Resilience in Trans History

Text by Morrigan Fogarty

Image by Carme Ferrando Soriano

This article serves two purposes, equal in their nobility. The first is an explanation of history: an attempted uncovering of a revolutionary point in time that has had its records and annals destroyed by fascism. The second is wild self-indulgence and fascination. Fair warning, I will be mentioning suicide. This is an article about trans history, about the first woman to receive a vaginoplasty, and about Weimar Berlin.

On the first of July 1919, Magnus Hirschfeld inaugurated the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Tiergarten, Berlin. Its purpose was clear: to serve as a research centre and museum of sexology, the first in the world. Hirschfeld, a Jewish gay man, was already well known for his work running the Wissenschaftlich-humänitares Komitee, an organization dedicated to the rights and recognition of queer people. The Institut was studying primarily queer people, with a focus on the disquieting and distraught crossdressers and so-called “transvestites” that seemed to haunt the Weimar Republic. It was at first a purely medical place, here intended in a negative way. The patient's humanity was not a concern beyond a pathologised focus on  “correction”. Doctor Kronfeld, the head of the surgery department, in fact, was an advocate for “conversion therapy” in the case of transvestites. Homosexual love was accepted, but transition was not. This would soon change. 

A year after opening, a young World War I veteran stormed into the Institut armed with a loaded pistol and a bottle of morphine. They had been denied medical castration and had plans to kill themselves, but instead demanded the institute operate on them. The Institut accepted, but when one Doctor Richard Mühsam went to perform the procedure, he refused to amputate their penis, and instead sheathed it in the abdomen. The patient, who had not consented to this, suffered from complications and horrific internal erections, and demanded the surgery be undone. The veteran falls off of the historical record here, little is known about their life afterwards except a brief letter written years later:

“Health’s good, I am at peace with myself, absolutely.”

In 1924, the Weimar Republic converted the Institut into a nonprofit, and appointed Hirschfeld as head. The advocates of conversion therapy left, and Hirschfeld instead promoted  “milieu therapy”, which aimed not to correct but instead align the patient with who they wanted to be. The result of this approach was almost comical, doctors working at the Institut would now frequently write prescriptions telling their patients to attend queer bars in Berlin. This attracted queer people to the Institut, not only as patients, but also as doctors and nurses. There is a clear shift from Mühsam’s refusal to carry out surgery to Hirschfeld’s approach. Hirschfeld treated his patients with respect, and coined the word “transsexual” to describe people who wish to align themselves with a sex different than the one they were born with. It’s easy to see how such philosophy produced far more ethical results, and it led to Dora Richterova, a trans woman who lived and worked at the Institut, to receive the first vaginoplasty in 1931. 

I want to start Dora’s story here, as so often the tales we tell about trans people end with surgery, as if from the moment we wake up in a hospital gown our lives are over. As if we are nothing but our desire to transition, and that this desire ends with surgery. Dora had friends, two trans women named Charlotte Charlaque and Toni Ebel. The three of them worked for Hirschfeld, both before and after surgery, and lived together. Charlotte was Hirschfeld’s English translator, Toni was a painter. The Nazis wanted to kill them all.

These three names are evidence that the lives of Hirschfeld’s patients were known, they lived as trans women and were subject to the world. Hirschfeld was a persistent advocate, and under his direction the Institut would host the likes of Margaret Sanger, Walter Benjamin, and Ernst Bloch. In 1933, the Nazis came to destroy the institute archives. Countless records on the lives of trans people were destroyed, and the neighbouring queer institutes were sacked. The Nazis ran through the streets with an effigy of Hirschfeld's head on a pike. Hirschfeld, Charlotte, and Toni escaped. He would go on to tour in America and died in 1935 in France. Charlotte and Toni ended up in Bohemia where they wrote in exile. For a long time, it seemed like the Nazis had killed Dora.

In the 1939 census of Prague appears Dora Richterova. She was unmarried and worked as a lacemaker. Earlier, in 1934, the president of Czechoslovakia issued her a name change, making her legal name Dora Rudolfa Richterova. In 1946, ethnic Germans like Dora were expelled from Czechoslovakia, so she moved to Allersberg, Bavaria where she lived until 1966. Dora Richterova did not die at the hands of the Nazis. It’s hard to say what her life was like after 1933 as she existed in the margins of history, out of sight, but she existed and survived in spite of it all. The first trans woman to receive a vaginoplasty was not killed by fascism, she lived to be 74. Her life is now a mosaic, a puzzle to be pieced together, but one that paints a clear picture, that of the resilience and survivability of transgender people. The fascists tried to kill us almost one hundred years ago. It looks like they are trying again. In the memory of Dora I have this to say: they failed then, they will fail again.

ENDNOTES

• I use the name “Richterova” here to emphasise Dora’s Czech origins, the language adds -ova to female last names and while Dora herself was ethnically German it feels wrong to not include this touch as someone familiar with Czech naming conventions.

• I have much to thank for the works of Leah Tigers and her article “On the Clinics and Bars of Weimar Berlin” and the YouTuber Avelo’s video “How Berlin Became A Trans Utopia” I suggest engaging with both if you care about trans history.