Reviews tagging 'Adult/minor relationship'

Gay Berlin. L'invenzione tedesca dell'omosessualità by Robert Beachy

3 reviews

oisinthewizard's review against another edition

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This is a very interesting and important text documenting LGBT identities (and public policy regarding them) in Weimar Berlin. I am disappointed to have quit the book only 40 pages from completion, but the conflation of (modern) gay and transgender identities with pedophilia is more than I can stomach. I understand the historic reasons for this fusion of unrelated identities and behaviors - notably, that the Weimar legal system understood these behaviors to be the same - but that does not make it palatable or even manageable as a 21st century gay man who finds pedophilia to be one of the most morally abhorrent behaviors in our society. 
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rachbake's review against another edition

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challenging dark informative inspiring sad slow-paced

4.25

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pastelkerstin's review against another edition

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challenging informative

3.5

There is a lot of interesting info in this, including on Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft which I've been meaning to learn more about for years. But sometimes it can drag a bit and often times I wished there would be more info on LGBT+ people beyond the G. Lesbians, bisexuals and trans people are mentioned but are very clearly not the focus. Partially this makes sense because a lot of history that is mentioned here is known through court cases related to the criminalization of sex between men, so wlw leave less of a paper trail because they weren't criminalized by the law in that way. It's still a bit of a shame though. But an even bigger shame is that the author misgenders every single trans person he mentions. And yes, the word "transgender" didn't exist at the time, but Beachy correctly says that some people who came to the Institute would be considered trans today. He then proceeds to mention several people who clearly experienced gender dysphoria but he uses the wrong pronouns for all of them and calls them man/woman based on their gender assigned at birth. It's the kind of thing that could have easily been fixed if Beachy had bothered to get a sensitivity reader for that chapter. Or if Beachy actually concerned himself with trans issues more. The carelessness here is kind of odd because Beachy clearly loves doing historical research but apparently doing research on how to talk about trans people didn't seem important enough to him. I would have given this 4 stars if it weren't for the bad handling of trans issues.

I'll probably read something that's related to trans issues and actually good next in time for Transgender Awareness Week next. Let's see how it goes.
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