Don’t Let the History of State-Sanctioned Transphobia Repeat Itself

By Clare Killman, Carbondale IL City Councilwoman

From the end of World War One in 1918 to 1933, my people—in this instance referring to transgender women specifically—enjoyed unprecedented freedom and liberation in Germany. We were given legal recognition, transitioned publicly, enjoyed medical care, and had social spaces carved out just for us in the vibrant culture of Berlin's nightlife. 

By 1933, when Hitler came to power, some of the harshest treatment under Nazi rule for holocaust victims was reserved for transgender women. We were seen as a contingent of the mentally ill, and thus destructive to the German racial ideal, and an aberrant variant of homosexuality- an anathema to the production of Aryan babies. The Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion was designated responsible by the Nazi government for "collaborating in the design of the security police’s treatment of sexual degenerates", such as "transvestites, fetishists, and others." All research and written documentation of medical advancement or the legitimacy of our people that was burnable was burned.

Our previous identification, used before 1933 to ensure our legal recognition, was revoked. We were excluded entirely from public life. The Nazis brutally targeted the trans community, executing plenty and deporting many trans women to concentration camps, wiping out every vibrant community structure we had built. Those who could not flee were unanimously killed with the exception of one sole known transgender woman survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. When transgender women were taken to Dachau or Lichtenburg or Buchenwald, they were stripped, humiliated, and beaten- at times to death- immediately upon arrival. 

Because of our lack of legal recognition and a lack of standardized intake around how we were admitted or for what we were admitted, there is no definitive data as to the exact number of transgender women systematically processed and killed by the Nazis in Germany. 

When I think of the glittering splendor of my acceptance in the beautiful broader community that I'm a part of, and how well received I am in public life and public spaces, floating from well-established event to well-established event, I am reminded of how this could all go away. How my kind has been brought to the brink before. How there so much beauty and love and kindness and so many worthy gifts to give to the world at stake. 

Transgender women in the United States have been made marvelous political wedge issues or scapegoats in recent months and have now been functionally erased from every federal database, website, organization, department, and in all federal language in the United States. Our access to the supreme form of identification in this country, a United States passport, has been revoked. We may no longer access something as basic and human as federal bathroom facilities in every building and port of entry in the country.

We have been characterized as pedophiles, groomers, dissidents, degenerates, predators, abusers, and inherently deceitful. We've been framed as unamerican and outside the bounds of a strict moral code the powerful in this country would like to enforce. We've been called the product of a mind virus, madness, lunacy, and a recent construct of the medical industry- discounting all scientific and historical data that indicates transgender women have been part of societies around the globe throughout history. 

Individual states, emboldened by support from the federal government, are moving to restrict access to healthcare for all transgender people of any age. Our own national monuments have had all mention of transgender people removed. We've been stripped of any ability at all to serve the government at the federal level as ourselves, implying a forced detransition should we wish to serve the state (Sarah McBride's compliance with bathroom rules). 

I would advocate that transgender people should not, in any way, be serving a state that does not recognize them. 

From 2020-2025, transgender people enjoyed unprecedented freedom in the United States. We did not know we were living through the decline of the Weimar Republic. We did not know we were living through the rise of the Empire. This empire too will be eclipsed, as they all are in time. Without preemptive action, there is little hope that history will not repeat itself. 

On behalf of my people, I implore you to listen to the ills of the past and think ahead to the prospective future. I urge you to remove all heads from the sand. To engage with the difficult death of the Republic. This is how liberty, dies; with thunderous applause.

“Sleeping Hermaphroditus”, 2nd Century BC, Greek Origin, sculptor unknown