In 1933, Nazi students marched to the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin and threw its contents into a bonfire. They were burning the life's work of Magnus Hirschfeld - a gay, Jewish doctor who had spent forty years building the world's first queer rights organization, the first clinic to provide gender-affirming care, and one of the most comprehensive archives of human sexuality ever assembled.
They tried to erase him. We are here to make sure they failed.
Magnus Hirschfeld founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee in 1897, making it the oldest known LGBTQ rights organization in history. He coined the word "transvestite," helped develop early frameworks for understanding what we now call transgender identity, campaigned against Paragraph 175 (Germany's anti-sodomy law), and treated thousands of patients with compassion when the rest of medicine treated them with contempt.
He survived multiple assassination attempts. He fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and died in exile in 1935. But the ideas he planted - that sexuality is natural, that trans people deserve care, that science should protect rather than persecute - those ideas survived everything the Nazis threw at them.
This is the story of the man who started it all, and why his legacy belongs at the very heart of queer history.
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Website: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com
