World War II...

On May 6th, 1933, Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science was raided and destroyed by Nazis. Hirschfeld, in exile, died two years later. Writings on sexology were burnt, and sexologists were persecuted. Soon, even Hirschfeld's World League of Sex Research was disbanded.

Due to the political events in Europe, SRS was placed on a back burner. Only a handful of sex reassignment operations would be performed until the next decade. Clinics in Denmark and Norway resume some of the work halted by Germany, performing theraputic penectomies and castration.

Europe under siege or occupation by NAZI Germany was a very dangerous place for transgendered people. Obviously transgendered MTF were especially at risk as they were swept into concentration camps along with gay men who had been prosecuted under Paragraph 175. Once in the camps, they were treated very harshly, forced to wear the pink triangle as a symbol of a little girl’s dress. Surprisingly, the reason for the NAZI hatred of gay men was that they were considered race traitors, wasting precious Aryan sperm, when they should be impregnating Aryan women to give children for the Master Race. It was possible, at least in the early years, to win release from the camps if one could “prove” one had been rehabilitated by hard manly labor. The method of proving oneself involved having intercourse with a female prostitute. One camp commander boasted that he could tell which prisoners could be rehabilitated from the very begining.... as some were just never going to be real men. Thus, feminine gay men and primary MTF transgendered people were the ones who suffered first and longest, if they survived the brutal treatment and starvation. Longest, since after the Allies liberated the camps, those convicted under Paragraph 175 were still incarcerated as criminals. The end of the war did not bring freedom to gays and transgendered people.

One of the treatments the NAZIs tested on the feminine gay men and MTF prisoners was injections of the recently available male hormones. The effects on the MTF must have been devastating. Jews, picked at random were also exposed to exogenous sex hormones to study the effects. Women were masculinized by male hormones, treated as experimental animals. Men were castrated and given female hormones. These were not transgendered people. However, these experiments led to the false belief that the NAZIs had allowed transsexual medical treatment to continue after the party took power.

The NAZIs were not alone in committing atrocities on gays and transgendered people during these years. The availability of sex hormones after their introduction in 1938 led to “treatments” for gay, lesbian, and transgender / intersex people using cross sex and same sex hormones depending on the favorite theory then in vogue. In some cases the law forced those who had been convicted of “sex crimes,” being caught with their lover, to undergo such hormonal treatments. One famous gay man was british cryptographer and mathmatician Alan Turing, who was forced to receive shots for two years.

Although there was not a champion to help transgender people with medical treatment, transsexuals did find that they could use these newly available sex hormones. In the case of physicians, they could prescribe them for themselves. Dr. Alan Hart who had transitioned in 1917 is likely to have prescribed masculinizing hormones for himself, as he was described as having a beard and an “unusual voice.” Dr. Ewan Forbes-Semphill was another that was known to have prescribed male hormones for himself.

Many other transgender people went without medical aid completely. A good example is Billy Tipton.
From 1933 to 1952, from the closing of the Instutute in Berlin to Christine Jorgensen’s surgery in Denmark, no surgical aid was known to have occured. Two decades were lost due to the horror of NAZI intolerance.

However, the early years of WWII were also a time of medical advancement which would help future transexuals. It was at this time that the first estrogens became available, with the introduction of Di-Ethyl Stilbesterol in 1938 (originally for use in chicken feed!), and Premarin in 1941.
In 1944-5, a British surgeon, Harold Gillies, performed some initial operations on Michael Dillon (formerly Laura). He used the wartime technique of flap surgery, which proved to be a crucial advancement for FTM surgery.