Transgender Jews and the Holocaust: The Story of Charlotte Charlaque

Some people think transgender politics is new, or that it began in the 1990s. But in fact, transgender people have always existed, and the real story of the beginnings of modern transition is much older. Before the First World War, Germany had a transgender political movement, and under pressure, the German government had begun to grant a limited form of legal transition. Then, the Nazis came to power and destroyed much of what trans people had struggled to achieve. Charlotte Charlaque's story traces this history. She moved to Berlin in the 1920s in order to transition, and she built a life for herself, working at Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science. When the Nazis took power, she had to flee the country. She and her girlfriend spent years trying to evade fascism, and Charlaque, who was Jewish, narrowly escaped a transport to Auschwitz. This talk tells Charlaque's story as a way to explore the remarkable trans world of Weimar Berlin, destroyed in 1933, and the ways in which the fascists persecuted trans people, particularly trans women.

Laurie Marhoefer is a historian of queer and transgender people during the Holocaust. He has written two books, many articles, and co-written two amicus briefs for United States Supreme Court cases involving transgender rights. He is currently writing Trans Berlin, due out in 2027 with Tiny Reparations (Penguin Random House). He lives in Seattle and teaches at the University of Washington.

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