RE: That Trans Thread 2.0
March 25, 2024 at 5:14 pm
And now for a recent story you might not have heard about.
The funny thing is, if JoJo had just been mistaken and just taken the L as soon as it turned out she was wrong, I
might have given her a pass on this incident. But she didn't. She just kept fucking doubling down on her horseshit.
Why would I have been willing to give her a pass? Well, I want you to imagine what comes to mind when you think "Nazi Book Burning." Odds are, much of what comes to mind comes from photographs comes from a single incident on 10 May 1933. What's a bit more obscure is which books ended up in the fire that day. For the longest time, I just assumed that the lion's share were either by Jews or just by people the Nazis hated.
The truth is, 20,000 of the books on the pyre that day (about 80% of the books estimated to be burned that day) came from one source: the library of Magnus Hirschfeld's
Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. The IfS was the first sexology research centre on the planet, and, more to the point, the first transwomen to actually get sexual reassignment surgery actually did so under the auspices of the IfS. And, incredibly,
they actually made a little bit of headway in the Weimar Republic. So, naturally, when the Nazis came to power, they put a stop to that.
I could understand if she was just ignorant of the history. Even with my obsession with this particular part of history, I didn't even know about the Magnus Hirschfeld of it all until, of all things, a review of
Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS pointed it out. It took until the release of
The Danish Girl (as flawed a narrative as it is) for me to find out that trans folk were even a thing pre-Christine Jorgensen. If even I really had to dig fairly deep to discover that aspect, I'd have forgiven JoJo (at least in this incident) if she just hadn't done the research.
But she didn't. Even after people pointed her to more information, she kept doing it. The closest thing she came to conceding a point is saying that the Nazis were hunting "sexual degenerates" and that
maybe some trans folk were caught up in that.