a-candle-for-sherlock:

Katharina T., a resident of Berlin in the early 20th century, had a deep voice and masculine appearance, and preferred to wear men’s clothing
at home and in public. In 1908, they—there’s no record of which pronoun
Katharina preferred—went to visit the sexual reformer and “sexologist”
Magnus Hirschfeld, to apply for official documentation that would allow them to wear men’s clothing in public: a “transvestite pass.”

Perhaps dozens of these passes were
granted by German police between 1909 and 1933, the year Adolf Hitler
became chancellor. The term “transvestitism” at that time encompassed
people of all gender identities, from those who occasionally wore men’s
or women’s clothes on weekends, to those who today might well identify
instead as transgender, a term that was not in common usage at the time.
Cross-dressing individuals were vulnerable to arbitrary decisions of
the police, usually according to how well they “passed.” While it wasn’t
illegal to cross-dress, per se, the practice often led to charges of
being a “public nuisance,” which could mean six weeks’ imprisonment or a
fine of 150 marks—and police were “often keen to exercise their
extensive regulatory powers,” writes historian Kate Caplan in “The Administration of Gender Identity in Nazi Germany,” a 2011 paper in History Workshop Journal.

Hirschfeld examined Katharina, quizzed
them on their life and sexual history, and then wrote a report to the
police supporting the application. In it, he argued that Katharina’s
preference for men’s clothing corresponded to their inner self. If they
couldn’t wear them, their well-being and even survival would be
jeopardized. In time, they did receive a pass, though for unknown
“formal legal reasons,” a further request to adopt a male name was not
granted. This, writes Katie Sutton, a scholar of German history and gender studies at Australian National University, in German Studies Review,
is the first known example of someone seeking such a pass. By 1912,
probably as a result of Hirschfeld’s pressure on the police, the pass
became a specific permit in what would become the Weimar Republic.*
(That they remained hand-written suggests that few were issued.)

Hirschfeld was one of a few doctors in
the city who helped people with minority sexual identities. Meanwhile,
other people became increasingly aware of the issues they faced. A 1906
German newspaper report, quoted in Robert Beachy’s Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity,
tells the story of a person who was assigned female at birth**, but
only appeared “unsuspicious” if allowed to wear men’s clothing. The
paper chastises city officials: “There are men with the faces of women,
and women with the faces of men. If necessary, police officials need to
be schooled by Dr. Hirschfeld. Such mistrust as in this case should not
be based on ignorance.” This was typical of a certain segment of Weimar
society, Beachy says. “You can sort of see that there was, at least in
some quarters, a liberal tolerance that was clearly visible.”

Hirschfeld was stocky and mustachioed, a pacifist, anti-imperialist Jew.
He was also likely gay, with two younger lovers—Tao Li Shiu and Karl
Giese—though he generally wrote about “homosexuals” at a remove. By the
time he saw Katharina, he had been writing about complex sexual
identities for well over a decade. After qualifying as a doctor,
Hirschfeld began to work specifically on minority sexual identities, and
published a selection of books on gender and sexuality, including, in
1910, The Transvestites. In 1919, he started the Institute of Sex Research,
a nonprofit foundation that provided services from marriage counseling
to STI treatment to early attempts at hormone therapy. Backed by
anonymous wealthy benefactors, the Institute treated rich and poor
alike, and sought “advancement of scientific research into all aspects
of sexual life and of sex education.”

(continued here)

The Early 20th-Century ID Cards That Kept Trans People Safe From Harassment