In November of 1918, with the German Revolution in full swing, Magnus Hirschfeld gave a speech in front of the Reichstag in Berlin, at a demonstration that helped establish the Weimar Republic. Demanding elections and the abolition of the monarchy, the assembly was attacked, just before Hirschfeld spoke, by monarchist, protofascist snipers. The crowd of thousands ducked as bullets flew over their heads. Hirschfeld was Germany’s most prominent sexologist: an advocate for the legalization of sodomy and a compassionate approach to people who wished to change their sex. Although his theories and categorizations were rejected by many contemporary sodomites, they are among the earliest ones which still resonate with gay, lesbian, and trans lives as they have been lived in the long twentieth century. Hirschfeld’s big idea—that sodomy, intersex variations, and sex change represented not deviant acts or deficiencies needing correction but inborn, natural differences, stable minorities of people benignly “different from the others” who, in a world ruled by science and justice instead of prejudice, could live openly and happily—continues to be the way most sex/gender minorities think about who we are.

When he took the podium, Hirschfeld demanded government by and for the people and equal rights for all. In the years of relative freedom that followed, he expanded his advocacy and research into a large Institute for Sexual Science that became one of the first and largest nodes in a network of organizations that helped develop contemporary homo- and transsexualities. A secular Jew and a left-liberal, Hirschfeld was a symbol both of the Weimar Republic’s many compromises and of everything the Nazis sought to eliminate. He was both a forward-thinking advocate for trans health care and someone who helped institute medical models that require cis doctors to validate trans personhood, both an early advocate for gay rights and sexual liberation and a believer in eugenics, both a self-conceived antiracist and someone whose political and research project mobilized a vast and violently collected colonial archive to ground apparently universal claims about sex. In 1933, in the middle of travelling the world to present his research, he was forced to watch on a newsreel as the newly empowered Nazis ransacked his Institute and burned his library.

The past decade has seen gay, lesbian, and trans civil rights movements achieve what briefly felt, to some people, like the beginnings of a total victory in the project of integration into Western liberal democratic society as recognized and rights-bearing minorities. It is also increasingly characterized by a backlash to that integration, part of a broader fascist wave that threatens liberal democracy itself. This contemporary history helps explain why the Weimar era—years of unprecedented sex/gender openness which ended in fascism and flames—has become one of queer and trans studies’ most urgent and popular topics. It has haunted our collective imagination. History is how groups (minorities, nations) ground our claims to rights. LGBTQI people, to paraphrase Benedict Anderson, are to be distinguished not by our falsity or genuineness, but by the style in which we are imagined—and have imagined ourselves.