Trans+ History Week

May 6, 2026

This week, 4th - 10th May 2026, is Trans+ History Week. This was created by We Are Queer AF a few years ago who also set today, 6th May, as Trans+ History Day. This date was chosen as it is the anniversary of the Nazi raid on the world’s first trans+ clinic in Berlin on 6th May 1933.

So what actually happened? Let’s do some learning! (CW for transphobia, homophobia, antisemitism and mention of suicide)

The campaign for gay rights

The credit for the first gay person to advocate for gay rights within western culture is generally regarded as Carl Heinrich Ulrichs, who gave an address at the sixth congress of German jurists in 1867. The language used was very different to the language used now as the term homosexual had not yet been coined. He was advocating against the criminalisation before and after the implementation of Paragraph 175 of the penal code, which made homosexual acts criminal. He continued to campaign against Paragraph 175 until he had to leave Germany in 1880. His work was then picked up by a doctor, Magnus Hirschfeld.

Hirschfeld was a groundbreaking researcher on gender and sexuality, originally from what is now Poland and mostly working in Germany. He started focusing on gender and sexuality in about 1895, likely influenced by the trial of Oscar Wilde of that year. The trial resulted in discussions about homosexuality from both medical and legal perspectives. Hirschfeld had spent time in Chicago and was struck by the similarities between gay culture in Chicago and Berlin, delving into research about gay cultures around the world. In 1896, he gave up his practice as a doctor and committed to studying gender and sexuality. One story goes that he had a patient who was a young homosexual man who committed suicide the day before his wedding, leaving a note asking Hirschfeld to tell his story and use it to change society’s understanding of sexuality. Later that year he published his first written work, Sappho and Socrates: How Does One Explain the Love of Men and Women to Persons of their Own Sex? (Title translations vary)

In reaction to the response to the book, in 1897 he founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee (called HSC in this post, although the actual name is in German). He did this alongside other advocates to campaign for social recognition of gay, bisexual and transgender men and women and fight their legal persecution. It was the first (or one of the first) established gay rights/LGBT organisations in the world. Their motto can be translated as “justice through science” and their focus was the scientific study of gender and sexuality with the aim to remove the stigma around homosexuality. They also advocated for other reforms such as divorce, contraception, and raising the age of consent from 14 to 16, but the focus was on homosexuality and repealing Paragraph 175. There was a culture of blackmail, with blackmailers threatening to expose someone’s real or alleged homosexual behaviour if they were not paid huge amounts of money, furthering the climate of fear and persecution.

Hirschfeld was picking up where Ulrichs had left off. Hirschfeld’s belief that homosexuality is both normal and natural was highly controversial, as most people believed it to be unnatural and wrong. He was known as the expert on homosexuality, but his own sexuality was never publicly shared.

The HSC wrote a petition asking for the removal of Paragraph 175, which was circulated from 1897 to 1930 - 33 years! This got thousands of signatures, including many famous people, and the HSC at its height had 700 members.

They also published pamphlets, the most popular of which was “what should our nation know about the third sex”. These would be posted to people by request from friends or family, or left on public transport to be picked up and read. At this point, homosexuality was framed as part of a third sex, building on the work of Ulrichs. The idea was that homosexuals and bisexuals belonged to a third sex that was different from male or female, but Hirschfeld did not stick to this theory for long.

Hirschfeld’s research

He travelled all around the world, conducting at least 30,000 interviews, examining gay men and lesbians, and touring gay communities and bars. He then changed the theory to sexual intermediaries; everyone was some mix of masculine, feminine and androgynous traits. This model did not sort people into a gender or sexual binary but instead offered over 43 million combinations of a range of indicators. This made gender and sexuality a spectrum and not a binary.

Hirschfeld did still try to produce labels, incorporating homosexuality, bisexuality and more. In 1899, he published his first yearbook of intermediate sexual types, continuing to publish versions annually until 1923. One of the main aims for this research was establishing that homosexuality is innate and unchanging, something that homosexuals are born as. This would strengthen his arguments against Paragraph 175.

His expertise resulted in him testifying in court cases related to homosexuality. His testimony in the Eulenburg affair, meant to normalise homosexuality, instead backfired and resulted in him and the Committee losing support. He became the target of antisemitism and homophobia.

Despite the scandal, Hirschfeld kept working and coined the terms transvestite and transsexual. Neither are the preferred terms these days, but in his day he was doing groundbreaking work and creating language that didn’t exist. His goal was ending stigma and made a clear distinction between cross dressers, homosexuality and other people who were considered deviants. This was supposed to protect cross dressers from being arrested by having that distinction between them and the criminal act of homosexuality. It becomes tricky to define his work by modern terms as the word transgender didn’t exist, but he seemed to assume everyone in his case studies were what we now call cisgender, although many of those people would more likely call themselves transgender these days. The changes in language can make discussing this topic in a historical context more difficult as they were not able to choose modern labels for themselves.

On February 27, 1912, a 19-year-old was arrested for walking around in women’s clothing, charged with public nuisance. But at the police station, she had to be released because Gerda von Zobeltitz, who had been assigned male at birth, was in possession of a so-called “transvestite pass” (Transvestitenschein), a permit from Berlin’s police chief that allowed her to wear dresses. Hirschfeld had given her a medical certificate explaining that it was in her nature to wear dresses. In the language of the time, she was a “transvestite personality”, and even the police had to admit that arrests wouldn’t change that. The incident prompted a half-dozen Berlin papers to report about the “boy in women’s clothing,” who made news again when she married a woman at the civil registry office. Hirschfeld helped all sorts of people by providing medical certificates saying this was an innate part of them, protecting many trans people.

In 1913, Hirschfeld helped establish the Medical Society for Sexual Science and Eugenics. Eugenics was a mainstream concept at this point and the new field of sexual science was tangled up with it.

In 1914, he published The Homosexuality of Men and Women, a massive volume of his research and the largest collection of available research on gender and sexuality at the time. Given the sheer amount of knowledge collated in the one book, it may still be the largest collection of this work now! In it, he continued his work saying that the issues that gay people faced were not because of their sexuality but because of stigma and the stress of keeping their identity secret. He also concluded that healthy homosexuals were able to keep their sexuality from their doctors, so the connection between homosexuality and deviance in medical literature was because doctors only encountered homosexuals that they knew about when there was some kind of physical or psychological problem.

Much of the work of the HSC turned to focus on the war and much less work was done in the field of sexual science

Institut für Sexualwissenschaft

The Weimar Republic describes the period of time between the end of WWI and the rise of Nazi Germany. The field of sexual science flourished in Austria and Germany during this time. There was a rise in groups calling for the legalisation of homosexuality and the rights and protections of homosexuals.

In this environment, Hirschfeld bought a villa in Berlin with his own money and on 6th July 1919, opened the Institute for Sexual Science (also known as the Institute for Sexology). This was initially for the scientific research and training in sexuality and gender but its services widened to include contraception, counselling related to sexual identity and orientation, marriage counselling, and a medical facility; they saw 4000 patients in the first year alone. It was a non profit foundation and employed over 40 people across various fields and the HSC became the Institute’s sex education division. They helped people from all walks of life and had a question box for people to ask questions anonymously, which ended up mostly helping heterosexuals who had questions about contraception as Hirschfeld was a huge advocate for both contraception and premarital sex. They also amassed a huge library, encompassing all the knowledge on gender and sexuality at the time, including thousands of books, photographs, letters and all of Hirschfeld’s own research. It became so popular and well used that he expanded and bought the building next door 2 years later.

Research continued on the same track as Hirschfeld’s earlier work, looking for signs that sexuality is innate and had a biological basis. For example, they looked at gay men’s Adams apples, body hair or the width of their hips. Brain scans and hormone testing weren’t available, so Hirschfeld was trying to determine a norm and then find out if homosexuals deviated from that norm.

He also supported the work of Eugen Steinach, one of the early pioneers of endocrinology after the recent discovery of sex hormones.

However, his work made him a target and in 1920, Hirschfeld was attacked by nationalist thugs and was beaten so severely that newspapers reported his death - he read his own obituaries!

In 1928, Hirschfeld co-founded the World League for Sexual Reform, although it had existed in some form since 1926. They held large conferences on the subject of sexual reform. This covered many topics from women’s rights to homosexual rights.

The impact of the Nazi party

In the 1920s, Paragraph 175 was being applied less frequently and Berlin was a centre for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. Hirschfeld was still researching and advocating for the end of Paragraph 175. In late 1929, a penal reform committee voted to remove the paragraph with the exception of sex work, it being used in positions of influence and where one party was under the age of 21. This was very controversial - to some it was a win, but it raised the age of consent for gay men higher than heterosexuals and made the punishments for the illegal parts much harsher than before. However, the penal code change did not go through the legislature before the rise of the Nazi party.

Hirschfeld gained an international reputation, described in a US tabloid as Germany’s “Einstein of sex”. He toured the world fundraising and doing talks about sexuality, visiting countries like the USA, Japan, the Philippines, China, the Dutch East Indies, India, Egypt and Palestine. Whilst in India, he heard rumours that he was being targeted by the Nazis, the stress of which, combined with other health issues, caused a series of heart attacks. He never went back to Germany after his 1930 tour.

In the morning of 6th May 1933, the Institute was raided. A group of Nazi supporting university students from the German Student Union stormed the Institution, shouting “burn Hirschfeld”, smashing furniture and beating up the staff. In the afternoon, 20,000 books and 35,000 photographs were stolen for the book burning event taking place four days later.

Some copies of his published work and books still exist, but all of his original research data was destroyed and the contents of the library were burned. The building was taken over by the Nazi government, although it was destroyed in an air raid in 1943.

On 14th November 1933, everything from the Institution that hadn’t been destroyed was auctioned off. He was able to buy back a few things and hoped to start a French institute, but his partner was arrested and deported and the new institute closed. He died on 14th May 1935, leaving his remaining work to the men he had relationships with, Carl Giza and Lee Shu Tong.

Hirschfeld became part of Nazi propaganda as an evil degenerate Jew. He had been targeted with antisemitism for his entire career, despite not being an observant Jew since he was a child. Despite his death, the Nazis continued to use him as a symbol in antisemitic and homophobic propaganda. The flourishing field of sex research was shut down.

The Nazi party expanded Paragraph 175 to include anything that could be interpreted as homosexual in any way. Later on, German courts even upheld the idea that this applied to thoughts. Lesbians were not targeted as much as they were not viewed as such a threat to Aryan purity, but they still faced heavy stigma, as well as criminalisation in countries such as Austria. Trans women also faced threats due to the increased laws on homosexuality. Between 1933 and 1945, nearly 100,000 gay and bisexual men were arrested in Germany or in German occupied territories. About 50,000 were imprisoned, and 10-15,000 were sent to concentration camps and forced to wear a pink triangle, a symbol that has now been reclaimed by the gay community.

After the war

Paragraph 175 was repealed in 1950 in East Germany but remained part of the code until 1994 in West Germany. In the 2000s, the German government finally annulled the convictions of gay men who had been convicted under Nazi rule, and in 2017 pardoned a further 50,000 men, including those convicted after the end of WWII.

Hirschfeld was mostly forgotten about until the 1980s. However, their attempts to erase his legacy failed, with his work continuing in the USA. The Magnus Hirschfeld Federal Foundation was founded in 2011, studying and advocating for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. Hirschfeld’s surviving work is mostly held by the Kinsey Institute for Research on Sex, Gender and Reproduction. The Hirschfeld Society, founded in 1983, are looking to identify the items that survived the war and bring the collection back together in Berlin, rather than have them scattered around the world.

Today, a brown metal box marks the spot where the villa sat. However, it isn’t exactly right as when the plaque was installed in 1994, the new Federal Chancellery was being planned and they didn’t want the plaque to end up in a building site!

Trans history

Trans+ History Week was launched by We Are Queer AF a few years ago as a “reflective period to learn and celebrate the momentous and millenia-old history of transgender, non-binary, gender-diverse and intersex people”. Knowledge is the key to liberation, and history shows us where to not follow. Each year, they post the stories of trans people, written by trans people. Check out their page for more.

This hateful ideology is making a comeback. The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention says that “a fundamentalist gender binary was a key feature of Nazi racial politics and genocide”, comparing that same belief to the modern gender critical ideology. However, they can’t destroy that knowledge now. Burning books won’t remove our knowledge or history or remove trans people from society.

Trans+ people have always been here and will always be here. They are represented throughout history and across cultures all around the world. This is not a modern trend or caused by mental illness or by TikTok, trans+ people simply are, and now we can show that Hirschfeld was right, using modern ways of measuring innate and biological traits.

Trans inclusion is a basic human right and we will keep fighting for that. We know that we are on the right side of history and we must not lose hope. Things will improve and this will be just a blip; hate never wins for long.

We see you and we love you.

Happy Trans+ History Day