Despite contemporary understandings of the relative sexual and gender freedom of Weimar Germany, the figure of the transvestite sex worker was specifically targeted as a threat to the body politic.
references
If the Weimar Republic was relatively lax about prostitution, and relatively lax about homosexuality, it was increasingly punitive at their confluence. The German Criminal Code recorded, “Male prostitution must – on this there is universal agreement – be opposed by all means… it is responsible for all the serious harm of same-sex fornication in the first place.” The transvestite sex worker, assumed both most deceptive and most visible, emerged as the paradigmatic subject irreconcilable with the sexuality of a nominally liberal Republic.
⤷ Leah Tigers, “On the Clinics and Bars of Weimar Berlin”
- See also Dean Spade, Normal Life