Transcestral Lessons from the Past or, We’ve Been Here Before: Learning from Trans Survival in Nazi Europe

• In Event: Fighting Anti-Trans Attacks

Abstract

In 2024, the ACLU tracked a staggering number of 533 anti-LGBTQ+ bills across the United States, most of them targeting trans adults and youth. As of February 1st, 2025, 245 anti-LGBTQ+ are already at various stages of the several states’ legislative sessions. Only a week or so after his inauguration, Donald Trump signed two executive orders explicitly targeting trans individuals: January 27th executive order titled “Prioritizing military excellence and readiness” effectively bans trans individuals from participation in the Armed Forces while January 28th executive order titled “Protecting children from chemical and surgical mutilation” defunds trans-related care for anyone under 19 years of age. The Center for Disease Control has also called for its researchers to pause or retract any journal article that references specific trans topics, with words such as “gender,” “transgender,” or “non-binary,” among others, listed as terms that need to be removed before publication.

Within this context, individual states are now emboldened to keep enacting and enforcing laws restricting the rights of trans people and invisibilizing our existence, thus intensifying the atmospheres of deep violence that surround trans lives. Trans people who are Black, Indigenous, and of color, working class trans people, trans immigrants and refugees, and trans people with disabilities are especially at heightened risk of discrimination and violence. This talk arises from this deep climate of anti-trans sentiments and proposes to refuse this erasure and resist this oppression by looking at previous times of intense trans oppression, namely Nazi Europe. In doing so, it proposes to focus on the lived experiences of our transcestors, and especially their literary and artistic expression, to locate survival strategies for the contemporary United States.

This talk highlights three inter-related literary and artistic tactics. First, it underlines trans practices of self-writing such as Liddy Bacroff’s Freiheit! (1930) and Ein Erlebnis als Transvestit (1931), Charlotte von Mahlsdorf’s Ich bin meine eigene Frau (1992), and Ovida Delect’s La vocation d’être femme (1996). Second, it centers French trans poetess and Holocaust survivor Ovida Delect, who, in her 1996 posthumous autobiography, credited poetry for her survival in the labor camp of Neuengamme. She tells us: “poetry was anti-death” (182). From her retelling of surviving the camps and her lifetime exploration of an ethics of poeliving, this talk explores a framework of poetics of anti-death that highlights poetry as a tool of trans resistance. Third, turning to painter Toni Ebel, museum curator Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, and performers Willi Pape and Charlotte Charlaque, this talk emphasizes the use of art and performance by trans people, both as material means of survival and as self-actualizing practices. Although writing and art may be thought to be superfluous in times of dire oppression, looking at transcestors highlights how important artistic expression is in order to survive psychically and emotionally.

Biographical Information

Dr. Jordan J. Tudisco (they/them) is a University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellow in the department of Film and Media at the University of California, Berkeley. They hold a PhD in Comparative Literature with a doctoral emphasis in Feminist Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Their main research project argues that our contemporary understanding of transness as a self-making identity is a normative colonial tool for white supremacy and neoliberal selfhood and instead forages for other ways to theorize and experience transness as a form of relationality and as a radical decolonial and abolitionist tool oriented to world-making, solidarity, and communal survival. Research interests include trans literature and media, non-binary French, transphobia and TERF rhetoric, and trans pornography and sexuality. Articles include “Queering the French Académie” published in the Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics in 2021, “The Failure of Cis Feminism” published in Transgender Studies Quarterly in 2023, and “‘But How Can You Call Yourself Not Binary??’: Linguistic Self-Determination, Gatekeeping and Trans Identities in the French-Speaking Context” published in Gender and Language in 2025. They currently have two chapters forthcoming, one titled “Anti-Trans, Anti-Gender and Transphobic Language” for the Oxford Handbook of Language and Prejudice and one titled “Transbians, Trannyfags and Lesbros: T4t and the Language of Trans Sexuality” for the Oxford Handbook of Language and Sexuality. They are also currently working on their first monograph tentatively titled Staking Our Claim: Self-Making, World-Making and Survival in Trans-Authored Narratives.

Author

• Jordan J Tudisco, University of California-Berkeley