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Boston Globe
18-05-2025
- General
- 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.
Yahoo
29-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Before Hitler took over Germany, Bertie was happy and trans in Berlin
In the run-up to the 2024 election, on cable news shows and at dinner tables, Americans debated a question that terrified various groups of us for various reasons. If Trump won, would he replace our democracy with fascism? Given Republican anti-trans ad spending estimated at $215 million on network television alone ('She's for they/them, he's for you'), trans people had reason to fear that Trump would eviscerate the civil rights they'd earned over the last half-century. Sure enough, Trump immediately signed a slew of anti-trans executive orders collectively described by now-fired EEOC commissioner Jocelyn Samuels as a plan to 'erase the existence of trans people.' Milo Todd, a Lambda literary fellow and creative writing teacher, centers his first novel on an earlier erasure, largely hidden within a bigger story: Hitler's attempt to eradicate the transgender people of 1930s Germany. When the Nazis took power, Berlin was an international gay hub, home to 100 queer bars, 25 queer journals and the Institute for Sexual Science, where the world's first sex reassignment surgeries and hormone treatments were performed by gender activist Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld. Through the eyes and heart of the novel's trans protagonist, Berthold 'Bertie' Durchdenwald, we experience the news of Hitler's takeover, which comes while he's dancing with his girlfriend in a queer Berlin club. The music cut out in the middle of a final, lingering note. 'We interrupt to bring you important news,' the radio said. 'President Hindenburg has just appointed Adolf Hitler as the new chancellor of Germany …' 'Don't they know what this will do to Germany?' Sofie spat. All Bertie felt was cold. Much as Trump immediately set about fulfilling his 'Day 1' campaign promise to 'stop the transgender lunacy' and 'get transgender out of the military.' Hitler immediately labeled transgender people 'sexual degenerates' and sent as many of them as his Brown Shirts could catch to the death camps. The institute was torched by a Nazi student mob, every book in its library burned in Opera Square. 'The world had changed overnight,' Bertie observes. 'The city was already draped in swastikas. Bright red flags hanging, flapping, lolling like dead tongues from every corner shop … Berlin was bleeding from the inside out.' Heightening the contrast between the trans experience pre- and post-Hitler, Todd uses chapters alternating between Bertie's beautiful Berlin life and his eked-out 1940s existence on the farm where he and Sofie hid under aliases throughout the war. Against this tragic setting, the elegance of Todd's prose plants wonder in the reader's mind. 'The asparagus sprang up every spring without fail, an old friend, a capsule of history from when life kept growing, birthed from a better time.' Read more: A shatteringly honest novel of trans identity gets a supremely timely reissue Soon after word of the war's end reaches Bertie and Sofie, Bertie discovers an emaciated young man unconscious in the asparagus patch 'in the dirtied stripes of a camp prisoner.' Noting the black triangle sewed to the man's uniform, the Nazis' label for trans prisoners, Bertie realizes the man must have escaped from nearby Dachau. While feeding and bathing the dazed stranger, Bertie takes a chance. 'I'm a transvestite,' he says. 'Me, too,' says Karl. 'Why were you still in those clothes?' Bertie asked. 'Didn't the Allies liberate the camps weeks ago?' 'I fled when the Allies came.' 'Is it true? They're setting everyone but us free?' 'The only difference I've seen between [the Allies and the Nazis] is their style of murder,' Karl answers. Devastated to learn that the Allies, too, were treating trans people as subhuman, Bertie and Sofie stop waiting to be liberated and start planning their own liberation. Their preparations to emigrate to America include training the innocent Karl to avoid recognition. 'Perhaps when you're rested,' Bertie said, 'I can teach you how to transvert.' 'I am not a man exactly like that.' 'Or you could wear some of my things,' Sofie added gently. Here, Todd has his youngest character summarize the painful central paradox of trans life — in Nazi Germany nearly a century ago, and possibly in tomorrow's America. 'So we have to be who we're not in order to be who we are,' Karl says. Read more: A hilarious, righteous transgender remix of 'The Odyssey' blows up the literary canon As their need to flee grows more urgent — this time, from the Allied soldiers who are arresting queer people while freeing the rest of the country — Bertie must destroy the evidence of their assumed identities. He lights a bonfire and burns the very thing that most disaster survivors grab on their way out the door: the photo albums commemorating the once-carefree life he lived when he could be who he truly was. 'Everything had burned, ever since that night at the Institut,' Bertie reflects as the flames lick at images of his happier self. 'First the twenty thousand books and then the countless people and then the proof that any of it had ever happened at all. It seemed like every last one of the normally sexed was in on it. It hurt his heart.' As their escape ship pulls into New York harbor, Bertie ponders the permanence of his pain. 'A great sadness fell upon him. Deutschland was behind him forever. He had loved his country. But what he loved was what it used to be, what had been lost. The things it could have been … Pride in a country was what it could do for its people, not what it could take away. Yet here they were. And he would need to get used to it.' Exhaustively researched, gorgeously crafted and presciently timed, "The Lilac People" exhumes a buried history that could leave us mourning our lost democracy if we don't learn from, and act on, its tragic lessons. Maran, author of 'The New Old Me' and other books, lives in a Silver Lake bungalow that's even older than she is. Get the latest book news, events and more in your inbox every Saturday. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
29-04-2025
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
Before Hitler took over Germany, Bertie was happy and trans in Berlin
In the run-up to the 2024 election, on cable news shows and at dinner tables, Americans debated a question that terrified various groups of us for various reasons. If Trump won, would he replace our democracy with fascism? Given Republican anti-trans ad spending estimated at $215 million on network television alone ('She's for they/them, he's for you'), trans people had reason to fear that Trump would eviscerate the civil rights they'd earned over the last half-century. Sure enough, Trump immediately signed a slew of anti-trans executive orders collectively described by now-fired EEOC commissioner Jocelyn Samuels as a plan to 'erase the existence of trans people.' Milo Todd, a Lambda literary fellow and creative writing teacher, centers his first novel on an earlier erasure, largely hidden within a bigger story: Hitler's attempt to eradicate the transgender people of 1930s Germany. When the Nazis took power, Berlin was an international gay hub, home to 100 queer bars, 25 queer journals and the Institute for Sexual Science, where the world's first sex reassignment surgeries and hormone treatments were performed by gender activist Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld. Through the eyes and heart of the novel's trans protagonist, Berthold 'Bertie' Durchdenwald, we experience the news of Hitler's takeover, which comes while he's dancing with his girlfriend in a queer Berlin club. The music cut out in the middle of a final, lingering note. 'We interrupt to bring you important news,' the radio said. 'President Hindenburg has just appointed Adolf Hitler as the new chancellor of Germany …' 'Don't they know what this will do to Germany?' Sofie spat. All Bertie felt was cold. Much as Trump immediately set about fulfilling his 'Day 1' campaign promise to 'stop the transgender lunacy' and 'get transgender out of the military.' Hitler immediately labeled transgender people 'sexual degenerates' and sent as many of them as his Brown Shirts could catch to the death camps. The institute was torched by a Nazi student mob, every book in its library burned in Opera Square. 'The world had changed overnight,' Bertie observes. 'The city was already draped in swastikas. Bright red flags hanging, flapping, lolling like dead tongues from every corner shop … Berlin was bleeding from the inside out.' Heightening the contrast between the trans experience pre- and post-Hitler, Todd uses chapters alternating between Bertie's beautiful Berlin life and his eked-out 1940s existence on the farm where he and Sofie hid under aliases throughout the war. Against this tragic setting, the elegance of Todd's prose plants wonder in the reader's mind. 'The asparagus sprang up every spring without fail, an old friend, a capsule of history from when life kept growing, birthed from a better time.' Soon after word of the war's end reaches Bertie and Sofie, Bertie discovers an emaciated young man unconscious in the asparagus patch 'in the dirtied stripes of a camp prisoner.' Noting the black triangle sewed to the man's uniform, the Nazis' label for trans prisoners, Bertie realizes the man must have escaped from nearby Dachau. While feeding and bathing the dazed stranger, Bertie takes a chance. 'I'm a transvestite,' he says. 'Me, too,' says Karl. 'Why were you still in those clothes?' Bertie asked. 'Didn't the Allies liberate the camps weeks ago?' 'I fled when the Allies came.' 'Is it true? They're setting everyone but us free?' 'The only difference I've seen between [the Allies and the Nazis] is their style of murder,' Karl answers. Devastated to learn that the Allies, too, were treating trans people as subhuman, Bertie and Sofie stop waiting to be liberated and start planning their own liberation. Their preparations to emigrate to America include training the innocent Karl to avoid recognition. 'Perhaps when you're rested,' Bertie said, 'I can teach you how to transvert.' 'I am not a man exactly like that.' 'Or you could wear some of my things,' Sofie added gently. Here, Todd has his youngest character summarize the painful central paradox of trans life — in Nazi Germany nearly a century ago, and possibly in tomorrow's America. 'So we have to be who we're not in order to be who we are,' Karl says. As their need to flee grows more urgent — this time, from the Allied soldiers who are arresting queer people while freeing the rest of the country — Bertie must destroy the evidence of their assumed identities. He lights a bonfire and burns the very thing that most disaster survivors grab on their way out the door: the photo albums commemorating the once-carefree life he lived when he could be who he truly was. 'Everything had burned, ever since that night at the Institut,' Bertie reflects as the flames lick at images of his happier self. 'First the twenty thousand books and then the countless people and then the proof that any of it had ever happened at all. It seemed like every last one of the normally sexed was in on it. It hurt his heart.' As their escape ship pulls into New York harbor, Bertie ponders the permanence of his pain. 'A great sadness fell upon him. Deutschland was behind him forever. He had loved his country. But what he loved was what it used to be, what had been lost. The things it could have been … Pride in a country was what it could do for its people, not what it could take away. Yet here they were. And he would need to get used to it.' Exhaustively researched, gorgeously crafted and presciently timed, 'The Lilac People' exhumes a buried history that could leave us mourning our lost democracy if we don't learn from, and act on, its tragic lessons. Maran, author of 'The New Old Me' and other books, lives in a Silver Lake bungalow that's even older than she is.
