i was curious abt the lives of these women, so i clicked the link and read the article, titled "Inside Out (Part 1)", from which the above picture is taken as well. i found it very insightful and incisive as to the politics of the institute, which receives so much uncritical acclaim on here, as well as to how the sexual politics of the weimar republic at large shaped the lives of the women who were its clients. i highly recommend reading it if you are interested in 20th century queer history at all. the article is available in audio form on the website, but below are a few excerpts i found particularly interesting.
Within a year a man (so-called), young, nervous, and ex-military, appeared before the Institute with a loaded revolver in one pocket, an overdose of morphine in the other, and elaborate plans to splash her brains on the clinic wall after doctors declined her medical castration. (Suicide was the greatest interwar German art, whose perfection measured in flamboyance; the soul of the new German democracy, raked with war debt and its imputation of guilt, played out in miniature by the will to life of its every civilian.) To her surprise the doctors accepted, foiling her glamorous death. On June 21, 1920, under referral by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, after extended psychoanalysis from Dr. Arthur Kronfeld, by the hand of Dr. Richard Mühsam ā Jews, all three ā she received a bilateral orchiectomy.
Despite all this motive, Dick Mühsam reported, āI could not bring myself to amputate the penis.ā Having refused a different patient orchiectomy the prior year, Richard was often a surgeon who could not bring himself to. Arthur, for his part, ran a mean conversion therapy spiced with the new Freudian science, which director Hirschfeld despised; one employee recalled Magnusās āabsolutely personal animosity toward the Professor Kr[onfeld]⦠He instinctively rejected everything from Kr.ās sphere of activity.ā Even Magnus, our champion against psychic conversion, held his early doubts:
āAt first I had strongly opposed these [surgical] methods, which I considered disastrous to wellbeing and otherwise deemed unnecessary⦠but the more I studied these individuals, I realized some were ready to commit suicide in the event their wish for sexual transformation went unsatisfied. So I told myself, I must surrender my hesitation.ā
So this once, in compromise, the patientās phallus was merely āsheathed,ā stripped to its columns of raw tissue and guided skinlessly through the body down a surgical canal at the perineum. Strange and painful internal erections followed. Little wonder this ātransvestite masturbator,ā as her surgeon named her, swore off transvestism and requested detransitional surgery four months later. Yet the Instituteās mission had executed nonetheless: the patient was now reporting in ravenous for life, well-adjusted to castration, a Sexualneurotiker no more! She, or he, had learned to regularly leave the house, then leave the whole damned country, writing from abroad to Dick their only words: āHealthās good. I am at peace with myself, absolutely.ā
It would fall to other women of the Institute, dismissively labeled āHirschfeldās transvestites,ā to receive a vagina, the enduring surgical invention of early trans clinical care. They decided this was possible after seeing the moving pictures. Dora Richter, at least, made appointment with Magnus already familiar with The Steinach Film, an hour-long advertisement from 1922 for a new surgical procedure so deliriously popular it became common all through that decade, on encountering a spry German man, to gossip of the monkey testicle presumed implanted in his abdomen: āHeās been steinached!ā This procedure, the film announced, was a āsolutionā to āthe ancient dream of eternal youth.ā Such propaganda of rejuvenation, of rebirth and virilization, answered fears of impotent and demilitarized German men.
More successful, more wealthy, more public than the Instituteās German girls, images of Liliās body circulated on many news rags abroad. Then, an image of her mind circulated in a 1931 literary biography under the pseudonym Lili Elbe. It is an egocentric text, a defense of Lili and Lili alone. On visit to the Institute she experienced, for the first time, a room full of other trans people: āThe manner in which they were conversing disgusted him [sic]; their movements, their voices, the way in which they were attired, produced a feeling of nausea.ā This was no editorial flourish. āIt did not suit the painter to be compared to little Ms. Dora ā a maid!ā recalled Ellen BƦkgaard, a feminist collaborator with Magnus on sexual reform. āHe [sic] did not like the Institute and they knew that down there.ā The feeling was mutual and lifelong, with Charlotte sneering in her recollections, āShe was a sissy boy,ā then invoking the figure of the gay flĆ¢neur, āalways roaming about the streets.ā āLili Elbe was very unhappy. So she went off with some little gay boy. Very stupid of her. Her former wife was also very stupid, to publish their story.ā
In 1929, Friedrich published his preferred collaborator, āthe transvestite named KƤthe Karl,ā writing of a āgroup that cannot be addressed as transvestites, though they don the clothes of the opposite sex.ā
āThey donāt do it out of inner need, but to do dirty business in clothing. I mean those hustlers who offer themselves up as prostitutes in womenās dress. They are mostly normal males, and morally inferior to their female counterparts. We reject all community with them, because the nature of their behavior is dangerous to other, real transvestites.ā
If the Weimar Republic was relatively lax about prostitution, and relatively lax about homosexuality, it was increasingly punitive at their confluence. The German Criminal Code recorded, āMale prostitution must ā on this there is universal agreement ā be opposed by all means⦠it is responsible for all the serious harm of same-sex fornication in the first place.ā The transvestite sex worker, assumed both most deceptive and most visible, emerged as the paradigmatic subject irreconcilable with the sexuality of a nominally liberal Republic.
If we end our critique of Berlinās trans clinic, the first in the world, with a memory of Berlinās trans sex workers, it is for this reason. Underserved by all but the most radical doctors, dually created by liberal financial precarity and incarcerated by liberal rule, it was they who were foremost targets among trans people for extermination under the Nazi program. Charlotte escaped; Toni escaped; poorer Doraās fate is unknown, but Charlotte claimed, in a comforting idyll, that years later she used cooking skills honed throughout her time at the Institute to open a restaurant in her rural hometown. Ossi Gades, who worked as dinner escort at Eldorado ā she did not escape. Caught outside in womenās clothes twice by Gestapo, she hanged herself in Plotzensee Prison to avoid deportation to labor camps. That is but one example.
Despite the Institute for Sexual Scienceās socialist, even communist tendency, whatever tepid liberalism it absorbed through its governing body made it suicidal as well. Its project for so-called āsexual intermediaries,ā to make us social creatures, was split between the disciplinary task of reconciling transgender subjects to the State, and the reformist task of reconciling the State to its transgender subjects. By this tactical split it could stand for neither, and neither came to pass. There is no greater reminder of this failed reconciliation with the Weimar Republic than the Nazi state which freely succeeded it, and there is no greater reminder of the failure of the Institute than the label of the small, black, triangular patches that state assigned in its death camps to some of its trans women, but more of its sex workers: āAsocial.ā
i would also like to note that nowadays "asozial" or in its shortened form "assi"/"asi" is a popular all-purpose german insult for people who are either visibly poor (often racialized immigrants) or rude of whose roots very, very few people are aware, as of the fact that sex workers, the homeless, day laborers, addicts, the clinically insane, pregnant/"difficult" teen girls, and other lumpenproletariat were persecuted, interned, and murdered at all under the "black triangle" ("schwarzer winkel") category at all. personally, i've rarely found companionship outside of the asocial milieu, and am proud of the friends i have had in it even if my own belonging to that milieu is somewhat dubious nowadays.