page_title: Transgender history
section_title: Germany
hierarchical_section_title: Transgender history / Europe / Germany
caption_attribution_description: English: A member of the SA throws confiscated books into the bonfire during the public burning of "un-German" books on the Opernplatz in Berlin.Čeština: Pálení knih v Berlíně, z 10. května 1933 Русский: Сожжение книг в нацистской Германии 10 мая 1933 года
context_page_description: Transgender history, in the broadest sense, includes examples of gender variance and gender nonconformity in cultures worldwide since ancient times. As this history is prior to the coining of the modern term "transgender", opinions of how to categorize these people and identities can vary. This history also begins prior to the mid-twentieth-century usage of "gender" in American psychology and associated conceptual apparatus including the notions of "gender identity" and "gender role".
  Sumerian and Akkadian texts from 4500 years ago document transgender or transvestite priests known as gala and by other names. Graves of possibly trans- or third-gender people in Europe have been identified from 4500 years ago, and likely depictions occur in art around the Mediterranean from 9000 to 3700 years ago. In Ancient Greece, Phrygia, and Rome, there were galli priests that some scholars believe to have been trans women, and records of women who passed as men in order to vote, fight, or study during times when these things were forbidden for women. Roman emperor Elagabalus preferred to be called a lady not a lord, sought sex reassignment surgery, and has been seen as an early trans figure.
context_section_description: Around 98 CE, at a time galli priests existed in Rome, Tacitus wrote that the priest of the Germanic Nahanarvali tribe also wore women's clothes.
  In the early 1900s, transgender people became a subject of popular interest in Germany, covered by several biographies and the sympathetic liberal press in Berlin. In 1906, Karl M. Baer became one of the first known trans men to have sex reassignment surgery, and in 1907 gained full legal recognition of his gender with a new birth certificate, married his first wife, and published a semifictionalized autobiography, Aus eines Mannes Mädchenjahren ("Memoirs of a Man's Maiden Years"); in 1938, he emigrated to Palestine. The same year, Brazilian socialite Dina Alma de Paradeda moved to Breslau and became engaged to a male teacher, before committing suicide, after which a doctor revealed that her body was male. This made her one of the first trans women known by name in Central Europe or of South American origin. A biography published in 1907, Tagebuch einer männlichen Braut ("Diary of a male bride"), was supposedly based on her diary.
  During the Weimar Republic, Berlin was a liberal city with one of the most active LGBT rights movements in the world. Magnus Hirschfeld co-founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee (WhK) in Berlin and sought social recognition of homosexual and transgender men and women; with branches in several countries, the committee was (on a small scale) the first international LGBT organization. In 1919, Hirschfeld co-founded the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, a sexology research institute with a research library, a large archive, and a marriage and sex counseling office. The institute was a worldwide pioneer in the call for civil rights and social acceptance for homosexual and transgender people. Hirschfeld coined the word transvestite. In 1930 and 1931, with Hirschfeld's (and other doctors') help, Dora Richter became the first known trans woman to undergo vaginoplasty, along with removal of the penis (following removal of testicles several years earlier), and Lili Elbe underwent similar surgeries in Dresden, including an unsuccessful ovary and uterus transplant, complications from which resulted in her death. In 1933, the Nazis burned the Institute's library.
  On June 12, 2003, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in favor of Van Kück, a German trans woman whose insurance company denied her reimbursement for sex reassignment surgery and hormone replacement therapy, who sued under Article 6 and Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
caption: On May 10, 1933, Nazis burned the library of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft.
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