01]: and she begins her journey toward a gender confirmation surgery, but she has no money.

36:40.437 --> 37:01.122
[SPEAKER_01]: So she also ends up working at the Institute as a maid and she becomes like a den mom to like all the other maids, all these transgender women who are working as maid because many of them had trouble finding jobs after they got transition surgeries and so the Institute was also acting as a placement agency for these people and they would employ some of them and so she's downstairs being den mom to, I mean, just amazing.

37:01.102 --> 37:23.295
[SPEAKER_01]: All the way up until 1933, I did 33, we know the Nazis take over, they burn the institute, well, they burn the institute's library, they take over the building, and for years, everybody thought that she perished in that attack, and it was only literally like counting down days to the end of my work that we made the discovery that she in fact survived.

37:23.275 --> 37:24.517
[SPEAKER_01]: It's such a wonderful story.

37:24.537 --> 37:25.778
[SPEAKER_01]: It's so exciting.

37:25.878 --> 37:38.956
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it was really fun because the woman who made the discovery as a trans woman and we had been conversing while we were doing all this research and actually her, she got an article out prior to the book coming out, but we were sort of discovered it in real time.

37:38.976 --> 37:39.597
[SPEAKER_01]: She texted me.

37:39.617 --> 37:40.678
[SPEAKER_01]: She's like, I found something.

37:40.718 --> 37:41.439
[SPEAKER_01]: I found something.

37:41.860 --> 37:46.566
[SPEAKER_01]: We discovered that Dora's name and gender had been changed on her birth certificate.

37:46.867 --> 38:05.584
[SPEAKER_01]: but it had been changed like in 19th, like way after the fall of the institute and we're like, well, she would have had to have been part of that so we can researching and here she not only did she survive, she went back and lived in Siphon for a while and opened a lacemaking shop as a woman and then later

38:05.564 --> 38:11.332
[SPEAKER_01]: She was a very good cook, and so she worked as a cook in a couple places, ends up being the Russian incursion, right?

38:11.352 --> 38:21.987
[SPEAKER_01]: They're sort of taking over the Soviet Union as growing, so she gets, she has to flee side-fed, and she has to immigrate back to Germany, where her immigration papers are like she's just some woman, right?

38:22.247 --> 38:31.740
[SPEAKER_01]: So she's, she's, she's just Dora this woman who immigrates to Germany from, from the border regions, and she lives out her life in this other small town, living with her brother we think,

38:31.720 --> 38:43.351
[SPEAKER_01]: And we know this because my friend who discovered this decides to go to the town and she she's basically she lives in in Germany and I don't so she was texting me She went around just asking all the old people like the older they were the better.

38:43.371 --> 38:52.039
[SPEAKER_01]: She was like hey, do you remember somebody named Dora Richter and she found two people who were quite elderly But were children when Dora Richter was still living in the town.

38:52.420 --> 39:00.107
[SPEAKER_01]: She doesn't die until like the 60s when she she lives to be a ripe old age And they remembered her because she kept a pet pigeon in her purse

39:00.087 --> 39:03.830
[SPEAKER_01]: And she would go, like, dying out, and she dropped little crumbs.

39:03.891 --> 39:27.192
[SPEAKER_01]: And she could just imagine, like, hearing this little, woo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo

39:27.897 --> 39:38.191
[SPEAKER_02]: In addition to your medical history books, you've also written a couple of mystery novels, and I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about like, does one style of writing and form the other?

39:38.211 --> 39:39.412
[SPEAKER_02]: How do you think about that?

39:39.953 --> 39:41.375
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's interesting.

39:41.635 --> 39:50.547
[SPEAKER_01]: It is a very different process for me, for writing them, but you'll note certain themes kind of run through them.

39:50.527 --> 39:57.237
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm a historian, so my mystery novels have this, uh, usually the mystery on some level hinges on history.

39:57.898 --> 40:04.768
[SPEAKER_01]: And in the first one, uh, a little bit, and then more so in the second one, there's art history and family history involved.

40:05.309 --> 40:11.158
[SPEAKER_01]: They also both are, and this is true of my other work as well, really interested in social justice and representation.

40:11.799 --> 40:17.327
[SPEAKER_01]: So the lead character

40:17.307 --> 40:25.000
[SPEAKER_01]: is autistic, I am autistic as well, and so you get, there's other neuro-divergent characters in the book, there's also other queer characters in the book.

40:25.020 --> 40:31.592
[SPEAKER_01]: There's in both books and one very important and sort of central character is transgender in the second book.

40:32.013 --> 40:39.626
[SPEAKER_01]: And so it's, it's, it's that the medically, all of these things are so important to me that bringing the history to life and bringing the margins to the center.

40:39.666 --> 40:40.227
[SPEAKER_01]: So,

40:40.207 --> 40:42.453
[SPEAKER_01]: The mystery books, their real mysteries, you know, people get murdered.

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[SPEAKER_01]: People get murdered in England, in a small town, you know, like they do.

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[SPEAKER_01]: And so that's the basis, but surrounding that is this other sense of representation and culture and and justice.

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[SPEAKER_02]: I read lots of mystery novels, seven small towns in England, and I'd love gears.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, thank you so much.

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[SPEAKER_01]: I'm actually just finished a thriller, so hopefully I hope that there's more in the Georgians.

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[SPEAKER_01]: The first one was called The Frame Boom of Art More House, and the second one is called The Dead Come to Stay, and you don't actually have to read them in order, but you can.

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[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm sort of like the gold-nage mystery, you know, you don't have to read them in order, but you get a little extra something if you do.

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[SPEAKER_01]: I have a plan for Christmas novel, so hopefully I will manage to convince my publisher that I should write a third one, but you just never know in this clip.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Could you please tell listeners how they can get copies of both the intermediaries and your novels?

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[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely, so the nice thing is the intermediaries was published by WWE Norton and company, so it's really broadly available and get it at most bookstores you can order it online.

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[SPEAKER_01]: I actually have the peculiar book club, which is my podcast and show, you do show.

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[SPEAKER_01]: We have our own bookshop.org site where you can purchase things there too, and we have intermediaries and it's actually on sale over there, I think.

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[SPEAKER_01]: So, those are all good places, and my fiction is much the same.

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[SPEAKER_01]: It's published with Hanover Square Harper Collins, and so it's pretty widely available right now the dead come to stay.

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[SPEAKER_01]: I'm still seeing it in bookshops because it came out less than a year ago.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes you can still catch the framed women.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Unfortunately, there's not paperbacks of any of these things, which I apologize for, but there's great audio books for all of them.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Maybe move these some day?

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[SPEAKER_01]: I, you know, so the frame movement of art more house is under an agreement right now and we do have a screenwriter and a couple of other folks attached.

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[SPEAKER_01]: So there's a film agent who is attempting to shop it right now as an ongoing series.

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[SPEAKER_01]: So they would actually do it as like, you know, a continuing, midsomerators like at writ large, I would love that.

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[SPEAKER_01]: for 20 seasons or yeah oh god I would love that yeah you know I'll just keep writing them and send stuff but yeah we we have a couple of interested folks and we we'll see we'll see what happens is there anything else you wanted to make sure we talk about

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[SPEAKER_01]: I think just if you can, if you can do it, please do patronize authors, particularly authors about books that have to do with LGBTQ themes.

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[SPEAKER_01]: It's a really tough time right now for any author, but in particularly those who under this administration are trying to tell stories about gay and lesbian people, about transgender people, it's rough and there've been a lot of backlash.

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[SPEAKER_01]: A lot of these authors are getting a lot of hate online.

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[SPEAKER_01]: and online is often where we have to be, so, you know, in as much as you can, not just mine, but lots of other people have written great books in the past year, and I'd say, get out there by them, say good things about them, review them, get them from libraries.

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[SPEAKER_01]: We absolutely love to see it.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Brandy, thank you so much for speaking with me today.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for having me.

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[SPEAKER_01]: I love on Sun History.

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[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

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[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for listening to Unsung History.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Bye!