Transgender individuals in Nazi Germany faced legal action, exclusion from public life, forced detransition, imprisonment, and death in concentration camps. Transgender people were mainly denied legal status by the Nazi state, even though some factors, such as whether they were heterosexual regarding their birth sex, "Aryan," or capable of useful work, could have improved their situation. Laws such as Paragraph 183 were in place during the German Empire (1871–1928) and Weimar Germany (1918–1933) to prosecute transgender individuals. Nevertheless, these laws were inconsistently enforced, leaving transgender individuals susceptible to the discretionary decisions of individual police officers. Magnus Hirschfeld's advocacy led to Germany allowing transgender individuals to receive transvestite passes in 1908, which protected them from legal repercussions for being openly transgender. In the period following the conclusion of World War I and until 1933, transgender individuals were granted unprecedented freedoms and rights. Berlin saw a flourishing transgender culture and significant advancements in transgender medicine through the Institute for Sexual Science.
After the Prussian coup d'état in 1932 and the Nazi takeover of power in 1933, institutions, gathering places, and transgender movements were often broken up by force. These included the first homosexual movement, the Eldorado nightclubs, and the Institute for Sexual Science. Paragraphs 175 and 183 were enforced again, targeting both trans men and trans women, and their transvestite passes were either revoked or disregarded. Books and texts about medicine or transgender experiences were destroyed because they were deemed "un-German." Although the precise number of transgender people killed in concentration camps is unknown, they were both imprisoned and killed. According to the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the German government:
"brutally targeted the trans community, deporting many trans people to concentration camps and wiping out vibrant community structures."
The term transgender, which is a cognate of English and German, was not developed until 1965 and was not widely accepted as a universal term until the 1990s. Magnus Hirschfeld introduced the German term transsexualismus (transsexualism), which was later translated into English as transsexual, in 1923. However, it was not until Harry Benjamin's work 30 years later that the term became widely used. In German, the term transvestit (meaning "transvestite" in the masculine) was previously used to refer to transfeminine individuals, while the term transvestitin (meaning "transvestite" in the feminine) was used to refer to transmasculine individuals. Due to the lack of a widely accepted alternative term, the majority of Western transgender individuals during this era self-identified as "transvestites.".
As a more precise representation of their gender identity, the term "transgender" is frequently employed in contemporary literature on the subject. According to Joanne Meyerowitz and other scholars of the subject, it is challenging, if not impossible, to ascertain the pronouns that transgender or transvestite individuals would have preferred during this era. Consequently, it is a common practice to use the pronouns that correspond to the gender presentation of the individual (i.e., he/him for individuals who present masculine and she/her for individuals who present feminine).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_people_in_Nazi_Germany
