PRIDE 2023 DEFIES WHITE SUPREMACISTS, CHRISTIAN NATIONALISTS

A Nightmare About Nazis Killing Trans People Leads Me to Pride

It’s Time to Fight Back, with Unity, Acceptance, and Support

Imagine living in a nightmare in 1940s Germany. Today, in the waking world, you may be straight and cisgender, but in this dream, you somehow know you are in the body of the wrong sex opposite of what you are as a reader. Your behavior and self-knowledge are based on only your experiences as a waking adult, but in this dream, you are the opposite.

Fortunately, as you search your room, you find some undergarments and a dress that make you most comfortable. Your flat chest is alien but the familiar sensation of the bra around your chest at least gives you the illusion of feeling like yourself. You quickly don them and stash some stray cash in a purse from the nightstand, you slip out the door before you are discovered. It’s confusing, in the streets are mostly older men, women, and mothers with young children. The only young men you see are in uniform driving a command car with an officer in the back. Voices in German fall to a hush as you duck into a nearby cafe, and every eye turns toward you. The proprietor hurries forward, turning red, waving and shouting at you to leave immediately.

Bewildered, you stumble back outside, realizing they were afraid of association with you. Looking for shelter you turn down the street only to stumble into two police officers with looks of disgust on their faces. They roughly restrain you and drag you to the station.

This story could be quite long, but here’s the short of it. You are led to believe that you might be set free if you volunteer for castration. But a doctor examines you, evaluates your mental condition, and classifies you as an incurable transvestite. You keep insisting that you really are a woman, and are met only with ridicule, abuse, beatings and worse. You are moved from jail, to prison, and ultimately, in November 1942, to the Mauthausen concentration camp, where you were issued a uniform with pink triangle badge. That badge made you a pariah to the other prisoners. You were lower than the Jewish prisoner population in the hierarchy and only given the most menial and horrid jobs. Fortunately, that did not last long. In January 1943 you were executed, as recorded under the name Liddy Bacroff.

You wake up, and realize that this may have been what life as a transgender woman in the 1940s might have been like. There was then, like now, extraordinarily little understanding of what a transgender person is and why they are. There was little or no tolerance from the uninformed and frightened. To most, you were queer, gay, sick, and mentally unwell. But even the gays and lesbians around you did not share your experiences. At least, when you talked with them their needs and self-perception were profoundly different than your own.

You realize that change needs to happen. Change must happen. People (children, youth, men, women) are in danger, and the danger is from the government. The danger is prejudice and fear being used as a lever to build mass hysteria.

Liddy’s story is real. Much of it is documented. If you know of Liddy or read the Wikipedia link I shared above, you know I only loosely used Liddy’s history, but the basic facts are true. Liddy was a self-professed transvestite and homosexual AMAB (assigned male at birth) person living as a woman. I don’t use pronouns because I do not know Liddy’s preference. I imagine Liddy often used she/her as it seems she tried to pass as a woman in every sense.

But was that Liddy’s identity?

Liddy’s story is only one example. Nazi Germany used Paragraph 175, which outlawed homosexual sex acts, as a basis to arrest thousands, many of whom were sent to concentration camps. While some may have been Jewish, that was not a requirement. And there is documentation that those issued a pink triangle badge were truly the ones to avoid at all costs. Association with pink triangle prisoners invited punishment or even re-classification as a pink triangle prisoner.

The scary thing is that many recent U.S. laws — eliminating public health access, outlawing drag performances with imprecise language that might be applied to transgender people during ordinary life, restricting access to public spaces, and enforcing educational and mental health systems designed solely to prevent gender non-conforming behavior — are natural precursors to atrocities like those committed in the name of Paragraph 175. History seems about to repeat itself.

So, even though I am only newly out in the world as a transgender woman, I am going to as many Pride events as I can this month. I could stay home, safe and sheltered. I am lucky, with resources, friends, and supporting family. I could avoid the public view, the opportunity for transphobic anti-protestors and Proud Boys to harass and intimidate the LGBTQ celebrating pride.

I am going to support my siblings!

I am going to be visible and show the world one more example of how being LGBTQ is not abnormal!

I want you to see that I and others like me are nothing to be feared!

I want you to hear the pain and fear we experience as we share stories of what is happening around the world and especially here in our backyard, in the United States of America.

I want you to hear the joy and relief we share having found community, acceptance, and safety.

I want you to understand that none of us have a mission to change anyone else. We LGBTQ people know better than anyone that who and what we are is not up for debate, that people’s fundamental identities cannot be changed by outside force. That goes for all cisgender heterosexuals out there too!

I want you to do more than accept and understand. I want you to be with us. March, protest, and lobby with us. Stand up with us when rights and human decency are stripped away from anyone.

This is not our fight alone. Misogyny is real. Black lives do matter. All cultures and peoples of color need protection. Anti-semitism is a horrible problem that must be stopped. People of all religious backgrounds and perspectives deserve the freedom to live and the same access to human rights: Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Shinto, Taoism, Atheism, Agnosticism, etc.

So while this month we celebrate Pride, and we remember the Stonewall riots, we also know that this is part of a bigger struggle. The struggle to end discrimination and bigotry. To give everyone the opportunities our country has claimed to be a symbol of American Freedom.

So come walk with me, in person or spirit. Come sing with me, speak with me, write with me. Join us!

This story is a response to the Prism & Pen writing prompt, Pride 2023 DEFIES White Supremacists, Christian Nationalists.

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