Yes but they also did things like this to launder their reputation and give themselves just enough credibility as an aid organization to get their foot in the door of other countries to then facilitate the CIA stuff.

Russia has the opportunity to do the funniest thing by hitting SBU and GUR targets with any captured Ukrainian drones they have

Apologies for the late reply, had some stuff come up.

Sorry to get you excited, but I was referring to the Lombardi-Nash translations, not the original texts. I wish I was fluent enough in German to read the sources directly. When I ever get to that point, top of my reading list would be Das Dritte Geschlecht, which is a modern reprinting of a magazine of the same name that ran for 5 issues in the later Weimar years. It consists of a lot of work written by trans people themselves, as well as medical experts in the field, plus a variety of photographs.

You bring up some really interesting questions about the text itself that I haven't thought about before. I haven't read Rockhill's book but I have listened to a couple of his talks about it, so I'm vaguely familiar with his thesis, and applying a similar lens towards the topic of trans medicine is very interesting. Based on my scattered reading, my guess would be that the answer is tied to the John Hopkins clique of physicians who eventually ended up inventing gender to "save binary sex from conceptual collapse". Embarrassingly, I have not finished it, but Histories of the Transgender Child is an excellent resource on that group and their work. The preface in the first Lombardi-Nash volume mentions that anti-German sentiment surrounding the First World War played a role in limiting Hirschfeld's reach outside the German speaking world. That, plus the infamous destruction of the Institute along with the fact that the vast majority of material (particularly the 'informal' stuff like patient notes) was never published abroad, meant that his work was buried under the other monumental historical events of the time. It's been a long while since I read it but I remember Heike Bauer mentioning in The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture that a lot of his surviving work was only unearthed recently.

Thank you for the interesting lines of inquiry, it's given me a lot to think about and an interesting direction in which to take my research, other than just reading Hirschfeld for the sake of it. I'd like to be able to bring a Marxist/communist lens to all this, but I am hesitant to even call myself those things because I am guilty of the classic sin of Not Doing The Fucking Reading. You're right though, his politics are generally glossed over from what I've read. Heike Bauer makes mention of some of the topics he was curiously silent about, but the only indication of his actual politics I've come across in my reading was an off hand mention that the Institute would occasionally house members of the Comintern who were staying in/passing through Berlin.

Anyway, not sure how to conclude, but thanks for chatting with me about this, it's given me a lot to think about!

Close enough, welcome back black_mold_futures

Anyone know of an easy way to remove the left over adhesive from patches? Right now my best and kinda only method is to rub it off with a washcloth in the shower but that tends to irritate my skin a fair bit. It's not the worst thing in the world but I feel like there must be a better way.

They're just politically and historically uneducated which results in an incoherent worldview. I passed through a phase like this myself when I was in the process of rejecting liberalism but my head was still swimming with red scare nonsense, which left me politically confused, wanting an idealistic equal and empathetic society but not yet understanding that these "authoritarian" aspects would (and are and were, historically) necessary to defend it. Part of that was because I had not yet understood the full extent of the barbarity of liberalism, even though I understood it in part. Parenti has a famous quote from one of his lectures that went something to the effect of, "If there was no NATO, there would've been no need for a Warsaw Pact. If there was no CIA, there would've been no need for a KGB." I think people in this stage of moving left (whether or not they eventually become communists) don't have a grasp on the enormity of the attacks, subversion, and siege levied against socialist states that can only be defended against with structures that are unfortunately capable of grave abuses. In the same lecture, Parenti uses the example of the Nicaraguan revolution, saying something like (not an exact quote), "They discovered a very terrible thing. They discovered they needed a secret police. They discovered they needed Instruments of coercion, and these instruments are capable of very serious crimes." Finally, though I don't necessarily see it in OOP, there can often be an element of racism as well. The Soviets and PRC will be seen as "authoritarian" while Cuba will be seen as okay, despite Cuba (until recently? I haven't kept up with the reforms over the past couple of decades) being a Marxist-Leninist state more or less identical to Soviet governance. This is exactly the goal of the red scare(s). It's not to outright prevent everyone from moving leftward, they'll never achieve that, but those that do so have been deliberately maleducated so that they do not align with the actually existing (and therefore working, and therefore threatening) socialist projects.

tl;dr, political and historical maleducation makes people say some stupid shit.

I think they just spoof numbers anyway. I got a scam call that was spoofing my own number. I was half tempted to pick it up just to ask if they even realized.

I read your whole post and I really appreciate your critique! Perhaps I was too careless with my language, as I greatly admire Hirschfeld's work, and this comment will certainly get me off my ass to read the 1,500 pages of Homosexuality of Men & Women spread across the 3 rather imposing tomes that have been sitting on my desk for an embarrassingly long time. My issue isn't with Hirschfeld's work but rather with the terms in their modern form which have been almost completely stripped of all the detail you relayed.

I guess to attempt to explain myself a little more clearly, it took me several years into my transition before I stumbled across Hirschfeld for the first time. I suppose I was so caught up in actually transitioning that I didn't think to investigate the history of it all. When I first started transitioning in the early 2010s, the term "transsexual" was still in popular use but had been completely deformed into a very rigid and binary transmedicalist definition (at least in the circles where I was coming to self awareness), which obviously adversely affected the way I thought of transness and my own discomfort with slotting myself into such a binary. It's that kind experience that I view as the baggage that comes from these terms, though I did not mean to lay that at the feet of Hirschfeld. As I said somewhere else in the comments, this is still a half-baked thought and I have a bad tendency to be rather careless with my language sometimes, so I appreciate the correction!

Discovering that Hirschfeld had a century before effectively endorsed the concept of an infinite spectrum of diversity in human sex, sexuality, and gender was a big part in getting me out of the aforementioned funk, so thank you for sharing all this! Who knew that cracking your egg on 420chan's /cd/ would be so bad for you!