So thank you so much for having me.
The shock of the new, cultural amnesia, trans erasure, and
what we can do about it.
I think best to explain this term with an example.
So if you have been following any kind of trans-related news,
you've probably already seen this story break, it broke in January, 2017.
Apparently, against the fact that many of us who are trans will already know,
trans men and transmasculine people who have been pregnant, or
have children in many varied ways.
Apparently the first-ever trans man to ever be pregnant happened in January.
And you can see, we're playing a little Daily Mail sort of tick-box exercise here.
Former Asda worker, sperm donor on Facebook, it's all very exciting.
[LAUGH] However, if you're a member of the trans community, or someone who
is interested in ethical journalism, someone that maybe knows someone in
the trans community, you might be a little surprised to see this same headline.
So in case you can't see that, that's 2012, Britain's first male mum speaks.
I promise you, they're not the same person.
So we have here, 2017, five years ago,
we have the first ever trans man to bear a child.
The shock of the new, the first trans person to, is trans a new trend?
Shocking, alarming rises and the number of trans children being referred.
It's used as a marketing purpose, it's used to shock,
it's used to titillate, to recycle a news story.
And also, as a total lens with which to view collective trans stories and
individual trans lives.
So to give some more examples, here we have a 2015 book,
marketing the story of Michael Dylan.
In case you can't see, I'm afraid the quality is not so high.
Apparently, the story is that of the world's first transsexual man.
Again, if you don't know the story of Michael Dylan,
he was quite an incredible person.
But, living in the 1950s,
he was not the first trans man by a very long stretch of the imagination.
Moving on from marketing, we can see this idea of trans being new,
the first trans person to, being a way to, for want of a better word,
sex up a news story that might otherwise be quite dull.
So India Willoughby becoming a presenter for Loose Women.
I have no doubt that it's significant, and I am very pleased for
her career advancement.
But it seems very strange to me to say that this is making history,
with the first trans host, when Jin Xing, in China, has a flagship program
which attracts 100 million viewers per week, as an out trans woman.
So, and then we have the idea of trans is new,
creating drama and twisting the substance of a news story.
So we have the story of Anohni refusing to perform at the Oscars.
Variety is reporting it here, that Anohni was the first-ever trans person
to be nominated for an Academy Award.
We could perhaps split hairs over the fact that they call Anohni a performer,
but she was nominated for Best Music.
Angela Morley, again, trans composer and performer, was nominated twice for
Best Music in the 1970s.
So there's absolutely no fact-checking that goes on here.
So this idea of trans as news twins with an understanding of trans being
something new.
A symptom of modernity, rather than something neutral, and
understood through cultural context.
Through constant usage, it shows not only a lack of awareness of trans realities,
but it erases the knowledge of them altogether.
This is not just not knowing, but turning ignorance and, too often,
laziness into a tool with which to shape the present and the past.
People who are not trans become so convinced of this narrative,
in this play-through, in the absence of investigation,
that a stereotype is made to stand in for fact.
And frequently, the concept of trans being new is more important than
the trans people whose lives this trope feeds off.
Again, if you remember the furor over the 2012 incident of
the first-ever pregnant man?
You will also remember how The Sun urged their readers to track him down, hunt him
down, and provide personal details, that they could out him and find his story.
Unsurprisingly, this caused widespread panic for trans people across the country.
And resulted in this man being outed, and
being forced to tell his story, regardless of his consent or his wishes.
Putting his family life at risk, his personal life at risk, and his career.
Being the news story is not usually a safe place to be.
And we often come across the fact that people who are not trans believe
that all trans visibility in the media is a good thing.
Without thinking of the fact that a story written about
us very often doesn't have our best interests at heart.
What I'd like to explore in more detail with you this evening,
is how the shock of the new, this particular framing,
intersects with our understanding of LGBT history,
how it frames our current standing, and what impact it might have on our futures.
The best example I could think to give is that of Lili Elbe and Gerda Wegener,
and how their stories were rewritten by the film, The Danish Girl.
If I may read to you, this is a chapter from my new book.
Visually, dramatically,
even orchestrally similar to Tom Hooper's previous award-winning film,
The King's Speech, The Danish Girl was a strange experience for me.
Based on a true story biopic, drawn from the book of the same name,
it purported to tell the story of Danish painter Einar Wegener, wife and
fellow artist, Gerda Wagner, and the woman Einar reveals herself to be,
the beautiful and ill-fated Lili Elbe.
The film itself is gorgeous, with that lush-yet-muted aesthetic
that screams classy period piece, like Downton Abbey on a bigger budget.
Everything, from the restrained and unobtrusive directorial style,
to the pre-credit reminder that the diary Lili is shown writing was
turned into a memoir, points to the telling of an underlying truth.
We see here, one of the main posters.
I'm afraid the text is a little small, but it does say,
inspired by the extraordinary true story.
Posters, and puff pieces, and interviews with the actor made it explicit.
Here is a true story of a transgender pioneer, and
what you're about to see next will shock and amaze you.
The idea was that failing to support this film was failing to support trans history,
trans visibility, and trans acceptance.
The problem for me is that what this film passed off as, quote-unquote,
the truth, was not.
But was instead a story based on a myth of trans victimhood and
suffering, at odds with the real life of Lili Elbe and her peers.
Is this image familiar to anyone, no, yeah, okay?
So this is Gerda Wegener's 1922 work, On The Way To Anacapri,
a depiction of one of the many trips that she and Lili took to Italy.
They also traveled around the whole of Europe.
The Denmark Museum of Modern Art has just had a major retrospective of
Gerda Wegener's work.
And they urged the viewer to observe the matching rings on both the couple's hands,
the complementary dresses, the dreamlike quality.
And the comfort of their bodies together that speaks very deeply of Gerda Wegener's
understanding of her and Lili as a romantic, spiritual, and artistic couple.
The basic facts, before Lili Elbe was known as Lili Elbe,
she was known as Einar Wegener.
Born in 1882, and trained at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts,
she married Gerda Gottlieb in 1904, while both of them were still students.
As painters, both Einar and Gerda enjoyed some initial success,
with Gerda's career quickly outstripping her partner's.
They moved to Paris, they moved back to Copenhagen.
They loved and supported each other, and eventually parted ways to pursue
other marriages, remaining close and loving friends.
What makes the story of interest to outsiders, of course,
is the fact that Lili became posthumously famous as one of the first people
to pursue a surgical transition.
She died in 1931, two months on from her fourth, or possibly fifth and
final operation, a uterine transplant.
Man into Woman, the book, appeared in 1933, and Lili's name was made.
While touting itself as a memoir, Man into Woman was actually written
by Danish journalist Lulu Lassen and German writer Ernst Jacobsen,
who took the pseudonym Niels Hoyer, and title of editor.
Jacobsen fleshed out his third-person narrative with extracts from
Lili's letters and diary entries.
Nerissa Gailey and AD Brown explain in their 2015 essay, Beyond Either/Or,
the many ways in which Man into Woman is closer to pulp fiction than fact.
Discrepancies between the book and the original documents it refers to, lack of
verification of its contents, due to the firebombing of records kept in Dresden.
And the number of alterations and exaggerations found throughout the text.
I'm using here, Einar and Lili, because that appears to be the way that Lili
referred to herself in her diaries, just as a side note.
Information about Lili and Gerda can be found in a scattering of sources.
Contemporary accounts written in transvestite magazines,
academic papers that have collated and analysed medical accounts,
wider media accounts and papers left by the pair.
There are many aspects of their shared life that we cannot know and
can't guess at.
What we do know, though, is at odds with the world The Danish Girl presents.
There are the general problems with the biopic format, and
perhaps we could shrug them off as a necessary aspect of artistic license.
The compression of years to create a tight narrative, for example,
is standard Hollywood practice.
But when the topic, transition, is relatively unknown,
these standard practices introduce troubling inaccuracies and distortions.
The shortening of timescale makes a gradual realization, and a multi-stage and
a multi-faceted transition, look like some kind of overnight fancy.
It may be easier on the audience's attention span, but
it props up the popular myth that trans people transition on a whim.
There are the usual insertions of fictional characters,
some cliched writing, and some heavy-handed pathetic fallacy.
Par for the course, but aggravatingly faithful to the usual trans tropes.
But beyond these features, there are four specific changes made to Lillian good
a story that I just couldn't get my head around changes that felt so regressive so
oppositional to what actually happened, that it made me wonder what the filmmakers
were trying to say about women in general and trans woman in particular.
One of the most shocking moments of the film,
one most likely to garner the sympathies of a general audience,
is the point at which Lili first seeks help for her, quote-unquote, problem.
And is forcibly strapped down, and
subjected to a radiotherapy cure meant to restore her to a state of normal manhood.
Gerda is present to encourage her, to enforce the idea that this painful,
excessive response is necessary, and the only thing that can save their marriage.
The cure fails, of course, but leaves Lili wary of seeking help.
I'd like to show you a clip from this movie now, as I found it unsettling for
many reasons.
But I'll let you see for yourself, so
let me just, >> Sir, how long have you been married?
>> Six years.
>> Children?
>> No. >> Is there regular copulation?
>> Yes.
Perhaps less now than before- >> And
before you started to dress as a woman.
I'm a specialist, Mr Wegener, you may be embarrassed, I'm not.
Tell me about Lili, where does she come from?
>> Inside me.
>> [LAUGH] The most likely explanation for all of this is a chemical imbalance.
>> Really? >> Onto the bed,
that would explain the pain, the confused state of masculinity, and the infertility.
Let's hope it is that, because that, at least, we can cure.
[MUSIC]
>> I don't need to do this, there's nothing wrong with me.
>> That's not true.
>> Gerda, this can't be right.
>> Radiation is a miracle, Mr. Wegener, it destroys the bad and saves the good.
>> I'm sure it'll be over quickly.
[MUSIC]
>> Lie still, Mr. Wegener.
[SOUND]
[MUSIC]
Mr. Wegener, how are you feeling this morning?
>> You hurt Lili.
>> I'm afraid your husband's aberrant thinking persists.
>> And let's get away from the movie, and back to Gerda Wegener's art.
It's a shocking scene, it's one sort of intended to grab the audience's attention,
to grab our feelings, to put us through the wringer.
And it is the exact opposite of what actually happened.
In reality, the radiotherapy treatment Lili undertook,
with the full support of Gerda, in fact, paid for by Gerda,
was designed to stimulate the ovaries doctors suspected her of having.
Radiotherapy, as a new and exciting development in the field of medicine,
was often touted as a revitalizing cure-all.
In this instance, it was thought that the beams would kick-start ovarian function,
and that a natural bodily transition would follow.
Allowing Lili to become, in her words, the woman she knew herself to be.
Lili began to bleed on a monthly basis afterwards.
And both she and Gerda felt this was akin to menstruation, and
a sign that the treatment was working.
Returning to the film, following the failure of radiation treatment,
Lili shutters herself away.
Unable to trust her doctors, unable to confide in Gerda, and
unable to withstand public scrutiny as either Lili or Einar.
There is no mention here of Lili's actual life.
Her consultations and treatments with Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut,
her supposed disdain for the other patients.
Her first operation, her travels abroad with Gerda, her parties.
Her general Bahamian lifestyle, and
her love of walking through Paris while drinking life in.
Lili does admittedly go for a Parisian stroll in The Danish Girl,
only to be assaulted by two strangers, another invention.
Where in reality we have a single trans person in one of many,
a pioneer to be sure but a pioneer in community.
We are shown in stood alone martyr should become someone who cannot be understood,
who cannot even seek understanding or compassion or companionship, but
cannot find release even in the solitary pleasure of anonymity.
In The Danish Girl, Lily's final operation and
death scene are inevitably played for maximum effect.
All trace of Heshfield erased, Lily and
Gerda try a last ditch consultation with Maverick's surgeon Curt Vonacross.
He warns them how dangerous his proposed treatment would be.
He tells them that Lily would be the first to try.
He doesn't care.
She needs surgery, modern security of a long life.
The surgery undertaken is reduced to two procedures from the likely four or
five the real life living on the wind.
First, removal of original tissue and second the creation of a vagina.
In the film, Lily is meant to rest properly but routine procedures and
get her strength back up, she doesn't,
asking her surgeon if she'll be able to have children after her second operation.
She gets the patronizing reply one thing at a time, you can guess the rest.
Go to conveniently arrives at just the right moment for
the big death scene caused by loss of blood and post surgical fever.
And Lily get in a final saccharine line before the delicate closing of her eyes.
Gerda cries, the audience, presumably cries.
Lily pays the ultimate price for trying to go against nature.
But wasn't she brave to do so?
The reality is far less operatic.
The details are somewhat murky after the destruction of medical records by
both the Nazis and by ally are.
What we know is that Lily wanted children and
that Vonacross was less ethical than the more cautious and qualified Heshfield.
Successful organ transplants would not become a reality until development
of powerful immunosuppressive drugs in the 1970s.
The insurmountable problem of rejection was well known in medicine by this point,
but Vonacross told her he could do it.
Her immune system rejected the transplant.
She died on September 13th, 1931.
It surprised me then that the cinematic change that made me even angrier than this
melodramatic surgery and death sequence was the overall treatment of Goda Wagner.
Gerda Wagner,
whose income from her art outstripped her partner's by a considerable amount.
Who won two gold medals for her work at the 1925 World's Fair in Paris.
Who had lived in Paris since 1912 with Lily as two women together, who funded
the majority of Lilly surgery, whose best works depict some of the most romantic and
erotic depictions of lesbian attraction, lesbian love, and lesbian lovemaking.
I've ever seen, is reduced and
changed to become a character straight out of Central Casting.
Gerda's career in the film only lifts off with Lily's transition.
And she becomes by turns frustrated, angry and
shrewish about the loss of her husband.
Gone is only attempt to accurately portray the Bahamian World of independent women,
artistic freedom, and gendered authenticity replaced instead by
a portrait of the marriage ruined by transition.
Identical to every other telling from the story from HBO's normal
to the join the dots tabloid staple.
Some, but by no means all, marriages do falter in the face of transition.
But attempting to impose that story onto the real lives of Gerda Wagner and
Lily Elba is an insult to how they lived, how they loved their courage and
their artistry.
Alecia Vicar brought home the Oscar for best supporting actress,
another remarkable chapter of women's history publicly erased.
I was ranting about all of this online, because I do try, but I do fail.
And I had an interesting response from an ex pupil of mine.
She commented that it wasn't the film's fault that it was so tragic,
because that's simply what life was like for trans people in the 1920s.
I don't blame her for thinking so, as it's certainly what I thought before I
fell down the rabbit hole of historical research.
[LAUGH] We're still struggling with LGBT acceptance now, so
it makes sense that the situation would've been so much worse a century ago,
and without doubt, tragedy existed.
Many, many people suffered.
But the story is not quite so bleak as the Danish girl would have you believe,
and sometimes it is even quite wonderful.
These are patrons of the Eldorado Club in Berlin in the 1920s.
They are all of them trans in modern usage.
Transvestite was the term used at the time, but it was a broad category.
It's difficult to pinpoint where to begin with the birth of the science of
sexology in the 19th century, or with a ball bar and party scenes in Paris and
Holland and Berlin.
Where dancers could present themselves as any agenda they liked and
flirt with whomever they chose.
Twice a week in Berlin with police permission.
Maybe with the 1882 case of Herman Connell, who after chest and
genital surgery was granted a legal change of name and gender by the crushing state.
If you want to talk about first as the first I can find.
Well, maybe with the fact that people who found to Agenda conventions,
who insisted on determining the agenda itself in opposition to how the world
characterize them was so well documented that contemporary news
researchers could argue over whose definition best described them.
In addition to the words transvestite, again, much broader term,
much more analogous to transgender now and the word transsexual, which appeared
in the 1920s, we had aberration and defemination from Richard Funkroft Ebbing.
A very, very long German word that I will attempt to pronounce for you now.
Massive apologies.
Drive for sexual transformation.
I'm sure someone can help me that later, that was from Max Mackey's.
And suck so aesthetic conversion from a block Alice in addition to the complex and
conflicting meanings of invert earning uranium and homosexual.
It was Magnus Hirschfeld words transvestite and transsexual that stuck
and Hirschfeld work that is behind so many of the extraordinary medical and
societal advances that pave the way for the modern trans movement today.
There's Hirschfeld in front of his research.
So a doctor, researcher, an all around campaigner for the rights of sexual and
gender minorities.
Magnus Hirschfeld was described by Adolf Hitler as
the most dangerous Geo in Germany.
In 1897, he founded the scientific humanitarian committee,
which is most likely the first campaign in group for
what we would call LGBT causes in the world.
He published a journal yearbook of sexual intermediaries featuring
scientific studies, news reviews, letters, and pictures.
In 1919, he founded the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin.
And in 1928, he founded the World League for Sexual Reform.
In between treating patients, acting as an expert witness,
petitioning the police and the courts for fairer treatment, and writing and
distributing political and informational pamphlets.
Hirschfeld found the time to write and publish his groundbreaking book,
Transvestites, in 1910.
Hirschfeld use the word to describe those who in his words felt peace,
security and exaltation.
Happiness and well being,
when presenting is the sex other than that which they were assigned at birth.
He made it clear that such people could come from all walks of life, could be
assigned female or male, could be of any and all sexual orientations including
none, and that they will not mad nor as people still think pushing a kink too far.
Lilly Elba was neither the first trans woman to undergo medical treatment nor
was her memoir the first in the field.
Called bears story Memoirs of a Man's Maiden Years which has to be the best
title, [LAUGH] was published in 1907 and served as the basis for 1919 silent film.
Orland self described androgen published Autobiography of an androgen in 1918 and
a female impersonators in 1922.
There are several reports and rumors of surgical treatment of what we might
now call trans men from the 1900s and 1910s.
Alan Hart, an American scientist and
novelist underwent his surgical transition in 1917, sorry, forgive me, 1907.
The first formal Western medical attempts at so-called male to female
surgery followed in 1920.
Historian Katie writes, these early surgical techniques for developing
hand in hand with reconstructive and cosmetic surgery methods for war veterans,
and in some cases were accompanied by early attempts of hormone therapy.
Although there are a few detailed accounts within the contemporary medical
literature, possibly due to the laws prohibiting castration,
there is evidence that multiple surgeries of this nature were performed.
There's community evidence that before this treatment by doctors,
trans women were helping each other with home surgery,
as a forms of genital surgery a pair of injections which can be done from home.
These surgical efforts were well known enough and
considered safe enough that following Lilly Elba's death and
editorial appeared in the community magazine the world of a transvestite.
This editorial reaffirm to its readership the potential of such surgery
noting promising science coming from Hirschfeld Institute.
And including an update from an unnamed transvestite to currently enjoying
a post operative holiday in their words as a complete woman.
What would it mean to people now if our history become a knowledge, but
that doesn't mean a history of people who are exactly as we are,
regardless of the dictates of historical and social context.
But of the people whose lives and efforts help to create the categories,
the structures and cultures through which we now move.
What if we knew of these people,
these communities in the same way that we know of Oscar Wilde?
It's a terrible, terrible cliche.
But as a young adolescent, I was obsessed with Wilde.
I didn't know how to describe my sexuality, and
I didn't know how to describe my gender.
But I knew I wanted to be like him.
I wanted to be that witty and unapologetic and to win the britches and
when the film Wild came out, and I saw that first case between two beautiful,
passionate individual man, I knew what I needed for my own body.
Just that little slice of history gave me an insight into myself and the role model,
and the comfort of companionship when I was invisible and alone.
What a tremendous gift it would have been to have known that there were people
in history who might now be called trans, people who lived as the genders
they knew that they were, regardless of what society had told them.
To know that they had claimed their own lives with honesty and courage, and
that maybe I could follow their lead and do the same.
The shock of the new has shaped the Danish girls presentation of trans history,
but it's also shaped the media response to the film.
So much has been made of as opposed to groundbreaking nature and
the representation of a trans woman biases man has been excused by the reasoning.
The film success will ultimately pave the way for the casting of trans actors.
It is apparently astonishing to have a mainstream movie with a trans subject
matter at all, and the trans community should shove their objections and
be grateful for the increased publicity.
As a movie fan, this explanation didn't sit right with me and it made me curious.
Is it really so rare for a film to feature the role of a trans woman played by a man,
the receiving his Oscar is a step forward.
So I decided to watch the World According to Gap by comparison.
I love that book when I was younger, it's a [INAUDIBLE] the John Irving novel.
Yeah, I never got around to seeing the movie.
So like The Danish Girl, it's a film that it's a man playing a trans woman.
And like The Danish Girl, that man received a nomination for
an Oscar for that performance.
And that was 35 years ago.
John Lithgow plays Roberta, an ex-professional football player who now
works in the feminist movement and becomes the main character's best friend and
anchor of sanity in a frequently grotesque world.
It's not a perfect film, much of it is of its time.
So the language used about Roberta, by herself and by other people closely
reflects back the sort of trans literature that was available at the time.
So not something that a lot of us would use now.
And yet it has a naturalness and an ease, and
an acceptance which I couldn't find in the Danish Girl.
I was struck by how natural John Lithgow feels in this role and how firmly
Roberta is accepted and celebrated as a woman by the other characters.
Not as a man trying to be a woman, and not as, quote unquote,
a man on a journey to womanhood or even a particular subset of woman but
simply as she is, as she is herself and all her complexity.
And so I wanted to show you a section of this film.
We have got played by Robin Williams playing with his kids with Roberta,
she acts as an art figure to the children, a substitute daughter for his mother,
as all around moral center for the film so
it's quite simple, but I think it's interesting.
>> Help, help, help.
[SOUND] Kill him, kill him, kill him.
Help, help, help.
>> [SOUND] >> [LAUGH]
>> You're wounded,
as soon as you're wounded you become a villan.
>> That's the rules, you're a villan.
>> I'll become the villan.
>> You're a disgrace to your tribe.
>> And the scum of the Earth.
>> It's time to die, Sir Scum.
I'm going to revenge my uncle's death.
>> You and who else?
>> Me and him, you ready Sir Waltz?
>> Ready and [INAUDIBLE] Sir Duncan.
>> Serve the church.
>> [INAUDIBLE] [SOUND] >> Get here.
>> [SOUND] >> What's a matter, Walt?
>> What's wrong?
You guys always get to die, I never get to.
>> [LAUGH] >> You can't,
someone had to rescue you the fair maiden.
>> I wanna die too.
>> All right.
In his last dying breath, [INAUDIBLE] has to crawl forward and swing his vile blade.
[SOUND] >> [SOUND]
>> [LAUGH] [APPLAUSE]
>> Sorry about that.
Now we have to end the war because of pot roast, ain't that a pity.
>> No. >> Come on,
don't moan if you wanna eat dinner.
>> Dead men don't eat.
>> Yeah, and dead men don't bitch either.
>> I've got to go, it's late.
Goodbye, Donnovan.
>> Sure you can't stay?
>> No, I have to go have a heartbreak in Manhattan.
He's young, he's handsome.
Well, what can I do?
>> Maybe this time it will work out.
>> Maybe so.
I'm a hopeless romantic in a male chauvinist world.
>> Bye, darlings.
[SOUND] >> It should be noted Roberto never has
any trouble getting a date, the problem is the man just not good enough.
>> [LAUGH] >> Which is rather nice.
So let's see.
Also important in both the book, the film doesn't follow it that much is that
one of Gabb's children ends up dating a trans woman because he has learnt
through having an outright reburser, that transphobia is stupid.
Which is really quite lovely.
Beyond the excuse to watch Robin Williams in anything, I think what's so
interesting here is to really see that difference in acting style.
And I don't know how many people here have seen the Danish Girl?
A few? If I talk about Eddie Redmayne's wrists,
do you understand what I mean, yeah.
[LAUGH] It felt that Redmayne's performance,
hinges on an open acknowledgement of performance.
The whole thing is performative,
it is this question of gesture of a sense of being on display.
Constantly quivering, seemingly either on the edge of tears or orgasm, wrists
held at uncomfortable angles, Redmayne's approximation of what a trans woman
is is one of the most uncomfortable things I've been witnessed to in this cinema.
I've always been ambivalent about the casting of these actors as trans
characters, feeling that the more pressing question was
the casting of trans actors in all roles and making sure they get paid for it.
Redmayne changed my mind.
The entire edifice felt precisely that, an edifice.
He was trans most depicted from the outside, Amanda's guise through outer
trappings rather than a woman revealed by her own honesty.
Short of, the short of stockings, she use make up, dresses, wigs,
nothing of the heart of what it is to be trans.
It felt almost parodic in its display and it hurts to know that that parody will
be taken as truth by people who do not know better.
Every project needs a hook.
Every artist wants to feel that they have added something new to the cultural
landscape.
But in the case of the Danish Girl, there is nothing new.
Simply the recreation and the re-staging of the new by those ignorant of or
unfeeling towards the history of the people they claim to be serving.
So, Hirschfeld Institute was pillaged by the Nazis in 1933.
One of the most famous images of Nazi book burning shown here,
is the destruction of the documentation of his research, his case files,
his painstakingly gathered evidence in support of sexual minorities.
Hirschfeld died in exile in France in 1935.
We do not know exactly how many other homosexuals, transvestites, and
other antisocials were rounded up and sent to the camps, but
we know that the numbers were considerable.
Many of those few who did survive the war were not freed but
sentenced to further punishment for their supposed crimes,
often in the same death camps they've been held in.
The magazines, bars, and
organizations that supported the lives of sexual engendered minorities were gone.
The destruction of both Hirschfeld's work and
the thriving subcultures that supported and benefited
from it set the emerging LGBT rights movement back by decades, if not more so.
The drives, legal, social, scientific towards investigation, knowledge, and
compassionate acceptance were razed.
We have a chance to relearn that history and to benefit from and
honor that legacy, if we have the will to do so.
If we can stand to look at our own past without prejudice, and
see what it is that we are missing.
I hope that we do.
If I was speaking to you even a year ago, it's at this point that I would conclude,
maybe do a recommended reading list, put you on to some other essays and papers.
I can see that this idea of the new of cultural amnesia is annoying for
anyone who cares about accuracy.
But we have the question why is this relevant?
The chasing of a news story going back to our pregnant man example,
is damaging because of unethical press behavior.
But what would it matter if Eddie Redmayne gets an Oscar nomination for
less than ideal performance?
It matters very personally to me,
because of the political moment we find ourselves in.
This Pan European North American resurgence of nationalism, isolationism,
authoritarianism and
fascism that is reliant on a falsified version of the past.
And that falsified version does not include people like me.
Fake nostalgia, walking back to a point whether either it was okay
to discriminate openly against us or people like us didn't exist at all.
Here we have take back control that we have make America great again.
We have Vladimir Putin's criticism of modern tolerance of genderless.
If we can only cut out this part, or this part, or
this part, then apparently our safety and our prosperity would be assured.
We are easier to uproot as trans people to be stamped out if we are seen as new,
unestablished, and unintegrated outsiders with no history and with no value.
It is easier to lie about us when the facts of our existence are distorted or
outright denied.
You may have heard or
seen the recent BBC documentary about gender non conforming young people.
And the argument of affirmative versus conversion aversion therapies.
You may have seen the news night argument the night before,
and the fact that Emily Maitlis,
the presenter tweeted that trans activists would offer genital surgery to children.
How different would that documentary be?
The general media treatment, in a world that was widely aware of the few tile
decades spent trying to change trans people with forced institutionalization,
forced hormonal injections, forced drug therapies,
electroshock therapies, and other forms of medical abuse.
How would the panic and sneering over the words people use to describe themselves,
gender queer, gender neutral, gender fluid,
change if we were fully aware of just how hackneyed that sneering is?
Jokes being made now about made up trans words were also made in the pages of
German newspapers in the 1900s and 1910s.
Will trans-feminists still be pitted against trans-exclusionary feminists for
public entertainment?
If we had fully integrated the knowledge of the extensive documentary
evidence of trans people's valuable work in the feminist movement since
the beginning of the 20th century.
Would we still be seen as a threat if the knowledge of historical gender
variance was widely known and unremarkable?
We end up fighting the same battles over and over again.
We are subject to the same insults and the ways in which they
have been proven wrong or forgotten when knowledge is not widespread,
when the version of history that most people know is mostly white,
mostly male, straight, and says, it's considered neutral.
When that history is considered neutral, it is much easier for
those who pedal hate in exchange for power to weaponize that ignorance against us.
This cultural amnesia is far more than an academic concern.
And I have never been convinced of the ideal of academia as somehow neutral.
This is about our daily lives and our shared future.
LGBT history is not nor should it be an add on, an extra month,
an optional course or a special reading list.
Rather, any history that does not acknowledge the diversity of human
genders, desires and lives is at best incomplete and a worst lies and
propaganda.
I believe that we are living in a dangerous time for accuracy and
inclusivity.
Fake news, outrageous and obvious political lies and
despicable subterfuge and sleight of hand are our daily reality.
So it is that I believe that making a stand for integrated knowledge,
daily sharing of wisdom, the elevation of learning and
the continual reappraisal of what it is that we know is a vital part both
of fighting back against hate and building a better future.
I'm speaking here in a university, but
I do not mean this in a university context alone.
Transpeople would be nothing without our oral histories,
our community learning and the ways in which we learn
to claim authority of the knowledge of our own lives.
This is something broader to take a passion for
truth into the ways we communicate with each other.
If we have specific skills and all of us in this room have specific skills,
we should be sharing them and using them.
And sharing them in such a way that those skills can be further replicated,
shared and used.
Post-truth was the Oxford dictionary's word of the year for 2016.
I have fought too hard and for too long to honor my truth,
to see it stripped away from me by people ignorant of or
hostile to the realities and histories of LGBT lives.
I hope you feel the same way, and thank you.
>> [APPLAUSE]