Talk:Transvestite pass

Wiki Education assignment: History of Sexuality

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 7 September 2023 and 22 December 2023. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Valerie and her week of wonders, Emperor Sheev, MoltenuniverseSL, Stutzman702 (article contribs). Peer reviewers: Bunny322, James Goodyear.

— Assignment last updated by James Goodyear (talk) 23:03, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

The first sentence of the second paragraph in the "History" section sounds awkward or like its missing something. Please review to see if there is a missing word or better way to arrange the sentence. In this same paragraph, consider removing "and aide" in the second sentence.

There is a wikipedia page on Iwan Bloch. You should consider linking to it when his name is first mentioned.

In the second sentence of the first paragraph in the "Police" section, consider changing the word "pass" to a synonym when you write "pass it to the police," as the word "pass" appears frequently throughout in reference to the Transvestite pass itself. This change may help avoid confusion.

Consider making all quotes into block quotes for aesthetic purposes and consistency.

Make the capitalization of words in the titles of sections more consistent. Either make all importants words capitalized or capitalize only the first word. I would advise against capitalizing words at random.

Potential accidental capitalizations of the word "Transgender." You can use "ctrl F" to check for these.

The following sentence: "Thus, the Transvestite pass illustrates the evolving legal and societal attitudes towards the act of cross-dressing, gender identity and transgender rights in Weimar Germany." Reads a bit too much like an essay. It appears to be a form of analysis or even the statement of an opinion. Consider rewording it or removing it entirely. James Goodyear (talk) 23:13, 30 November 2023 (UTC)James Goodyear

Transvestite passes in Nazi Germany

The only information the article provides on general Nazi policy regarding transvestite passes is that

"[w]hen the Nazis came to power in 1933, German police stopped recognizing and providing passes. The police also revoked the passes of people who already had them, and in some instances, the pass was used to identify people to send to concentration camps"

and that

"trans individuals (mostly trans men) had been allowed to [change their name] during the early years of the Nazi regime."

The first claim is sourced from an article in The Conversation by Laurie Marhoefer, which states that

"Most people who held 'transvestite certificates,' as Toni Simon did, had them revoked or watched helplessly as police refused to honor them."
(Emphasis my own)

Of course, "most" does not equal "all," as this article currently claims, and police "refusing to honor" these passes does not necessarily imply a universal, official policy. As Marhoefer himself points out, "there is a well-known case from Berlin where police renewed a trans man’s 'transvestite certificate' after he spent some months in a concentration camp," but remarks that "[h]istorians initially took this case to be representative. Now that we have a lot more cases, we can see that it is an outlier. Police normally revoked the certificates."

While it already contradicts the generalization made in the Wikipedia article, Marhoefer's piece, though presenting a sound theory, is still strongly editorial in tone (linking Nazi policies to contemporary political debates in the US), and lacks any citations for the aforementioned conclusions. If we compare this article to its German-language version, we find another set of contradicting claims: While it states that "with the Nazis' rise to power [...] and the closing of the Insitut für Sexualwissenschaft [...] the practice of these 'transvestite passes' came to an end," just a few sentences later, we are told that "[i]n Hamburg, 'transvestite passes' were issued by commissar Karl Otto Rudolf Förster until 1936."
(Translations my own)

Interestingly enough, the German article also links to a 2014 academic paper by Ilse Reiter-Zatloukal, professor of legal and consitutional history at the University of Vienna, in Beiträge zur Rechtsgeschichte Österreichs whose argument runs counter to both versions presented on the English- and German-language Wikipedia. Writing about Nazi policy on transvestite passes and name changes in general and their implementation in post-Anschluß Austria, Reiter-Zatloukal asserts that "there was no fundamental change [in the treatment of female 'transvestites' after 1933]," but that they were rather based on the "relevant legal practices of the Weimar Republic, themselves rooted in the late German Empire" (p. 177, translation my own), as elaborated upon in the work of Rainer Herrn, himself an employee of the Magnus Hirschfeld society (conf. ibd.).

Further drawing upon Herrn's work, she notes that "despite the destruction of [Hirscheld's] institute, 'transvestite passes' from the Weimar Republic from the Weimar Republic were renewed and new ones were issued under Nazi rule," (p. 183, translation my own), providing two examples of "male transvestites from 1934 and 1937." (ibd.) Expanding upon this, Reiter-Zatloukal introduces us to two Austrian cases, that of Mathias Robert S., an intersex transgender man, and Rudolf Emil K., who were both granted legal name and sex changes as late as 1940 -- hardly the "early years of the Nazi regime" (conf. pp. 195-196; 202). The latter is notable insofar as it presented an "unambiguous case of transsexuality" (p. 203) in a "person clearly assigned to the female sex without any surgical intervention on grounds of a diagnosed 'mental abnormality'" (p. 202, translations my own). The author supports Herrn's conclusion that there was no significant change in Nazi policy on transvestite passes from 1935 to 1940 (conf. p. 203).

Overall, there appear to be three main problems with the Post-Weimar period paragraph:

1. It wrongly asserts that all transvestite passes were revoked in 1933 and no new passes were issued,
2. wrongly asserts that legal name and sex changes were only granted until some (unspecified) "early" point in Nazi rule, and,
, 4. violates WP:NPOV by editorialising in favour of Marhoefer's position, while disregarding the contributions of Reiter-Zatloukal, Herrn, et al, implying (heavily so) that Nazi policy was far more centralised and targeted than the findings of the second camp would suggest.

Given its relative brevity, a fundamental re-write of the section might be in order, fixing both the three main issues at hand and expanding upon such topics as the differences in treatment of MtF and FtM persons, the role of homo/heterosexuality in individual decisions (conf. Reiter-Zatloukal, pp. 203-206), and the later use of transvestite passes in post-war Germany, as well as the eventual transition to the Transsexuellengesetz of 1980. Also compare this to the general article on Persecution of transgender people in Nazi Germany, which uses some of the more nuanced language upon which this page could expand.

~ EinMensch20 (talk) 21:39, 30 May 2026 (UTC)