“During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night,” Dan Savage said.
The knee-jerk reaction to the headline might be nauseating, or elicit questions. Afterall, how can these two subjects be linked? To that I say: how much do you know about the Institute for Sexual Research started by Magnus Hirschfeld in 1930s Germany?
Sections of the government have followed a fascist pattern towards dictatorship that is easily recognizable to any marginalized community. It has been made especially clear with the removal of all mention of trans people from government websites.
Also as an openly trans person, I was admittedly sheepish to writing this article. How much do I remove myself from online platforms? How pin-pointable and small should my identity expression become in the face of blatant erasure?
Because that is exactly what this is. There is no beating the bush around it. And I will repeat this fact: a world without trans people has never existed and never will.
We are here. We are your neighbors, siblings, coworkers, partners and acquaintances. Alan L. Hart, Charley Parkurst, Elagabalus, Frances Thompson, Tamara Rees and Harry Allen are all examples of this.
From the perspective of a transgender person, we all foresaw some level of removing mentions of transgender people coming post-election. Warnings to verify you were stocked up on your hormone replacement therapy, had a passport with the appropriate gender marker, and learned self-defense classes all came way before January and even before November.
I also found that, on a personal level, I am okay. I am thriving, actually. When disclosing this with a close person in my life, they revealed the fact that the only people in their lives that were having a difficult time through this seemingly new societal chaos are cisgender, white people.
BIPOC and transgender people have always had to live in some state of constant chaos – whether for personal safety, protection or simply because they had no other choice. To live everyday having to hide or instantly shield yourself from others’ inherent judgement creates a confusing internal experience, especially without having knowledge of the definition of the word “queer.”
Queer is a political identity. In today’s political climate, you cannot be LGBTQIA+ without identifying as a leftist. Queer is the act of identifying outside of social norms and acknowledging the cisgender, heterosexual standards which are meant to box you into minimal options.
If you believe you can be queer without being political, only referring to yourself as your respective identity while not using the word “queer” is inherently more accurate and exercises self-awareness. We are all part of one community, and trans people are the reason we, as the LGBTQIA+ community, have such a broad and expansive knowledge of gender variance.
Although previously I was not aware of Dan Savage’s quote about the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis, his words speak to me more than ever as we face a current, fundamental abuse of power from the Trump administration. An abuse of power that includes their blatant disinformation regarding trans individuals.
As a community, we are going to continue to build a coalition and live through this night. Trans joy is liberation, and we will continue to stand up to the government forces who say otherwise.
At the beginning of this article, I asked what you as a reader knew about the Institute for Sexual Research. Magnus Hirschfeld, a Jewish and gay man in 1930s Berlin, started the Institute for Sexual Research after one of his clients, a soldier, committed suicide after the passing of “Paragraph 175” in Germany, which made homosexuality illegal.
He supported individuals who could identify outside of the binary naturally, including nonbinary identities, bisexuality and those who expressed gender separately from sexuality. He also performed the first modern gender-affirming surgeries, provided a safe space for queer individuals and created a library holding thousands of documents on identities, gender-affirming surgeries and legal protection.
In Jan. 1933, Hitler enacted a sterilization and later extermination policy for “lives unworthy of living.” On May 6, the Nazis stormed the Institute for Sexual Research and left with a bronze bust of Hirschfeld and books. 20,000 books were set ablaze.
This was one of the first Nazi book burnings.
German youth said the state committed “the intellectual garbage of the past,” to the flames. In a world of anti-intellectualism, information censorship, falling media literacy rates and increasing violence – doesn’t this sound familiar?
