Remembering Dora Richter and what it means to survive

As I write this, it is the Transgender Day of Remembrance: an annual recognition, observed on November 20, of trans people lost in the previous year to transphobic violence, particularly murder.

The event began 25 years ago as a remembrance of two Black transgender women, Rita Hester and Chanelle Pickett, who were murdered in Boston in the mid to late 1990s. The organizer of that initial remembrance, trans woman Gwendolyn Ann Smith, started it because after Hester's murder in 1998, she was surprised to see how many in her community had already forgotten Pickett's murder just a few years earlier.

It can be easy to forget the past, even in the short term. But remembering it can also help us imagine the future.

A quarter century later, the vigils and remembrances to hold up the victims of violence—and to call attention to the violence that is aimed at the trans community —are still necessary. There has undoubtedly been some progress, but as trans people have become more visible in society (don't we all remember that Transgender Tipping Point?), violence and the ever-present threat of it is still far too much part of the trans experience, especially for Black and Brown trans people.

And now, at the threshold of a second Trump administration, one where the existence of trans people has become a political cudgel, the trans community in the US—which, as a trans woman, is my community—is facing a near future in which the omnipresent threat of violence is amplified by the power of the state.

A troubling echo

The current state of affairs in the US feels a lot like Berlin during the Weimar Republic. Trans and queer people found community in Berlin in the 1920s, even against the background of state persecution from laws like Paragraph 175 that were often enforced lightly at the time.

And of course there was the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft—often translated as the Institute of Sexual Science—of sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld (incidentally, a gay Jewish man), which provided a great deal of resources for queer Berliners and housed an extensive library of volumes on sexuality as well as other documents or items of interest. Chances are that if you've had any education on the Holocaust or researched the subject yourself, you've actually witnessed a connection with the Institute in one of many famous pictures from that era like the one below.

The contents of the Institute's library were part of the mass book burnings by Nazi stormtroopers and student groups that happened in May 1933—a harbinger of even worse atrocities to come.

But I don't want to talk about the Third Reich's assault on queer people—or the continued violence against queer people in Germany even after the Nazis were deposed, because of laws like Paragraph 175.

I want to talk about Dora Richter.

Meet Dora Richter

There is a lot of talk in many circles—specifically, in circles where tolerating the existence of trans people is characterized as "ideology"—about how transness is a fad, and how the gender-affirming care that trans people often seek out is experimental and recent. The best counter to those claims, from a historical perspective, has been people like Dora Richter.

You can't tell the story of Hirschfeld's Institute without talking about Dora Richter, a trans woman born in Bohemia (present day Czechia, near the Czech-German border) in the early 1890s. According to extant records, Richter had shown both interest in the feminine as a child and distress with her birth sex, and after a sojourn in a theater troupe and two weeks of conscription in the army, her life led her to Berlin—and the Institute, where she worked as a domestic servant, as many other trans women did. Hirschfeld himself was fond of her, calling her by the diminutive Dörchen.

The most notable reason that Richter is mentioned is that she is largely credited as the first trans woman to undergo full genital reconstruction in 1931 by surgeons at the Institute—almost a full century ago.

Of course, 1933 and the rise of the Third Reich would come, wiping away the Institute and its wealth of information and forcing Hirschfeld (who had been on a speaking tour during the sacking of the Institute) into exile, where he would die having never returned to Germany. Many trails back to her were swept away as well and many presumed her dead at the hands of the Nazis.

But here's the thing: Dora Richter survived.

According to documentary evidence tracked down by researcher Clara Hartmann, Richter escaped back to her birthplace of Seifen (Czech Ryžovna), where she took up work as a lacemaker until the 1946 expulsion of Germans from what would become Czechoslovakia. She settled in Allersberg in the German state of Bavaria where she lived until her death in 1966 at the age of 74.

Let me say that again: Dora lived another quarter century after the Nazis came for people like her.

Outliving the oppressor

It is a scary time for trans people in the US right now. The 2024 election—now the most expensive election in American history—was replete with ads containing negative rhetoric about trans people in bathrooms, in women's sports, around your children, with essentially no substantive pushback from pro-trans politicians on the left. The incoming administration has already declared its intent to ban gender-affirming care for minors (despite all the evidence for its safety and efficacy) and "cease the promotion of sex or gender transition at any age" by federal agencies, and the likely picks for key public health positions include people like Florida surgeon general Dr. Joseph Ladapo, who presided over massive bans on gender-affirming care for minors and adults.

The tension is so high that even high-profile trans celebrities like Laverne Cox are openly talking about fleeing the country or even stockpiling hormones—a massive setback for trans rights that should be unthinkable in our modern day.

I don't begrudge anyone their fear right now—times are uncertain and there is a great deal of potential for suffering, not limited to trans people by any means. I'm scared too, even from my relative place of comfort in a deep blue state with strong protections, and I've had to have hard conversations with friends and family.

But then I think of Dora—Dörchen—who saw society come for her and her people and found ways not just to escape the worst fates but to find her own place where she could be happy and feed the birds that landed in her purse.

And with that, it becomes easier to imagine a future not only where we survive but where we outlive our oppressors.

That is a future worth fighting for.