Paisley Currah’s formulation of “sex is as sex does” asks us to think about displacing sex outside the self, at a granular, administrative level. Moving away from identity-based ontologies towards a transition-based method that asks what happens to “sex” and the structures that regulate it when it changes, this paper looks at how sex (as a legal substance and function of civil regulation) was made and unmade between 1900-1945.
The provision of legal sex change was part of a wider push for civil liberties and political reform in the Weimar years. But this process continued under Nazism. High-ranking Nazi officials actioned name changes for “Aryan” trans men. The designation of trans men in this equation—vs. trans women—speaks to a distillation of Nazi racial purity carried under the sign of sex, granted by the state, and embodied by these men. Sex changed law; law changed sex. But these changes were contingent, and these contingencies signal what meanings were carried under the sign of sex within the contexts of Weimar and Nazi Germany.
A deeper historicization of legal sex change—that tracks its continuation in liberal and illiberal regimes—also punctures leftist narratives of transition as an extension of universal liberalism and conservative arguments that see transition as symptomatic of social degeneration. Trans as analytic thus unpicks the mechanisms of the German nation state and inverts the temporal logics of our contemporary moment.