Ep. 57- Magnus Hirschfeld, the trans community, and the Nazis with Brandy Schillace

When the Nazis carried out their infanous and well-documented book burning on the Opernplatz in May 1933, the literal fuel for that fire came from Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science, an institution that both studied and provided treatment for LGBTQ Germans.

In this episode, I talked with Brandy Schillace about Hirschfeld, the struggle for gay rights in Weimar Germany, and the Nazi assault on the gay community as well as the connections between this homophobia and antisemitism and genocide.

Brandy Schillace, PhD is an independent historian and journalist.

Schillace, Brandy. The Intermediaries: A Weimar Story (2025)

Follow on Twitter @holocaustpod.
Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:00.924)
Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Holocaust history podcast. And today we are talking about, again, the Nazi relationship persecution of trans people, but also the larger history, media history of trans people in Germany. and also it's also wrapped into all kinds of other really interesting, movements, for example, for gay rights and things like that. And

I couldn't think of a better person to bring on talk about that than Brandy Scalace, who has just written a really amazing book called The Intermediaries about this. so Brandy, welcome to the podcast. Can you start by telling us a little about yourself and I guess how you got interested in this particular topic?

Brandy (00:41.045)
Thank you so much.

Brandy (00:47.124)
Sure. So I've had a career of various things. I was a professor for many years. I worked in a medical history museum. And as someone who is a medical and science historian, I matriculated out and now write trade, nonfiction, and also fiction books. But particularly, I focus on kind of unknown stories. So things that are on the fringes and edges, things that have been forgotten. And

Because I am someone who's also deeply interested in representation and social justice, naturally this was a subject that was very interesting to me. And the other important point about it is I hadn't really heard that much about the Institute for Sexology or Magnus Hirschfeld prior to doing a bit of research and then was so overawed by the story by

the characters by the spirit of it all that it became a really sort of mission driven book that I became interested in and it's been a work of a little over three years.

Waitman Beorn (01:51.14)
And I will, I will point out really quickly, particularly for the, the, the grad students and early career researchers and folks. this book has now become sort of my platonic ideal of a popular history because, Brandy uses footnotes. She cites historians. but it's incredibly readable and it tells a great story. So, you know, it's, it's definitely something to, to, to read for all the reasons, but if you need another one,

There is another reason.

Brandy (02:21.623)
There's also, because I was thinking a lot, I was a professor myself, I was thinking about professors, I was thinking about students, there's a timeline in the back that is quite comprehensive, possibly one of the most comprehensive ones. And in addition, I left short biographies of all the major characters because it's a book with so much going on in it that I thought that would be very helpful. There's a glossary, there's an index, there's the most comprehensive bibliography I've ever written in my life.

So it is very much with an eye to letting people find the original documents that I used while also giving you a very like sort of narrative kind of Star Wars story. feels like a Star Wars story to me. You know, it's like we're escaping the Empire and we're the Rebel Alliance.

Waitman Beorn (03:07.62)
Yeah, it's great. mean, it's absolutely and all those things are actually fundamentally great because, you know, you don't see that a lot in the trade books. And honestly, I don't I read I read some sometimes and they even buy, you know, great historians that I know. And I guess they've been told you can't have footnotes. And I just I guess I'm too much still in the in the nerdy academic world that I just I can't write a book. I couldn't write a book about footnotes. I just wouldn't feel I feel icky about it. I'd be like,

Brandy (03:32.141)
I fought quite, yeah, it was a fight. It was a fight to get that in there, but I just refused to give up.

Waitman Beorn (03:38.47)
Well, it's worth it's worth having it's it's it's paying off. So that is really so the Magnus Hirschfeld and his Institute are really kind of the the focal point of the book. But it also deals with issues that we'll talk about, you know, anti-Semitism, homophobia, fascism, the Nazis, censorship, gay rights, all these kinds of things. But can we before we get to all of those different things, can we just start by talking about a little bit about

Who's Magnus Hirschfeld? How does he get involved in this? Because as I understand it, it's kind of a new sexology and sex studies as a sort of academic discipline that's respected is a relatively new phenomenon at the time that he's getting involved in it. How does he find himself there?

Brandy (04:16.685)
Mm.

Brandy (04:26.593)
Right, well, the book itself, it covers a long period of time and it actually starts in the 19th century covering someone named Carl Ulrichs. Carl Ulrichs was one of the first people to start talking about homosexuality in a very open way. gave, he sort of outed himself in front of a legal body as a jurist, as a, he was a legal professional himself, which lost him his job, but he wrote a lot of

books and letters and things about what it meant to be homosexual and what it meant to feel like you were a man with a woman's soul. And partly it was that Hirschfeld had encountered these works. Hirschfeld was a son of a physician and he was Jewish and he was also homosexual. He was gay. He knew that from a very young age. He was very interested in literature. He had a very literate soul, I would say.

And he read voraciously and he had encountered the works of Karl Ulrichs and was fascinated. But at that time, at early time in his life, he hadn't really found a way to use that information necessarily. He was following in his father's footsteps. He was becoming a physician. He ultimately ends up practicing in a sort of a suburb of Berlin. I think it's Charlottesburg. I'm probably butchering the pronunciation. And he begins seeing patients. Now,

Herschel wasn't out as a gay man, as it would be quite dangerous and you would lose your job and lots of other bad things could happen to you. But my assumption is that he must have been very safe for people to express their own sexuality to him, even at this early stage. And what ultimately happens is he has a patient he's been seeing, he's been treating him, the patient has been depressed, there's been some other issues.

It just so happens that the patient is getting married and he commits suicide on his wedding night. Sometimes Hirschfeld says it was the day after, but the point was it was the marriage itself that was the cause, basically one of the causes. And Hirschfeld receives a letter after the man's death sent to him. And it's basically a kind of a suicide note where he says to him, look, I can't marry this woman. I'm homosexual.

Brandy (06:51.053)
And he had known the woman since childhood and he was partly feeling like he couldn't live a lie anymore. He didn't want to make his parents ashamed, but neither did he want to yoke this woman and what he considered would be a loveless marriage. He thought there was no way out. And so because he couldn't live openly, he took his own life and he asked Hirschfeld directly in this letter, can't you do something? Isn't there something you can do to make the world a more safe and fair place for people like me?

And Hirschfeld cites this as the inciting incident. He feels as though that set him on the path. And he begins by settling up something called the Scientific Humanitarian Committee. But essentially, he starts on this journey to try and overturn the laws that make homosexuality illegal. But in addition to that, spreading the understanding, which is born out of endocrine science in these early days, that

Homosexuality must not be sin. It must be natural. It must be a natural, diverse phenomenon. He studied Darwin, so for him, he's thinking about this in an evolutionary sense. And at first, he didn't have the kind of science to back it up. There wasn't any. This is pre-Enderkron theory. But it's coming. People are starting to work on these things. They're starting to be curious about secretions and starting to think, well, what if it's not the brain and nerves?

that determine everything about your body? What if there's these small, invisible things in your body, all over through your body, that are also pulling the strings? And one of the things that I think is very fascinating, I talk about this in the book, is that we went from a kind of God brain making all the decisions, morality, religious understanding, to an understanding that something as small as hormones coming from other parts of your body could actually influence.

the future. And it's a very proletarian idea at a time when Germany is experimenting with its first republic. and Hirschfeld was very much of the republic and really excited about the Weimar. So all of those things kind of work together to create this incredible mission for Hirschfeld. so from the, but it starts quite early in his life.

Waitman Beorn (09:12.85)
And so how does he get to, I mean, he becomes this really, I think, sort of towering figure in these studies and the Institute becomes sort of his headquarters, but also as we'll talk about, you know, the sort of focal point for all kinds of different people coming for all kinds of different reasons. How does that develop? I because I'm suspecting that at some point, you know, he needs a great deal of legitimacy in a certain sense to build, you know,

both physically but also metaphorically, huge sort of center in Berlin.

Brandy (09:48.888)
He does, and he relies on science for that. So I'm a historian of science and medicine, and so much of my book talks about the way science provided this backing for Hirschfeld. And it's very odd because it starts with some very weird experiments, like transplanting rooster testicles and things. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (10:09.842)
I was going to mention that one. was like, that was like so cool, though. Really quickly, give us that one, because again, it's it's one of those things you're reading it you're like, what? And then you're like, oh, and then of course, this comes back, you know, it comes back and it comes back.

Brandy (10:20.139)
Right. Yeah, it does. It's such a weird idea. It starts with a man named Berthold, and Berthold has this deep desire to understand how puberty works. Like, how is it that you go... He experimented on chickens. How is it that a chick turns into a hen or a rooster? And again, the going understanding was that the brain was making all these decisions. I have... Right. yes. Way, way...

Waitman Beorn (10:45.218)
this of course is pre-DNA and pre sort of you know knowing from the womb what someone's going to sort of end up being yeah yeah

Brandy (10:50.645)
Right, yeah, I no idea what chromosomes are yet. It's coming, but it's in this period, but it hasn't happened yet. And the question is, are you deciding? Is your brain doing all of this stuff? Are nerves doing all of this stuff? And I just have to mention that it's one of the ways they villainized anything that they considered was quote unquote not normal, right? Not German, not whatever. was because they said, well, it's a choice, because it's a moral choice.

It's coming from your brain. You're making a choice.

Waitman Beorn (11:20.464)
And this is, this is, I want to point out something that just popped in my head that I think is really interesting. it's a book that, it's a book that I always plug. It's kind of weird, but there's a book by Paul Lerner called Hysterical Men about, essentially about PTSD and you know, it's evolution in the immediate sort of world of one era. And it's interesting because now I'm thinking that's how the German psychologist viewed PTSD as well. like, it's a moral, it's a moral thing. You're not, weak.

Brandy (11:45.34)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That you were choosing this. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (11:49.778)
mentally whereas the british psychologist and to be more of this is a reaction to something that's happened to anyway sorry it does that they can be a connection there

Brandy (11:49.899)
Mm-hmm.

Brandy (11:55.478)
No, it's true. There is a connection there because you had, I mean, it makes sense, right? We had kings and proletarian, you had people who were in the king position who believed in a religion with God in that same position. I mean, there's a lot of top-down hierarchy that's kind of going on. And if you are saying that that's true, then any choice you make becomes a moral one and not a natural one. But at the same time, there was an understanding that nature could not be immoral.

So you've got this nature versus religion kind of back play, right? Now you have Berthold. Berthold going, how do we get, how do we turn into roosters, right? And he had this idea. His idea was to take testicles out of a rooster and then put them back in the rooster. And you're thinking to yourself, what was the point of that? Well, he severs them from where they live and he re-implants the testicle in the same rooster in its abdomen, in its stomach, guts, essentially.

Waitman Beorn (12:25.938)
Mmm.

Brandy (12:52.289)
And he does this because there's no nerve connection there. So he thinks, okay, if it's nerves making you go through puberty, and I have severed all the nerves, but I've kept the testicle inside of you, right, then it should stop. You shouldn't go through puberty. Meanwhile, as a test case, he took some testicles out of other young pre-roosters and didn't put them back in to see what would happen to them. And the ones with no testicles did not develop into roosters. As a matter of fact, what we know today, we call them capons, right? And they look like big hens, and they're sort of...

Waitman Beorn (13:01.318)
that should stop.

Brandy (13:21.953)
big and fluffy and hen-like and they don't get combs and they don't crow and they don't get the tail feathers. But the rooster he re-implanted the testicle into, into the guts, did turn into a rooster and did all the roostery things that roosters do. So afterwards he does an anatomy, or I'm sorry, he dissects the rooster to find out, so the nerves must have regrown somewhere, right? But they didn't, there's no nerve fiber anywhere. There's blood vessels, there's vascular tissue.

And he starts thinking, so nerves aren't making you go through puberty. Somehow there's something, some secretion, they love this word, it's such a gross word. They love this word though, secretions are flooding your body and somehow telling you to become a rooster, if you are rooster inclined. And this is such a strange idea. And it seems to go against everything else that science is saying. But what's hilarious is Spirit Hold goes, huh, and then just drops it, like he quits working on it.

it doesn't get picked up for years later. And it ends up coming to the fore with a man named Starling, who's actually British, who's doing work not on roosters or testicles, but on the way salivatory glands and stomach secretions work. And he basically re-engineers a similar kind of experiment and discovers the same thing, that nerves are not doing this, that some other thing inside the body, something tiny and visible, I call it the science of small things, is

radically altering the behavior of the body. And if it's not the brain doing it, this starts to really destabilize this concept of the God mind making all the decisions. And it's partly that that starts to undergird and provide this incredible foundation for Hirschfeld to say, this is nature, this is natural diversity. If it's nature, you can't criminalize it. We all agree that nature is not moral or amoral. It's simply nature, right?

And as a result, he feels there's no need, in fact, it's completely illogical to have punishments for someone whose small secretions have altered the way they behave in the world. Because he really felt that somewhere in these secretions was partly what made you more masculine or more feminine. And I should say, not everything that Hirschfeld comes to believe is actually ultimately scientific truth.

Brandy (15:45.752)
But it was leading him to truth and he was somebody who was really able to change his mind as he learned new things. But early on he was like, okay, so these hormones must be somehow responsible for you being the person that you are. And so you can be born a certain way. You could be born homosexual. It's not a choice, you're simply this way. And that was incredibly freeing because suddenly people were realizing that they weren't doing anything wrong. And...

you you understand how many homosexuals died because they felt they had no choice. And Hirschfeld refused to call it suicide in the traditional sense because he felt that it was not self-murder, which is the way it's translated in German, because he's like, these are not people who think they're making a choice between life and death. They think they're making a choice between suffering and ending suffering.

And he's like, it's not the same thing. They are murdered, but they're not self-murdering. Like the society, they're victims of society. And he talks about that. So he does become this towering figure, but he becomes it not by championing rights from a social standpoint, which some other people do, even people who are in his society, but championing it from a scientific standpoint. And he publishes like a

like he writes and he writes and he basically becomes the most, the premier expert on sexuality. And that's why he embraces sexual science, which it was called before, it wasn't called endocrine science originally, it was called sexual science, which was part of endocrine science, which was also looking at other hormones in the body. And it's through that.

people, then there's no one else doing it really, and not to the same degree. I there are other people, Kraft Ebbing and some other folks, but he is like the new star on the block. He has all these publications and not only that, he bases his work in massive surveys. Like he is trying to find everyone that he can to interview them and to create this enormous compendium of data that you simply, he thinks if he has enough data, you just can't argue with it.

Brandy (18:06.903)
because, and he says this a lot, that you can go through science to justice. And that's really where he makes his mark to say, this is why you should believe me. I am looking at science.

Waitman Beorn (18:21.074)
Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really good point because, you know, one of the things that we see throughout both the book, but also the history, and I think you make this point too, is that science by itself sort of isn't good or bad. It's just, it can be a path to lots of different end goals, many of which, as we know, are not good morally, you know, or ethically. And here you have someone that is

That is, it's interesting because I guess one of the things that came through about Hirschfeld is that even though he clearly has like skin in the game personally, because he's gay himself, he's also quite, I don't know if unbiased is the right word, but he's rigorous in sort of his approach to both the science and the study, in the ideology sense and the study of.

Brandy (19:06.957)
Mm.

Waitman Beorn (19:15.826)
But also he's also very much in the activist sense too. So he really has like a foot in both camps because the, the con the sort of social context for homosexuality in this time period in Germany, in legal sense is this paragraph 175 that is sort of the, it's sort of like the, bugaboo throughout his existence. He's always trying to joust with it and, and get it to be altered or repealed. And maybe we can talk a little bit about, about that.

and then come back to sort how the Institute develops into what it is.

Brandy (19:49.166)
But just a quick note to something you just said a little bit earlier, which is science is not apolitical, is I think the biggest thing. I like to talk in the book about the fact that while the word hormone was coined in 1905, we were just getting the concept of genetics in 1905 as well. And gene science, which is a real science, genetics is real science, also gave birth to the pseudoscience eugenics, which ultimately gets picked up by the Nazis.

and does horrible, horrible things. And it's a manipulation of scientific data that ultimately does horrible harm. And I think it's fascinating that two types of science, two scientific things are discovered around the same time. One leads people to thinking perhaps homosexuality shouldn't be illegal and we should accept people for diversity. And the other one says, if you don't look the way we think you should look, you're a life not worth living.

So it's just astonishing, but it's a really good case study of saying science doesn't speak for itself. So Hirschfeld has to speak for it.

Waitman Beorn (20:50.212)
And especially the legal pace of it too, right? Because you mentioned earlier that in the context of homosexuality, his argument is, if it's natural, if it's a genetic, he wasn't thinking of genetics, but if it's sort of a natural condition, then we can't outlaw it because that's wrong. And it wasn't he necessarily, I guess we can talk about his eugenics relationships as well. But ultimately, not just the Nazis, the Americans at the Cold Harbor Institute and everything else.

are making legal decisions saying legally you aren't allowed to procreate or whatever based on precisely the same. I mean, they often got it wrong, you know, things like promiscuity, single moms, alcoholism, but they thought they were genetic for the, they're making the same argument, right? That these are genetic. These are natural things, just like Hirschfeld was saying homosexuality is, but we can actually outlaw them. And to the extent that Nazis.

And the Americans are certainly set. We can outlaw you being alive with these things.

Brandy (21:48.078)
Well, it's really fascinating because Hirschfeld inadvertently provides ammunition to the other side because he's this expert. Actually, it's really clear. There's a trial, the Julemberg trial, where Wilhelm's right-hand fellow Julemberg is accused of having a homosexual relationship with Moltke by a journalist named Harden. You guys can see why I've done all of these bios in the back. There's a lot of names. And Hirschfeld is called onto the stand.

And he means to provide support to Jullenberg and Moltke, but he ends up accidentally creating a situation where they twist something he says. He's saying, well, you know, it could be that somebody has homosexual tendencies and doesn't even know it, but it doesn't matter because it's natural. And they went, aha, there are secret homosexuals. Like it was immediately just taken and twisted. And.

Waitman Beorn (22:42.838)
homosexuals then thereby shouldn't be involved in government because it's an automatic vulnerability, et cetera.

Brandy (22:46.497)
Right.

and it's secret and they don't even know it. And so now you can accuse people who have displayed no affinity. They just used it as way of getting rid of people they didn't want. became what Hirschfeld even describes it basically as a gay panic after this. And he is inadvertently part of that. And it happens again with the Nazis. The more he reveals how this is just natural, you can be born this way.

the more you have people on the other side going, well, we should get rid of the people born that way so that we don't spread it. right. And it's funny, there are people out there who suggest that in the Nazi era, nobody knew what transgender was. That's completely a lie. Hirschfeld had coined the term intermediaries to talk about people who we now call transgender, and who he actually at his institute performed actual

Waitman Beorn (23:18.192)
and then it won't be there anymore.

Brandy (23:44.022)
surgeries and hormone therapy and everything to facilitate gender transition. And he popularized it. So in fact, yes, the Nazis, they knew who transgender people were because of Hirschfeld. So he was so popular that he almost changed history. almost got, well, he did change history, but he almost got people in Berlin to finally accept gays and lesbians and transgender people.

He missed it by, I mean, it's amazing. The book talks so many times, they came so close. But in missing that, the other side took that information and used it to target homosexuals and lesbians and transgender people. so, you know, it's one of those things, his very stature of being so knowledgeable and so well known also made him and everyone he supported a target. mean, Hitler called him the most dangerous Jew in Germany.

at one point. I mean, that's astonishing. the book burnings, they were burning the library. People see those footage and they don't know what they're burning, but that just goes to show you how much the Nazis knew what he was up to and hated it, you know.

Waitman Beorn (24:56.198)
Yeah. so with one of the things that's interesting, you know, is, is again, his work with paragraph one 75, which is the law outlawing homosexual behavior in a certain sense, broadly defined. mean, and then even more broadly defined ultimately, right. Can you talk a little bit about that in the context? Because one of the things that's fascinating, you I think you didn't use the word, but I mean, there's, sort of an intersectionality of.

Brandy (25:08.823)
broadly defined.

Right.

Waitman Beorn (25:26.256)
of gay activists. So you have like Hirschfeld, but you also have like these kind of like fascist, misogynistic, the, so-called masculinists, right? That are like, we were, we're looking for gay rights, but not for like the effeminate gay people, because that's just not okay. And, and it's, again, it's kind of mirrors this, socialist communist not being able to work together to defeat the Nazis in the political side thing.

Brandy (25:31.915)
Hehehehe

Brandy (25:36.172)
Right.

Brandy (25:42.39)
Yeah.

Brandy (25:49.044)
Mm-hmm. It does. And so much of it comes down to one of the questions the book asks early on is how do we first begin to hate? Where does hate come from? How does it happen? And a lot of it comes down to division, but even more of it comes down to what we would today call toxic masculinity, right? It was this concept that, and again, in the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution changed relationships in a lot of ways. Suddenly you had

women in the workforce, had women going, why don't I have rights like everyone else? Why don't? And the more there was agitation for that, the more there was a backlash to that. And you had people who had grown up under patriarchy being told that they were super special little men who had all the power. And they didn't want to lose any of that. And it's like the joke where people say, human rights aren't pie. If someone else has some, it doesn't mean there's less for you. But they really felt that they were being stolen from.

And this was rhetoric you saw a lot in Wilhelm's, in the time of Wilhelm, but also afterwards. It's this concept that somehow I'm being stolen from by these people who are not like me. And so it's patriarchy, but it's also a kind of xenophobia. It's really interesting, this fear that becomes hatred. And they attacked anyone they thought was too feminine. That meant they were attacking women, but they also attacked gay men.

they attacked trans women. They changed the terminology a couple times through the course of history. So at one point, people we now call trans women would have been considered trans men. It all switches around. quite hard to keep track of. So I did it for you, don't worry. But they thought they were too feminine. And they called Jewish people too feminine. They said Jewish men are effeminate and they are corrupting our young

Waitman Beorn (27:40.412)
Mm-hmm.

Brandy (27:44.696)
good German masculine boys. And so they literally created these, von der Vogel, these boys clubs, which were supposed to safely usher German boys into uber-mench masculine adulthoods safe from women and Jews and gay people, while at the same time taking a bunch of pubescent boys and sticking them in the woods together without supervision.

Waitman Beorn (28:09.428)
to do like shirtless gymnastics and stuff and like, yeah.

Brandy (28:11.181)
Yeah, you know, naked bathing. It's not gay. Anyway, they just had this concept that femininity was the problem and anyone who looked too feminine was weak. so this masculinist culture leaked over into lots of other areas. And so you had men who were in fact homosexual, who were in love with other men, who were in fact quite misogynistic, who didn't like women.

Friedlander and Adolf Brand, these are people who knew Hirschfeld, who were in his circle, were sometimes were frenemies, I guess. And Friedlander said, we must escape the tyranny of women who couldn't vote or do anything. Who knows why he thought that was tyrannical. But he was a homosexual man and somebody who believed that gay men who were effeminate and transgender people were like.

just as bad as women. So you have these divisions that were sewed by that masculinist sentiment, that sense of fear of the other. And it picks up xenophobia, it turns into anti-Semitism. Like it's amazing how quickly Brand and Friedlander and many of these other guys who started off knowing Hirschfeld, were later happy to throw him under the bus as a Jewish person.

and saying, you know, well, I'm distancing myself from that kind of gay man or that kind of Jew. Some of the other folks were Jewish too, but they also were drawing lines like, well, I'm not. And some of it was because they thought they'd be countenanced by the Nazis. They thought that these uber-Mensch, masculine Nazis would go, okay, yeah, we're all the same. We're all into masculine stuff. It's all good. They were radically wrong. Like they were expunged just like everyone else, but they thought somehow they were going to get a piece of the pie that no one else was going to get.

And that division is ultimately why some of it's why they weren't able to overturn paragraph 175. There were fractures that simply couldn't be healed. They kept trying to come together to do things and it would fall apart over these divisions. And of course, a lot of the misinformation being pushed by the Nazis was aimed at trying to make those divisions happen. So they were trying to divide these folks. Unity was not something they wanted. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (30:26.64)
Well, one of the things that's really interesting that you bring about, that you mentioned in the book, that's probably surprising to lot of folks is that, you know, there are people like, I think it was like the Berlin police commissioner, you know, in charge of this kind of thing, who was actually all for, in a certain sense, all for gay rights and all for repealing paragraph 175. And he wasn't sort of your stereotypical, like touchy, lefty liberal guy. But he was legitimate. was...

actually interested in repealing 175.

Brandy (31:00.937)
He was. mean, had reasons for it too. mean, partly they wasted a lot of police resources chasing around people for who they were sleeping with when he, I mean, that he didn't really feel like that was a good use of manpower. And yet that was something they were having to do. So, I mean, he was of the mind that it should, I do believe he believed it, but also for practical reasons, it would have made sense for him to not really want to have to make that thing that the police were in charge of, you know.

Waitman Beorn (31:28.274)
Yeah, absolutely. mean, it gets to it. We move a little bit into the Nazi period here. But one of the things that I think is interesting in a certain sense is that many of the Nazis, particularly like the super homophobic ones like Himmler and those folks, they sort of espouse the so-called disease theory of homosexuality, right? Which is this idea that that you sort of have carriers, like really bad people who are like the again, like the the seducers, the groomers, whatever you want to call them.

Brandy (31:47.885)
Mm.

Brandy (31:53.056)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (31:58.386)
And they spread homosexuality. And those are the really bad ones. But if you're not, if you're kind just one of the other people that is quote infected, it's actually curable. And you see this with some really weird cases. know, like when I was doing my book on the German army, I was looking through the, there's a whole thing on sex crimes. And obviously I wasn't looking really for homosexual stuff. I was looking for sexual assaults against Jewish women.

Brandy (32:11.725)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (32:27.954)
I read through it and you know, there are there there's so many guys in the German army who have gay sex. And then when they're called to the court, they just say, look, I was just really horny and I'm not gay and I won't do it again. then the German the German military courts are like, OK, you know, and the people and the people that the only people that really get sort of punished, at least in the German military justice system, were like the ones that are like habitual. Like you're doing this a lot or you are like, you know,

Brandy (32:45.889)
Hehehehe

Waitman Beorn (32:57.414)
doing it to younger boys or something, you're kind of the seducer aspect, which in a certain sense, it goes against everything that Hirschfeld is also arguing, right? Because he's saying it is not sort of a coercion kind of thing. It's a natural who you are.

Brandy (33:06.711)
Right.

Brandy (33:10.443)
No. Well, and we have a couple of interesting points, right? So going back to Carl O'Ricks, he was very young when he first realized he was homosexual. And his sister asked him, well, who did this to you? And he's like, No one. Like, we live in the middle of nowhere. We live in this little town. I've never even met another gay person. know, the same is true of the transgender person. The main character that I follow in the book, Dora Richter, who is

the first trans woman to undergo reaffirming surgery in the way that we normally think about it in the modern sense. And she grew up in Siphon in this tiny little village on the mountains and she'd never met another trans person. She'd never met another gay person. But from the time she was a toddler almost, very, very young, she thought of herself as a woman and as a girl and spent all of her life trying to achieve that.

there was no one that she caught it from. So there were cases that just disproved that even in the period. But Hirschfeld did understand that there was flex. I was astonished to find how early the concept of gender fluidity really was. Because he talks about military, he talks about homosexuals and various other folks in the war period. And he says, it's not unheard of that

a bunch of fellas who are with each other and not with their spouses might have, you know, urges, needs that are met in certain ways. And he didn't even necessarily just mean sexually, but just the companion ability, the softness that, you know, he talks about very uber sort of masculine, I keep using the word uber, but trust me, so did they. Very masculine soldiers might befriend a somewhat more feminine, more

Waitman Beorn (34:56.114)
Yeah.

Brandy (35:02.945)
you know, traditionally maternal or whatever soldier and that that would be like his wife, kind of like his work wife, I guess. And that he felt that that was, you know, a natural thing and that in his many of his surveys sort of denoted that people didn't live on one side or the other. There wasn't like the ultimate man and the ultimate woman. Those were myths. And instead we all were kind of in this this array in between. And he said at one point there were

41 million sexual and gender combinations, which is a lot of combinations frankly. I think it might even have more than that. So it's fascinating to see that he understood that there were situational things, but yet he deeply believed that you were born a certain way and that therefore there's no reason to criminalize it at the same time.

Waitman Beorn (35:56.731)
Yeah, and I think that's the other interesting point, you know, that moves along with this is the period that immediately precedes the Third Reich, which is the Weimar period, which arguably sees a great deal of openness or tolerance for

all different kinds of sexuality, including, you know, political rights for women and things like this. Can you talk a little about that and sort of how he fits into that period and then, you know, what effect that has, I suppose, in the Nazi worldview as well?

Brandy (36:19.169)
Mm-hmm.

Brandy (36:35.671)
So the Weimar period really, I mean, he was so important to it that he actually gives a speech on the first day of the kind of, you know, the moment in which they are coming together as the new republic. And he's a very integral figure. He knew a lot of the people, the social democrats that were in charge at the time. It's partly why he was able to substantiate the Institute for Sexuality, Institute for Sexual Science. And he'd already bought a building, but now it's

It becomes an actual organization recognized by the government. And that simply wasn't really possible before. he sees the Republic as, again, this way of democratizing more than just the political situation. That if it's an everybody coming together to govern ourselves and to be part of what it means to be German, then into his mind, that was also a welcome opening

to diversity, to immigrants, to all sorts of people. he ends up, though he does have a falling out with Brand and the masculinists, he ends up aligning himself with feminists instead. And he actually joins forces with Helene Stoker and lots of other women who are angling for more rights for women, including reproductive rights. I mean, I didn't realize how early the concept of a, you know,

your right to abortion or your right to be a single mother, etc. were on ballots, so to speak. And he was part of all of that. And this was just a time period where there was a great flourishing. I have to say the Wilhelm period had not actually as much censorship as you might think. It was a very, very publishing frenzy. Like they published a lot of Oscar Wilde's work in German after it was banned in England. So it was a very, very open publication place.

They had their own printing press. They were dropping leaflets. I mean, this was a big deal. And he was using everything that he thought was possible in this new permissive era. And he thought it was permanent. mean, the speech he gives is so heartwarming, but also kind of deeply, you know, he doesn't understand his own foreshadowing, right? He's like, and this will carry on for all time. We will be a beacon of hope. And it's like, well, not really. But they were close. I...

Brandy (38:59.743)
I don't think people realize how close people, mean, Hirschfeld as a Jewish man and lots of the other people involved in the Institute were Jewish. were. Levi Lenz was a surgeon. had these folks who were, I think it makes sense that they were the ones involved. They were people who had taken to Germany as their homeland, often coming from somewhere else. And they felt a renewed sense that they could shape the future under the Weimar. And they were very progressive.

They did so much good and they came so close to making it stick, basically. it's a, I think we can take a lot of hope from it now when we're seeing similar kinds of things starting to crop up and to know that this is a fight that we have been fighting and that we'll continue to fight.

Waitman Beorn (39:51.063)
Yeah, I as we think about that why does the why does the ultimate fight to repeal 175 fail I almost seems like they ran out of time almost but

Brandy (40:03.565)
Yeah, it's a lot of things. I again, there's a reason why I weave the story so historically, because if the Treaty of Versailles hadn't destabilized the Berlin, the government of, or I'm sorry, the economy of Germany, some things might not have happened. If there hadn't been an incursion from the French in the, you know, the, the Ruhr Valley,

some of this might not have happened. Like there was a whole lot of things. I have a chapter actually that's called 1924 or yeah, 1924 and Four Acts or something like that, I think. Because I'm basically saying like there's these big things, these four actions that happen simultaneously and around the edges that destabilize the Weimar to a point where it becomes harder and harder to make the progressive strides that Hirschfeld wants to do. And they still came close.

Waitman Beorn (40:37.788)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Brandy (40:59.403)
Like even after a lot of this was, you know, the outrageous inflation where you had people trying to get their wages and they had to take it home in a wheelbarrow because it wasn't worth anything. know, this was just a really unstable time. I think I compare it a little bit when I was I was doing some of the writing, of course, during the pandemic lockdown. And I thought it was a similarly destabilized time, you know, to in there because of radically altering cultural norms. And

even then they were able to get really, really close. the infighting of between the divisions between the socialists and the communists, you know, the infighting between the various groups who should have been coming together to fight the right, the fact that the right was so unified and it was unified around misinformation, which that's, that's kind of the thing people often miss is that

You can be homogeneous if you are lying. If you're telling the truth, it's much harder to be homogeneous because you're trying to look at all the aspects and all of the avenues and angles. But yeah, so they were solidifying while other places seem to be fracturing. And so, you know, it literally can, in fact, they even published a newspaper saying that they had overturned paragraph 175 and had to retract it because they thought that they had. That's how close they came.

Waitman Beorn (41:57.144)
Yeah.

Brandy (42:22.301)
And then, of course, the destabilization continues and we ultimately end up with the Third Reich.

Waitman Beorn (42:30.458)
Yeah. And before we get to third rank, even though I, you know, I want to go there. can we talk about the Institute itself? Because it's, it's much, much more than a sort of stuffy archive slash, you know, medical research building. I mean, it's, it seems much more like it's like a coworking space, but it's like a community hub. I mean, almost like a coffee shop. I mean, there's, there's so much going on there. And then of course there's, you know, really important.

Brandy (42:43.446)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (42:58.138)
people that are kind of floating in and out of it. Can you talk just a little bit, give us a sense of the Institute itself as a both as a place but also as kind of a hub.

Brandy (43:08.727)
So it was located on Tier Garden. So it's a big public garden and on the square. And it was a palatial residence, a huge building that had been owned by, I think, a sort of violin player or some musician. It was gorgeous inside. mean, think of Disney, right? It was like a palace. had big, the windows had like carved finials. And it was just this gorgeous place with terraces and its own garden and its courtyard.

And inside, they had a library, they had counseling rooms, they did therapy, they did communal events, they had a ballroom, they gave presentations, they showed movies, they did educational films, they did classes. And it wasn't just that homosexuals and transgender people went there, they did marriage counseling, they did fertility treatments.

They did social support. They helped people get jobs. I mean, it was such a massive enterprise. It was doing so much in this beautiful space, ultimately providing homes for a number of people, including, and I mentioned earlier that Hirschfeld was a fan of the arts and literature. And so you have Christopher Isherwood is there and W.H. Auden is there and Conrad Voigt, who was in Cabinet of Caligari.

He performs in a film that, Not Like the Others, which is a film that Hirschfeld made to sort of publicize what it was like to be homosexual and a reason to get rid of paragraph 175. And he used to go to the balls and there'd be photographs of this actor just hanging out with all of these transgender and gay folks all dressed up for ball time. They had meals together. They had a huge dining area. They had.

were nurses, there were doctors, there were surgeons, they did hair removal treatments, they did hormone therapy. I I was utterly astonished at the sheer number of things that happened at the institute. And I thought, this is the most modern place I've ever come across. And it was massive.

Waitman Beorn (45:17.33)
Yeah, I and I think that's one of things that comes through also that's important is that it's this community hub of sort of acceptance and tolerance. this is one of the things that is lost for a very long time because it bears mentioning for our listeners that paragraph 175 stays on the books, I think, until the 90s.

In Germany 80s late late 80s. I mean, you know, and it's it's one of those things that Even after the war There are people for example gay men who have a very difficult time getting any kind of compensation for their suffering under the Nazis because technically They're still criminals, you know, technically that they were actually convicted of an actual crime and and that that often put anyway, but

Brandy (45:46.497)
I think 80s, but yeah, I mean, in some form it was still, yeah, it was still there.

Brandy (46:09.602)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (46:15.562)
I think that that that's important too. You know, and as we start to, as we move toward the Nazi period, you know, what, what, what happens? I mean, there's, guess there's sort of two real phases. sort of have the 19, you know, 23 to 33 time period where the sort of the Nazis are building. And then we have 33 on when they're in charge or is anyone worried about the Nazis in the internet, in the,

Brandy (46:18.016)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (46:43.988)
the Weimar period before before 1933.

Brandy (46:47.191)
This story feels very strange to be writing as an American who watched Donald Trump get elected in 2016. And then again, later, because no one thought he would. Everyone was like, well, I mean, sure he can run. And oddly enough, there was a lot of talk about Hitler this way as well.

You know, they were like the guy with the weird little mustache, the guy who looks like Charlie Chaplin. Come on, you know, and people called him a clown and they didn't take him seriously. So not as such, not originally, at least people watched him kind of agitating and thought, well, it's a small vocal minority. You know, we don't really have to be worried about that, but they really underestimated how charismatic he was. I read a fascinating account by a Jewish man who was in a room.

where Hitler gave a speech against Jewish people. And he talked about even he felt weirdly compelled to believe him. And he said it was like being under a spell. And this is a man who was Jewish listening to this and going, I don't understand why I'm having why this is having this effect. So he was really, really captivating as a speaker. I mean, and this was something that people just underplayed and they didn't even realize it when he went for his trial after the putsch.

where he tried the beer hall putch where he tries to do the coup. And there was an American journalist there. And when Hitler stands up and walks up to the thing, the American journalist is like, he looks like a salesman, like, you know, like, no one took him seriously. So in a sense, no, not at first. It was only after they started joining for you had the the free corpse, the free booters, the which is kind of like a militia. Also very masculine as you had you had him picking up various

folks, which would ultimately lead to the brown shirts and the storm troops and etc. And it was only as he was coalescing these things, well after the Beer Hall Putsch actually, that people started to worry. And you started, I quoted several letters that went back and forth between people in Britain, instance, know, higher ups going, you know, maybe we should keep an eye on this guy. And in Germany, think Hirschfeld understood that he was dangerous.

Brandy (49:07.669)
because Hirschfeld had been targeted. Hitler basically had a hit out on him. They nearly killed Hirschfeld once. They attacked him twice. They nearly killed him once to the point that his death was reported in the papers and he read his own obituary after he recovered. He understood that he was dangerous. He understood that he needed to leave Germany and he did leave Germany ahead of

any of these things taking place. And he knew he would never come back. And it's deeply sad because he loved Germany. He loved Germany. But I think to a point, people just thought it can't happen here like that. Christopher Isherwood talks about the day after, you know, in 1933, and they'd sort of taken over. And he talks about suddenly, you know, walking down the streets, which are now draped in

red banners with the swastika and listening to propaganda being played over the radio and watching people just sit at cafes. He's like, just sitting at cafes like we always sit at cafes, kind of dissociating and not really realizing what had just happened. And he himself feeling like he wanted to do something, but also felt completely powerless to do anything. so it's strange. think people often assume that Nazis come to power.

by tanks running down the streets. And they don't realize that Nazis come to power in the decades leading up to tanks running down the streets. And that's why we have to be so vigilant now. That's why we have to be so aware. It's why the attacks on transgender people matter so much. What people don't often realize is that the Nazis used attacks on gays, lesbians, and transgender people, then called intermediaries, as a practice run.

they thought, well, no one's going to get too upset, right? So they like sort of trialed out some of the things that they did on those people groups. then they they expand it and they're like, well, now we'll, okay, now it's this, now it's and then of course, it ends up being all Jews and all, you know, immigrants and disabled people and, you know, Romany and all these other folks. But they start off going, we're going to hit a group that we don't think anyone will stand up for. And that's what we have to guard against right now. And that's what makes this book very

Brandy (51:23.657)
uncanny and strange and prescient and also I think hard to get into shops sometimes for the same reasons is that we are watching this happen and people keep thinking well no it's not it's not right it's not but anti-semitism doesn't start when the bombs drop

Waitman Beorn (51:41.21)
Right. mean, there's this interesting moment. think it, I think it was in Laurie Marhoffer's book. I don't know. I think that's where I read it, but there's also this kind of like lag, right? Of, this tolerance might be too strong a word, but she talks about, a, a man, I guess he would have been called a transvestite in this time period, but you, in the Weimar period, you could basically get a permit that says, you know, I'm presenting as a woman and

Brandy (52:06.593)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (52:10.478)
Here's my identification and like, leave me alone to the police. And this guy walks in, walks into the police station in, you know, 33 or something. and it's sort of shocked that they, you know, are like, we don't, we're not doing that anymore because the Nazis, but they also don't arrest him either. They'd sort of like, they're like, get, out of here, but like, we're not doing that. You know, and so you have these, these weird moments of, and then of course, I think one of the things that bears mentioning a little bit is of course,

I think, and it's also kind of like you're talking about it in a certain sense. And I'm not sure how much of it is intentional, but it's, can be divisive in the sense that, you know, different kinds of LGBTQ folks are targeted in different ways and to different extents by the Nazis. And it doesn't, it doesn't make, you know, one group better or worse than the other. But for example, lesbians tended to not go in for the same level of

Brandy (52:56.449)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (53:10.81)
of persecution. I think in some ways, mainly because the Nazis were homophobic and in the in male sense, because they were challenged by by gay men much more. And because they're misogynistic in the sense that they always think, well, you may be a lesbian, but you're still capable of creating children if we want you to. And

Brandy (53:19.585)
right.

Brandy (53:30.634)
It's partly that they weren't threatened in the same way. mean, they weren't threatened in the same way by trans men, for instance. Because again, that means you're accepting the masculine. Because in a weird way, The cult of masculinity meant that they were most fearful of things that seemed to point out that they were not immune to having, say,

Waitman Beorn (53:40.593)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (53:45.038)
You're trying to be better. using air quotes here, but like, yeah.

Brandy (53:59.47)
feelings that we might normally think were feminine, right? Because it's all bunk, right? That was the whole point that Hirschfeld was saying, is that there's not actually female this and male that, like, it's all messy and you can have different feelings, you can behave in different ways, you can be maternal or paternal or whatever. And it's true, yeah, there's a huge spectrum.

Waitman Beorn (54:02.392)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (54:18.629)
Well, the spectrum, idea of just, we're all someplace along a line. It's also movable.

Brandy (54:23.307)
Well, his was actually, instead of a spectrum, it was almost this weirdly intersecting, this is where he got that 43 million or whatever number from. He made an equation because he was like, okay, so you can be on a sliding scale with your sexuality, you can be on a sliding scale with your gender, but you could also be on a sliding scale with like,

your psychology and then you could be on a sliding scale with your, there's all these different ways in which he, and he's kind of right, know, my partner is, assigned male at birth considers himself a man far more quote unquote maternal than I am. And that's perfectly acceptable. You know, there's nothing wrong with that, but they felt very threatened by those things. And you know, it just, gets worse as time moves along in that timeline. But I mean, I think,

Waitman Beorn (54:49.212)
Mm.

Brandy (55:17.163)
We see a lot of similar kinds of things happening now with people being so frightened of diversity and intersectionality and a lot more siloing, which we all know is actually quite dangerous.

Waitman Beorn (55:37.062)
Yeah, I mean, it's the, the somebody said this on social media that they, I think they're, they're an historian of, of witchcraft and somebody asked them like, what's the, what's the most modern, you know, what's the most modern equivalent. And they, she said that the anti-trans movement, you know, it's this, it's this completely sort of imaginary threat, you know, of, of the, that, doesn't really exist.

Brandy (55:54.433)
Mm-hmm.

Brandy (56:01.036)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (56:05.36)
But in a certain sense, seems to me that it.

Brandy (56:06.089)
And, you know, of course there was the imaginary threat of that, you know, Hitler was claiming that Jewish people were doing all of these things. They weren't doing either. There weren't like Jewish people weren't out in the streets gathering up young boys and turning them into girls. This wasn't happening. But he was saying things like this about Hirschfeld, about the Institute, about what they were doing there.

Waitman Beorn (56:13.531)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (56:25.296)
Well, and also, mean, you mentioned this a little bit in the book, but there's a much longer history of anti-Semitic tropes about Jews as sexual degenerates. And of course, I'm using the Sierra quotes there as well. But they are what we would call today pedophiles and groomers of particularly non-Jewish girls.

Brandy (56:40.321)
Mm-hmm, right.

Waitman Beorn (56:51.698)
And they are the purveyors. This goes all the way back to the protocols of Zion. They're the purveyors of pornography and all these sorts of things, which is a nice, again, it's scare quotes, but is a nice sort of parallel line of attack for the Nazis to attack the sexology and the trans folks and then also homosexuals. I mean, there's that I was just looking at it a minute ago. There's that famous photograph.

Brandy (57:11.469)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (57:20.95)
of the the the Nazi guys in the Institute and they're standing on the pile of but the funny thing is they're reading it right it's like like that's the funny thing is like there's someone has clearly put two you know we would call them I guess potentially pornographic but they're there it's a topless woman it's clearly a nude person they clearly place them so that they're in the photograph but then you have these guys that are they're reading like they're interested you know like they're like they're looking through it you know which I thought was

Brandy (57:27.085)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Brandy (57:46.495)
Yeah. Right.

Waitman Beorn (57:50.546)
particularly interesting, you know, but one of the things that I think is is seemingly in a certain sense different. And again, this is why history is great, I guess, and messy, you know, is that the the anti homosexual stuff didn't for the Nazis. It didn't occupy the same amount of of airtime, if you will, as it does now. I mean, it's it's there.

I would say certainly the anti-Semitic propaganda publicly is far greater in a certain sense.

Brandy (58:23.915)
Yeah, what I would say is that anti-Semitism replaced it. So essentially, Hitler wanted targets that were soft targets, people he thought he could villainize. They start off going against what they call deviance, They count everyone, they count all sorts of people as deviant. But it was a very short walk into anti-Semitism because anti-Semitism already existed. So, you know, I think

Waitman Beorn (58:44.998)
Right.

Brandy (58:54.221)
partly, and trust me, I know there's plenty of antisemitism now as well, but you have people less willing to commit to antisemitism. Like they don't want to say that they're antisemitic. So it's almost like a way for them. I mean, I sort of feel like trans attacks now feel to me like undercover antisemitism. Like I feel like it's still there and it's just their way of being like, well, we can't say that.

Waitman Beorn (59:03.943)
Yep.

Brandy (59:23.849)
so we'll go after this other group that we can villainize more easily.

Waitman Beorn (59:27.25)
Well, and it's, and it's interesting because now that I'm hearing you, it's also kind of like retro homophobia from like the sixties, you know, this idea that, that trans women in particular, again, and as you point out, I mean, again, it's, think it's really trans women that are coming in for the most abuse nowadays. but it's also this idea that they're going to go into the bathroom and they're gonna, you know, they're going to molest people, which is, which is the sort of the old school homophobia that the gay men are going to recruit the or molest children in this kind of stuff.

Brandy (59:33.591)
Mm-hmm.

Brandy (59:53.249)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (59:56.94)
and it's almost like a throwback to that, which in a certain sense is, precisely because, LGBT people have been, you know, again, on the long archif history, it's much more tolerant now. And so you can't, you can't make those same arguments, you know, in the same way that you used to.

Brandy (01:00:13.901)
Yeah, I guess what I'm pointing out is they'll go after any soft target. Like the soft target is first, and then they go after the next ones and the next ones and the next ones. know, it's transphobia is a canary in the coal mine, right? And, you know, this is the beginning of what will become worse. You know, it doesn't become better. It doesn't get better. And they didn't stop.

by villainizing only some kinds of LGBT people in the Nazi period either. They started there and then they kept going, you know. And I think the other thing that's interesting is they called them a variety of things, the third sex, transvestites, intermediaries. And Hirsveld's point was that there are people who do not fit into specific boxes. And he didn't actually feel like you needed to differentiate them super strong. Like you didn't have to

Waitman Beorn (01:00:43.217)
Right.

Brandy (01:01:09.079)
get too granular, right? That there are just people who don't fit into the boxes and that their lives are still worth living and that they shouldn't be treated any different than anyone else. why I think it's so important to tell the story of say early, though I do talk about Hirschfeld a great deal, I talk about Dora a lot more because I think it's important to see what it's like to be the patient to the person who lives your life and goes, I don't feel like I'm in the right.

body. mean, she tries to suicide for the first time when she's like 12 or 13. And, you know, because she doesn't fit in the body that I mean, we people go, dysphoria is a myth. It's it's catchy. They got it from TikTok. There was no TikTok like she was in siphon on the mountain. You know,

Waitman Beorn (01:01:52.163)
Yeah. mean, it's it's a really important story, though, too, because, you know, it's a story that that again that that that Brandy tells in the book of this this person who is a trans woman or what we'd call today a trans woman. And she's trying to navigate. A world in which she is kind of a new phenomenon, right? I mean, like, I mean, you think about if you read it now, looking back and you're like, well, if she was living in

Brandy (01:02:14.817)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (01:02:20.082)
You know, in New York City, there would be all these things and she could go do this, that, another thing, and there'd be all these support groups and it'd be no big deal, presumably. Relatively speaking, obviously it is a huge deal for individuals, at the macro societal level, there's all the support. Yeah.

Brandy (01:02:32.829)
Right. She literally thought she was the only one in the world. She thought she was the only one in the world and she was so devastated because she kept... And she was quite religious actually. something very interesting, I quote this in the book, she goes to her... She's a father confessor, she's Catholic, and she goes to her father confessor and she's telling him about all this stuff and how she's... She tries, she actually tries even... Her parents want her to get married to a woman. She makes a solid attempt...

at dating a woman, it doesn't work out. Like all of these things. So she goes to her father confessor and she's telling him all of these things. And the father confessor's idea is, well, maybe you should enter like a monastery or enter the cloth because, and he says, you might find others like you here. And I thought, that's interesting. What an interesting thing to say. You know, but it's like the idea that, you know, that it was living in the world that was difficult, not.

Waitman Beorn (01:03:18.675)
Yeah.

Brandy (01:03:27.595)
And he didn't actually berate her, as near as we can tell, I mean, these are coming from her words, he didn't tell her she was wrong or bad or what, you know, it was more like, hmm, it's difficult for people like you out in the real world, you know, we need to find a place where you can go. And she does, but it's not into the religious, you know, she doesn't end up in a monastery, she goes to the Institute instead.

Waitman Beorn (01:03:48.658)
Yeah, I mean, and, and, you know, I mean, I suppose it might be a spoiler, but this is a history book, you know, like in the, end, she sort of ends up living a mundane normal life, but actually that's great because she lives a normal life as a woman and that's all she really wanted. And she doesn't need to be like a superstar. you know, that's.

Brandy (01:04:00.461)
Yeah!

You said something earlier about why some people were more targeted than others. Like for instance, you said that gay men and trans women were more targeted than say lesbians at the time. But there's another thing going on here, which is the people who quote unquote passed, right, who were flamboyantly, know, who seemed very feminine and Lily Elba, who was beautiful and

glamorous Christine Jorgensen who is beautiful and glamorous which was awesome nothing wrong with any of that but society was so much more willing to let those with money and support and glamour be that way and what's interesting about Dora she's just somebody she's just an every person like anyone you'd meet on the street and in the end she lives that way too and what she doesn't have like a famous grave or you know

Waitman Beorn (01:04:46.683)
Yeah.

Brandy (01:04:57.281)
But through research done by actually a lot of other transgender people in a wide network of folks that I contacted, particularly Clara Hartman, we ultimately found in the course of writing, as I was writing this book, that she'd gone back and lived in this little town and people were like, she was the lady who kept birds. Like that's her moniker in history.

Waitman Beorn (01:05:15.037)
Yeah. And actually, as you point out, that's great because like she didn't want to be known as like the trans woman. She just wanted to be like a normal, everyday woman. And that's what she ends up being. And one the things that's relevant to today, I said this before and I'll stand by it. I think that the world would be a much better place if people didn't decide whether or not people got human rights based on whether or not they want to have sex with them.

Brandy (01:05:19.937)
That's what she wanted. Right.

Brandy (01:05:27.095)
Yo!

Brandy (01:05:40.384)
Yes!

Waitman Beorn (01:05:40.506)
which I think, which I think is, I mean, honestly, that sounds a little vulgar, but I think it's very much like at the root of a lot of, of hatred and fear of people that are different. It's like, that's gross. And it's like, it may be okay. It may be okay for someone to say, I'm not attracted to that kind of person. but that doesn't mean that they don't get respect and human rights and, and everything else. But I think people have a very difficult time. I mean, homophobes in particular have a very difficult time separating those things out and saying, you know, it's okay. You know, that.

Brandy (01:05:47.917)
I think so too.

Brandy (01:05:59.799)
Right.

Brandy (01:06:09.197)
Well, this is why it's tied so closely to patriarchy and to toxic masculinity, because there's an element of sexual conquest that is mixed up in all of that, in all of their ideology of power. So it's like, well, you're allowed here because you're a woman I might be able to have sex with, is literally how many women got into positions at all. It's horrible, it is horrible, but it's also true. And the minute

You you think about it that way, you realize the first newscasters, couldn't just be anybody as a woman in a newscaster. You had to be a bombshell, right? And it's still like this. so trans women who pass easily are less harassed than trans women who don't pass easily. And that it should not matter one way or the other, you know?

Waitman Beorn (01:06:46.972)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:07:00.74)
Right. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, so and we've covered a lot of grounds. Maybe we come back to Hirschfeld at the end. Can you talk a little about sort of what his what his legacy is? Right. Because ultimately, the Nazis don't destroy the institute. The allies do, apparently. Right. In a bombing. But what how is how is he commemorated? How is his work commemorated? What happened to all of his?

stuff, because I'm guessing, because one of the that you haven't mentioned that's in the book is that he also had this really sounds like amazing museum kind of thing full of, you know, pictures and different kinds of people and different kinds of different kinds of sexual activities, not to mention all those surveys, you mentioned all the data that he collected. You know, what's the legacy of all of that today?

Brandy (01:07:28.269)
sure.

Brandy (01:07:46.274)
Mm-hmm.

Brandy (01:07:50.99)
So it was the Nazis who destroyed the Institute, mainly they didn't destroy the building, they did destroy the Institute. essentially what happened is in 1933, they went, they gathered up all the materials and three days later, they had that huge bonfire on the Orpenplatz and people don't realize it. You've seen the images, people have seen black and white footage, they've seen people throwing stuff on that bonfire and they don't even know what's burning and I think that's fascinating. And that was by design, the Nazis wanted

Waitman Beorn (01:07:56.466)
That's what I meant, yeah.

Brandy (01:08:20.915)
erase all memory that the Institute had ever existed. And they came real close in some ways, right, in some of the histories. But what they did is they wanted to burn all of this material. And we did lose a ton of things. We didn't lose everything. And part of the reason is because various people had been smuggling things out over time.

Hirschfeld himself published widely in multiple languages. He went on a world tour before the Nazis took over where he basically seeded all kinds of other, I mean, the Kinsey Institute, lots of other places owe some sort of debt to Hirschfeld's Institute. Some of the earliest homosexual rights movements, you can draw a direct line between the people who started them and Hirschfeld one way or another. So you had that.

You also had people like Levi Lenz who escapes literally hours before the Nazis get to him. And he was one of the surgeons who worked on Dora. And also, I believe he had a hand in treating Lily Elba for some things. They had multiple surgeons who did the various things that were required. And, you know, they got out and they wrote memoirs and they wrote about what had happened.

And that's why I say that to a certain extent, it's like a Star Wars story. Like they sent the Death Star plans off already. know, the Empire was there, bad things were going to happen, but they, a remnant survives. And it's, it's why we aren't further back than we already are in terms of rights. Do we, did we lose progress? Absolutely. And there was a backlash against the Weimar's progressiveness, even in other countries after the war, which is really sad, but

Waitman Beorn (01:09:36.721)
Right.

Brandy (01:09:59.212)
The fact that we've moved ahead at all, really still owes a debt to those original heroes who preserved what they could. The Nazis turned it into a base of operations because it was a very nice building and it does get bombed. And today it's not there anymore. There's a center there and the gardens are still there. So you can still see the gardens. I went to Berlin to do a lot of the research, but Hirschfeld's legacy is curious because I feel as though his actual name

much like Dora's is not necessarily a household name. People don't necessarily know who he is. And yet we know of other organizations and institutions and concepts that he developed and that we still use today. And so I think that's really an interesting, a little bit like Dora, it's almost as though he himself is not necessarily the figure that is most remembered, but his work lives on in the work of all the others.

really does live on and it's, you know, we're still fighting.

Waitman Beorn (01:11:02.814)
Yeah, I mean, and that's the thing. And we've, I don't think we've shied away from it in this conversation, but you know, we're, we're at a period where there's an attempt at sort of regression. you know, there was, think there was just a Supreme court case, that was just decided about, allowing States to sort of ban, gender affirming care for, for kids and things like that. you know, and so one of the reasons I, you know, that it's important to get, have these conversations, but also conversations that are grounded in

Brandy (01:11:16.192)
Yes.

Waitman Beorn (01:11:31.694)
in history, you know, that and grounded in things that have happened before. You know, so the people can't claim that people are sort of being hysterical about, about this. You know, this is something that clearly is, has happened before. And there is a certain playbook to this that is being, you know, it's that tired phrase that, you know, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes or whatever, you know, I mean, like this, you know,

Brandy (01:11:42.185)
Yes. Yeah.

Brandy (01:11:54.914)
I'm not even sure they're doing much adaptation on this one. Sadly. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:11:58.148)
No, I mean, it's a playbook. mean, it's a playbook that's gone, you know, been around for a very, very long time.

Brandy (01:12:07.905)
I think though the one thing that history does teach us, particularly, I hope, in this book, is two things. One is how important it is to go after, seek, and enjoy things. That joy itself is a weapon and is an act of resistance. That living your authentic life is also an act of radical resistance. think people

when we feel really crushed by what we're seeing right now. And in addition to attacks on transgender people and LGBTQ people, we're also seeing a rise in antisemitism. mean, it's a whole lot of a rise in attacks on women's rights. I mean, it's all seems to be happening. And we can feel really crushed by that. And I think that's by design. So when you realize, when you think to yourself, why I shouldn't enjoy this thing or I shouldn't look forward to this thing, shouldn't. Yes, you should. You have an obligation.

to joy because that's how we fight them and that's how we maintain our strength to continue fighting them. know, joy is something that you're owed and it's also something you should pursue. And the other thing is hope. Hope because we have been here before, we hadn't given up then and we aren't giving up now. And in the end, the Nazis don't triumph. Yes, they

horrible things, terrible, awful, ugly, catastrophic things happen, but they were beaten. Partly because they dissolve from within, there's so much backbiting, they don't stand well together in the end either, because they don't have joy and community. And so I feel like this book is about hope and joy. It's not about giving up, it's not about dark days. And Dora Richter outlives the Nazis, right? She survives. And I think that's something that we can take heart from.

Waitman Beorn (01:14:02.954)
And the community piece is an important point because one of the, think one of the things that happened certainly during the Third Reich that enabled the Nazi genocidal project in all its forms, you know, is people pull back. They withdraw because they're frightened or because, you know, they want to keep their heads down because the people that are being targeted aren't them at the moment.

Brandy (01:14:16.993)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (01:14:26.18)
or whatever. And I think that that also, as you point out, is kind of the other part of it, which is that that enables, excuse me, that enables further persecution. And we're seeing that today with the fact that actually, no, people are standing up for other people that aren't them, that aren't in their, that aren't their category, aren't their type or whatever, but they're standing up for them rather than sort of pulling back and saying, that old Martin E. Mueller quote of, they came to the socialist, they came to the communist. I think that's something that

Brandy (01:14:27.297)
Mm-hmm.

Brandy (01:14:36.023)
Mm-hmm.

Brandy (01:14:52.95)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (01:14:55.122)
that also comes through in the book too, you know, even, even in like not sort of standing up against fascism times, even just, you know, in society treats me badly times, um, going to the Institute, you know, having a place to meet and have coffee or go to a dance or whatever. mean, that's, that's a connection. And then the fact that there are people sort of floating in and out of that who aren't there sort of clinically, but are there as just kind of interested people. Um, you know, I think also

shows the value of community. But we probably should wrap it up here. But I do want to give you a chance to answer our question that we always ask, which is, what is one book on the Holocaust that you have found particularly influential you would recommend to our readers, our listeners?

Brandy (01:15:45.57)
Well, you know, the reality is I haven't read very many and, yeah. Honestly, lot of the things I've read on the Holocaust were things that were happening during the Holocaust lately, because of course I'm a historian. But there is a book on my reading list that I haven't read yet that I'm dying to get to, and it's called Lovers and Auschwitz. A true story. It's actually about a journalist or it's a journalist who writes it, but it's about two people

Waitman Beorn (01:15:50.502)
that's okay you know you there's no right or wrong answer here so you did

Waitman Beorn (01:16:10.129)
Okay.

Brandy (01:16:15.767)
who were, one was I think a Polish Jew and another one was from Slovakia who fall in love in actually in Auschwitz and the types of things, particularly the one woman does to shield other people. And I'm interested, I haven't read it yet, but I'm looking forward to it. I think it looks fascinating.

Waitman Beorn (01:16:34.268)
Cool.

Brandy (01:16:47.117)
Mm.

Brandy (01:16:54.797)
You

Brandy (01:17:02.189)
In, in, of in, yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:17:03.138)
the blank of Auschwitz because it's just like, becomes, I was talking with one of the people at the Auschwitz museum a while back and like the joke they have in house is like, it's the Auschwitz of Auschwitz, you know, the book, it's like the Auschwitz prisoner of Auschwitz. Cause everything is just anyway, Brandy, thank you so much for coming on to our listeners. know I've been sort of, I haven't hit the week in an episode a week recently. I'm trying to get back to that. But I hope that you have.

Brandy (01:17:15.489)
Right?

Waitman Beorn (01:17:32.822)
been on, on Tenter Hooks for the next episode. again, thank you so much for listening. please, you know, give me a like, give me subscribe, drop me a note, say that, you know, that you're listening and enjoying it. All those things are great to hear. and again, Brandy, thanks so much for coming on and, I should mention the book. The book, is Intermediaries. and it's a Weimar story, but it's actually coming, it's not even out quite, it's coming out.

Brandy (01:18:02.253)
It's out in the United States. It's coming out in the UK, think, the 27th of June.

Waitman Beorn (01:18:06.45)
27 June. That's according to the Amazon. So this is...

Brandy (01:18:11.659)
Yeah. So it is out in the United States coming out very, very soon in the UK. And I will be in the UK in October, actually, on a bit of a book tour. So I'll be in London. I'm not going to be in Newcastle. I'm going to be in London. And in London, I will be meeting with CN Lester. She's going to be with me at I think it's a Waterstones in Gowrie Street, I believe. And then I'm going to be in Manchester at the University of Manchester, then in

Waitman Beorn (01:18:23.036)
Are you gonna come to Newcastle?

Waitman Beorn (01:18:27.57)
Of course.

Waitman Beorn (01:18:36.347)
Okay.

Brandy (01:18:41.995)
Edinburgh and then in Glasgow. So those are the four cities that I will be hitting.

Waitman Beorn (01:18:43.634)
Okay. Well, it's, you know, at least it's not just London, you know, as a, as a, as a, as a new proud northerner in the UK, you know, I I've already developed the chip on my shoulder that, you know, everything in the UK happens in London.

Brandy (01:18:49.609)
Not just let it know.

Brandy (01:18:58.999)
So it's, you know, it's really funny is that I actually write fiction as well. And my fiction is set in North Yorkshire and in Newcastle. So I'm a big fan of that area. I would live there in a heartbeat if I could. it's a, it is near and dear to me, but yes, I didn't actually end up making a stop there this time.

Waitman Beorn (01:19:10.245)
Awesome.

Waitman Beorn (01:19:15.234)
No worries. Well, thanks so much for coming on. really appreciate it.

Brandy (01:19:19.65)
Thank you. It was wonderful to be here. Thanks.