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Boston Globe

The story of a little-known transgender pioneer has fully come to light

Dora would become the first person to undergo gender confirmation surgery, complete with vaginoplasty, depilation, and hormonal supplements. She began the process in 1931 and would complete it two weeks ahead of Lili Elbe's better-known transition, depicted in the film 'The Danish Girl . ' Elbe has a street named for her; I've visited her grave, upon which people moved by her story as a transgender pioneer have left mementos. Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up Few remember Dora. Advertisement Dora Richter's grave in Allersberg, Germany, is unmarked, and its general location was only I'd spent three years in archives in Berlin chasing down Dora's story. Finding Dora required hunting through government documents, translating hundred-year-old dissertations, and looking for material that survived Nazi purges. For me, pulling together the disparate pieces of her life into a book has been a task of exhumation as much as reclamation. Advertisement For years, when mentioned at all, Dora appeared as a coda to a tragedy — a victim of the Nazis who attacked the Institute for Sexual Science in 1933. But Dora's story is bigger, brighter, and longer than that dark period. She outlived her persecutors and survived long after the Third Reich had fallen. This is the story of a forgotten first, the vibrant and unsinkable Dora who lived her life with authenticity. Dora Richter circa 1930. Unknown The village of Seifen stands at an elevation of around 3,000 feet. Despite its location on the Czech side of the border, most of the residents were then German and Catholic. On April 17, 1892, a Rudolf Richter would be entered into the town's baptismal records as the second child of Josef and Antonia, a musician and a lacemaker. Antonia had wished for a girl, and reproductive superstitions were strong in the late 19th century. Her wishes were thought to have been transferred onto the child, who was born a cherubic creature, small and delicate, and took after her mother in looks and personality. Antonia taught her children lacemaking, but their father rebuked the art as inappropriate for a boy. He insisted that Rudolf wear trousers, but Rudolf took to sneaking dresses from the girls. 'He' then chose the name Dora and wore women's clothing in secret, despite the threat of a beating. It is unclear exactly when she adopted the new name, but she wrote letters to a schoolmate under the name Dora. Dora Richter circa 1930. Unknown With the first signs of puberty, Dora even attempted to remove the offending penis. The first try failed, and the child feared to make a second. Inconsolable, Dora swallowed nails in a suicide attempt. She was only 13 years old. Advertisement I read Dora's account of this for the first time in a dimly lit reading room at Humboldt University in Berlin. An unpublished doctoral thesis contained the transcript of an interview with Dora from 1923. Typed on onion skin paper in fading purple ink were Dora's own words. I was struck then, as I am now, by how strikingly similar Dora's plight resembles that of modern transgender teens. For all the talk of trans identity being a modern invention, in the 19th century a working-class teenager in an isolated mountain town had the same struggles. Dora would eventually leave home to work as an apprentice baker to send money back to her family. Whenever possible, she dressed and lived as a woman. More than anything, she wanted to be loved by a man — but as a woman. And for this simplest of wishes, she faced abuse and ridicule from her family, threats and blackmail from strangers, and the risk of imprisonment — or worse, as the rising Nazi party targeted gender and sexual nonconformists. When I began researching Dora's life in 2020, I was convinced, like many researchers before me, that she had met her end at the Institute for Sexual Science in 1933, the day Hitler's 'Sturmabteilung,' a paramilitary organization, sacked it and burned its books — a tragedy immortalized in black-and-white film reels. Until at least 2023, everyone assumed Dora was killed in this attack. It was only when I, Clara Hartman, and a few others began digging deeper did the full story emerge. Advertisement The intake interview revealed what Dora thought about herself as well as her adventures, her lovers, her heartbreaks. An update to her birth record showed that she had returned home after the notorious book burning. A spare mention in a census revealed she had escaped both the Nazis and the encroaching Soviets to return to Allersberg. In each mention, her new gender, achieved surgically, was preserved: Dora was the woman who lived. She made lace, tended flowers, and kept pet birds; she was remembered as a smiling old woman who died peacefully. She lived a long and healthy life. So why, I asked myself, hadn't her story been preserved along with that of Lili Elbe? Elbe was a painter, supported largely by her partner, and she even wrote a book about her experiences. Dora, on the other hand, eschewed the limelight. She was not glamorous or well-heeled. She had no higher education, no grand aspirations, no claim to titles. She worked menial jobs in factories and as a maid. Her experience reveals the quiet life of a person who, above all, wished to be an ordinary woman. There are many more Doras than Lilis — thousands of transgender people leading lives that will not be memorialized. And that is what makes her so very important right now. Pulling her story from the fragments of history likewise helps us recognize there are countless transgender people who have always been among us, living, loving, struggling, and also quietly thriving.