Berlin’s forgotten centre for trans activism.
In the 1920s, a fancy Berlin villa was home to a gay Jewish doctor who facilitated the very first gender-affirming surgeries. In the same building, communist leaders held secret meetings with anti-colonial guerrilla fighters. The Institute for Sexual Science was like something out of a Fox News fever dream.
Today only a small plaque along the Spree commemorates the villa where Magnus Hirschfeld carried out the first ever gender-affirming surgeries, and where secret anti-colonial communist meetings were held in.
In the 1920s, a villa in Tiergarten sat on the banks of the Spree, near where HKW now stands. It was home to Magnus Hirschfeld, the gay Jewish doctor who facilitated the world’s first gender-affirming surgeries. In the same building, communist leaders held secret meetings with anti-colonial guerrilla fighters. This was The Institute for Sexual Science, like something out of a Fox News fever dream.
On February 27, 1912, a 19-year-old was arrested in Weißensee for walking around in women’s clothing. The suspect was charged with Grober Unfug (public nuisance).
At the police station, the suspect had to be released. It turned out that Gerda von Zobeltitz, who had been assigned male at birth, was in possession of a so-called Transvestitenschein (transvestite pass), a permit from Berlin’s police chief allowing her to wear dresses. She had gotten a medical certificate from Dr Magnus Hirschfeld explaining that it was in her nature to wear dresses. In the language of the time, she was a “transvestite personality”, and even the Wilhelmine 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.
Way back in the 1890s, Hirschfeld had made a career out of treating people who didn’t fit into the rigid gender and sexual norms of imperial Germany. Hirschfeld’s Scientific Humanitarian Committee (WhK), the world’s first gay-rights group, launched a petition to abolish Germany’s law against male homosexuality, the infamous Paragraph 175.
