1./ Where did the LGBTQ+ movement go wrong? How did a noble cause end up bullying artists and trying to destroy women's sport? The answers may lie buried in the movement's foundational myth about a sexology pioneer and his clinic. The truth is much darker than the myth.👇 
2./ The myth says the template for today's LGBTQ+ movement was laid down at Magnus Hirschfeld's Sexology Institute founded in Berlin in 1919 where the happy marriage between gay and trans rights was forged. Here's even @sciam churning out this canard.👇scientificamerican.com/article/the-fo…
3./ Hirschfeld, a gay Jewish man, was undoubtedly brave but it's his claim that gay & trans people share some common affinity and his pioneering of 'sex change' surgery that makes him an LGBTQ+ hero. A who's who of trans activism retweeted the @sciam article.👇
4./ But did they really read it? Here's the clinic in a starring role in the hit TV series Transparent. The transwoman with the red lipstick is Dora Richter the first person to have a full 'sex change' op including the world's first ever vaginoplasty. 👇
5./ The Nazis closed the Institute, burning its library, and Hirschfeld died in exile. We don't know what happened to poor Dora but her story has a dark side that suggests the clinic was never the exemplar that's now suggested. Take her experimental operation as an example.
6./ It's a sign of how intellectually dishonest the LGBTQ+ movement has become that none of the @sciam retweeters mentioned (or noticed?) a detail that rather undermines the image of the Institut as fundamentally progressive. It was this reference to surgeon Erwin Gohrbrandt. 👇
7./ Yes, on the upside Erwin Gohrbrandt experimented by inventing the vaginoplasty, creating Dora Richter and later Lili (The Danish Girl) Elbe's "female" sex organs. But on the downside he'd go on to work for the Nazis conducting a range of appalling experiments at Dachau.👇
8./ Gohrbrandt went straight from experimentally castrating sex change patients to sterilising the mentally disabled at Am Urban hospital in Berlin. Here's a paper he co-authored in 1937 which provides "some information on the history and technique of sterilization."
9./ As the Luftwaffe's top medic he wanted to find out how pilots who bailed might survive in the sea. 300 prisoners were repeatedly immersed in freezing water for hours until they died. Colleague Sigmund Rascher created saddlebags from human skin.👇nejm.org/doi/full/10.10…
10./ On its own the fact that the doctor who helped invent the vaginoplasty for Hirschfeld became a monster is troubling but unfortunately that's only one of many problems with the mythic story of the Institute. Take this blatant racism. 👇
11./ The clinic's Ethnology Department was run by Baron Ferdinand von Reitzenstein who argued African women were too sexually dominant and advocated "benevolent" German colonial intervention to solve that. So much for that BLM virtue-signalling from Tatchell, Maugham et al👇
12./ The Baron also argued against women's equality and said women doing "gainful work in male clothing" was a sexual pathology. The rosy myth about the clinic suggests Hirschfeld himself challenged such regressive 'gender binary' attitudes. That's a complete misunderstanding.👇
13./ While he claimed there were over 43 000 different sexual types those were all defined as different combinations of specific male and female biological traits. So a man might have a feminine pelvis or a woman a masculine larynx or skull. It was nonsense and it got worse.
14./ Homosexuality he said was caused by a biological defect so gay men were effectively demi-women who could never be 100% male. They were effeminate with weak muscles, "mincing gait or feminine handwriting". No wonder many gay men argued strongly against Hirschfeld's work.👇
15./ Hirschfeld saw homosexuality in terms that could have come straight out of today's trans activism. As this article reveals he studied lesbian vaginal secretions to try to find sperm and gay men's urine to find menstrual blood. Lesbian penis anyone? 👇washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/l…
16./ It's one of the greatest ironies of all about the status of Hirschfeld and his dodgy clinic in today's LGBTQ+ movement that no one mentions his promotion of a vicious form of gay conversion. It all started with a remarkable "discovery" of Dr Eugene Steinach.
17./ In 1919 when the clinic was founded Europe was in the middle of a craze for monkey gland transplants. The famous cocktail is named after Serge Voronoff's bizarre op in which "rejuvenating" slices of baboon balls were inserted in a patient's scrotum. diffordsguide.com/cocktails/reci…
18./ Not to be outdone the respectable endocrinologist Steinach announced he'd discovered male cells in the ovaries of a homosexual goat. In a leap of the imagination he now suggested male homosexuals might be cured if they were castrated and given testicles from straight men. 👇
19./ The organs were obtained from straight men who had undescended third testicles. Magnus Hirschfeld became one of Steinach's most stalwart champions and sent gay men to be "cured". The numbers were likely small but the implications were huge.
20./ It's often claimed that Hirschfeld's argument that homosexuality was a medical defect was just a useful tactic in his campaign to get decriminalisation. But had this crazy 'gay cure' he promoted taken off thousands might have been maimed. Of course it didn't work.
21./ The best criticism of Hirschfeld I've seen is in this essay by Chandak Sengupta and came from a contemporary doctor, Edwin Bab, who argued tomboy girls were "simply uncommonly wild" and not biologically masculinized as Hirschfeld insisted. Amen to that.
22./ The Hirschfeld clinic is indeed a perfect pinup for today's confused LGBTQ+ movement. For one thing Hirschfeld promoted highly experimental and dangerous surgery both on trans people and gay men. His evidence base was even less than that for puberty blockers.
23./ Just like the LGBTQ+ movement his project was rooted in rigid gender stereotypes and like it his clinic was obsessed with claims the obvious sex of someone could disguise a different hidden sex identity. And just like them his approach was steeped in internalised homophobia.
24./ His lumping together of gay, trans and intersex people as if they share common needs worked profoundly against gay people's interests as it does right now in gender identity clinics where doctors follow Hirschfeld's lead in trying to cure young gays with hormones or surgery.
25./ Above all, it tells you everything you need to know about how unanchored the LGBTQ+ movement has become that it's willing to ignore the clinic's rampant racism, Nazi doctors and 'gay cures' to hold to some dream of gay and trans harmony. It's time we ditched this toxic myth.
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