Pre-Nazi ruled Germany was the most liberal country in the world. Sexologists were advocating for the acceptance of gay and lesbian people and of inverts (an earlier form of what today we would call transgender). While anti-Semitism was still strong, there was a thriving Jewish culture in Germany, including a very active theater and music scene, some of the first anti-fascists were Jewish artists lampooning Hitler on stage. Black people from the U.S. who could moved to Germany because of the opportunities it afforded them. The social sciences and the hard sciences, especially technology flourished too.
This isn’t to say that Germany itself was a “good” country, it had brutally ruled colonies after all. But then again the U.S. also has colonies we just don’t call them that these days and instead of slavery and racial rule we have smiley faced neo-liberalism and puppet states.
This is just a warning that something can happen here like what happened in Germany. We’re not such a wonderfully progressive country with such great laws that fascism can’t sweep in and roll back all the civil rights that have been won over the decades since the Second World War.
Hitler himself said the only thing that could have stopped him was if the people smashed all the nuclueses of his movement when it began.
So let us smash all the developing organs of the modern fascist movement today so we don’t have to suffer under them tomorrow.
And let us not forget that we must go further than our anti-fascist forbears and destroy the systems that breathe life and pump blood into reactionaries: capitalism, the state, white supremacy, hierarchy, patriarchy, etc.
True true.
Though the historian in me raised an eyebrow at the term inverts as ‘an earlier form of what we call transgender’ while the moderm terms gay and lesbian are used without such context.
Magnus Hirschfeld and his colleagues at the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, used the word ‘invert’ to describe anyone of what we today call the LGBT community. They perceived this as a spectrum of being ‘inverted’, meaning ‘like the other gender’.
These doctor-activists, many of them selfidentified inverts, believed that invertedness was a spectrum of being ‘like the other gender’ that ranged from experiencing same-gender attraction to being effeminate, to cross dressing to needing social and/or medical transition to be happy. (And they argued that everything on this spectrum should be legal, safe and accepted).
They saw gayness as a form of genderdiversity and genuinely saw being LGB and T as much more one group than LGBT activists do today.
So ‘invert’ was used to refer to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. In practice the term invert was often used to describe gay and bisexual people while the word ‘transsexual’ was coined by Hirschfeld specifically to describe transgender people
Hirschfeld and his colleagues also fought for free health care, free and legal abortion and euthenasia, sex education, free std testing and women’s rights.
QueerAnarchism 