A Milestone in Trans Historiography

“Having a story means possessing integrity.” Perhaps one must read this short sentence from the introduction of Nora Eckert’s book “The Long Path to Self-Determination” (Amazon Affiliate Link) several times to grasp its full meaning.

People not only carry their own past; collective identities do as well. But for an individual to become aware of this, and for a community to truly act as a source of identity, history must become past in the sense of being written and preserved. That requires people who collect history, pass it on, work it through, and put it into writing.

Trans isn’t a trend, and the fight for recognition isn’t either

So much upfront: The publicist and fellow journalist at TheColu.mn, Nora Eckert, contributes an immeasurably important part to unlocking the history of Germany’s trans community with her account of the trans movement and emancipation. In doing so, she makes their own history comprehensible—bundled, compact, and accessible for the first time.

That is not only of immense value to the community as a whole but also to individuals within it. “We are, without exception and in the truest sense, our own history,” Eckert writes. And it is also a signal to the mainstream public: Trans is not a trend, and the struggle for societal and legal recognition is not a new phenomenon. Rather, it is a bitter continuity within a cis-heteronormative social reality.

The Community is Complex and Contradictory

This reality also explains, Eckert notes, why being trans is not a fringe phenomenon. Not only do trans people exist across all social strata and within the heart of society, but “for trans* it’s always about the bigger picture, which is the patriarchal order.” This makes her book relevant far beyond the trans community itself.

The book’s great strength lies in portraying the emergence of trans communities in all their complexity and even their contradictions. For years, two camps stood in opposition: one viewed being trans as a transition that finds its fulfillment in affirming gender binarity through the process of transition; “real” trans people then underwent gender-affirming surgery to live in the desired gender. Trans as an identity was rejected.

Pioneers of the trans movement

Conversely, there was the position that a trans woman could be a woman without surgery. An “unbearable and dogmatic discussion,” Eckert describes this as. She not only presents the facts or compiles contributions from community journals, but also places them in a larger context to help readers understand them better.

Furthermore, Eckert also profiles pioneers of the trans movement, such as Gert Christian Südel or Maria Sabine Augstein. Particularly interesting are biographical sketches of Waltraud Schiffels, Johanna Kamermans, and Gesa Lindemann: Their positions are sometimes far apart. They stand for “different perspectives in a contemporary coexistence with overlaps that each may claim as authentic,” she explains—making it clear once again: trans people are not homogeneous, and there are as many ways to live one’s trans identity as there are trans people.

Resistance as Continuity

Nora Eckert also tells the story without simplifying it into a mere progress narrative. Rather, it becomes clear that today’s aggressive transphobia—both from TERFs and from conservative and far-right circles—was not as widespread in the 1970s. The discourse has shifted since then. In the media, trans people at that time were far from invisible. Accounts describe them as “generally well-meaning or understanding,” even though the focus was heavily on suffering—and they were consistently exoticized and sexualized.

Yet resistance is a continuity of the movement—resistance against societal norms and against bureaucracy. For example, Hertha Wind achieved a civil registration change of her name and her birth certificate as early as 1947. Eckert also gives substantial space to the development of the Transsexuals Act and the numerous constitutional complaints that gradually eroded it over time.

Her excursus on the years-long attempts to reform the Transsexual Act is enlightening. This arduous prehistory of the Self-Determination Act received surprisingly little attention in coverage of the 2024 new law—a lack that would have provided important context and possibly helped counter some of the fear being stoked at the time.

Unkept Promises of the Constitution

All of this makes clear how long the German state withheld the rights that trans people deserved. For Eckert, this represented an authoritarian state “that casually and legally disregarded basic human rights.”

What might sound almost shocking at first—and provoke instinctive resistance—becomes comprehensible as Eckert continues: what the Basic Law promised after the horrors of the Second World War—the free development of personality, the respect for human dignity, and the reaffirmation of the right to bodily integrity—was not accessible to trans people “until the third generation.” A terrifyingly apt assessment.

Remarkable Depth of Detail

Nora Eckert’s “The Long Path to Self-Determination” is a readable, well-structured non-fiction book that traces community formation and the path from external psychopathologization to internal capacity and agency. While other works in queer historical writing—such as Benno Gammerl’s “Queer: A German History from the Empire to Today”—somewhat recount the trans community in passing, this volume keeps its focus squarely on a community whose history has been far less comprehensively documented to date.

In response, Eckert offers remarkable depth of detail and a broad understanding of the developments at play. The book bears the mark of years of meticulous labor and is already a reference work for readers and researchers alike.