Just another photo of Nazi book burnings.
We’ve heard a lot about Section 28 in recent months, mostly because the current UK Government’s attitude toward trans people has led to an increased threat of similar policy making a return. Section 28 was a piece of legislation that sought to “prohibit the promotion of homosexuality by local authorities.” In England and Wales, Section 28 was in effect from 1988 through to 2003 (Scotland abolished it in 2000), meaning that for people in schools during that time, the teaching of issues that fell under the remit of the “promotion of homosexuality” was completely absent from their education.
For most people, I imagine, the assumption is that it relates mainly to education about sex and relationships. I’ll admit that for years that’s how I understood it. But the truth is that the impact of Section 28 is far more insidious than that, and its impact reached much further than simply just teaching children that same-sex relationships are a thing. It is only now that we are really beginning to see just how much Section 28 has affected society, and even then we’re still some ways off from being able to understand the scale of damage that it has done.
When I was in school, I was taught about Nazi book burnings. In history, I was shown the picture above, as I’m sure a great many of you were, and I was told that the Nazis burned books by authors they despised, about subjects they opposed, and that doing so was a symbolic attack on their enemies. What I wasn’t told, however, is that this picture specifically is from 10th May 1933, and shows Nazi officials destroying and burning the entire content of the library of the Institute of Sexology, a place with a “global reputation for its pioneering work on transsexual understanding and calls for equality for homosexuals, transgender people and women.” Neither, it seems, was anyone else.
When I think about this now, I feel a complex array of difficult emotions. The sadness is overwhelming, and there’s a part of me that wants to say that I cannot even begin to imagine how terrified the innocent people there at the time must have been but… well, that’s simply not true. I can imagine, because I’m not far off feeling the same thing. Mostly, though, I just feel anger; anger at those who supported this, anger at those who stood by and did nothing, and anger for all the lives senselessly lost as a result. Selfishly, I also feel anger toward my history teacher, who showed me this picture and failed to tell me what it was, and I feel anger toward the Government who enacted a policy that meant I was never going to be taught it anyway.
I wonder all these years later if, had I been told, things would be different. Would I have felt confident and safe enough to have come out earlier? Would I have begun my journey before even leaving school, and now be a happy and productive member of society? Had I learned these things back then, I would have had the language and the context and the understanding to express what I was feeling. Section 28 robbed me of a chance to begin my life with positivity and have a childhood that didn’t involve hiding myself, just like it robbed thousands of queer people of the same.
But Section 28 has done far worse than that.
To justify their crimes, the Nazis dehumanized their targets by invalidating their identities. Part of this was erasing their history. Section 28 was an extension of that. When the Nazis destroyed all the research at the Institute of Sexology, they destroyed proof of our existence, and by refusing to teach us that fact, the UK Government did the same thing. When people online claim that trans people weren’t targeted by the Nazis, they are doing precisely what the Nazis intended. Fascism does not end, just because World War 2 is over does not mean the ideology has gone. The burning of books at the Institute of Sexology was just one domino in a line that leads to Section 28 and, in turn, to holocaust denial by world-famous children’s authors on the internet.
The claims that trans people were not targeted because the Nazis did not view them in terms beyond how they viewed their other targets is, to put it simply, fascist rhetoric. The Nazis didn’t view any of their victims as valid. When I was shown that photo in history without the full context, it became ‘just’ another picture of a Nazi book burning. As such, the targets became ‘just’ another group, indistinguishable from any other of Hitler’s ‘undesirables’ and that’s exactly how the Nazis would have wanted it.
