Zavier Nunn
@zavinunn
Followers
2,519
Following
468
Media
12
Statuses
530
Historicising trans subjectivity. Mellon Fellow @sofheyman . Soon: Ass. Prof. @NorthwesternU . Former: @DukeGSF , @OxfordHistory , @UCLHistory
he/himbo
Joined July 2018
Don't wanna be here?
Send us removal request.
Explore trending content on Musk Viewer
宝塚記念
• 213907 Tweets
Afghanistan
• 164217 Tweets
LINGORM TSOU FANMEET
• 121207 Tweets
ブローザホーン
• 98611 Tweets
ドウデュース
• 64422 Tweets
#BBEBxZeeNuNew
• 61249 Tweets
ホームラン
• 49929 Tweets
FILLED WITH LOVE AT MNL
• 45979 Tweets
ソールオリエンス
• 45226 Tweets
#ユーフォ3期
• 36176 Tweets
ディープボンド
• 35812 Tweets
श्यामा प्रसाद मुखर्जी
• 34292 Tweets
MEW IN HOME CARE FAIR
• 31332 Tweets
ベラジオオペラ
• 24480 Tweets
菅原騎手
• 24121 Tweets
Patrick Universal Vlog🧹
• 23246 Tweets
ジャスティンパレス
• 23152 Tweets
プラダリア
• 19757 Tweets
菅原明良
• 18338 Tweets
ローシャムパーク
• 17501 Tweets
G1初制覇
• 14200 Tweets
#anime_eupho
• 13569 Tweets
レース中
• 11424 Tweets
Pinned Tweet
It’s publishing day!
I’m chuffed to share that my first article is out (early release, open access) with Past & Present. If you’re interested in trans histories of Weimar and Nazi Germany (who isn’t?) then this one’s for you 😌
13
111
464
Cisgendered! At the Mpox vaccine clinic
“I guess there is no way you could be pregnant but I have to ask anyway”
Oh honey, I am precisely the kind of fag that could get pregnant
24
392
16K
Sweaty, sailor-clad stranger at Oxford’s drag club-night: ‘this is strange to ask, but are you a historian?’
‘Yes’
‘I recognised you from your article I read in my masters class. The mullet is unmistakable’
Identified via mullet as a trans historian at the club. I’ve peaked
9
28
1K
@HaydenHewitt
Hi! Author here. I categorically do not take the same position as you. You've wilfully bent the argument of my article to suit your transphobic needs. Maybe try actually reading it next time.
2
21
422
@MononymicSimone
I’m sorry, that’s terrible practice and must have felt awful. They shouldn’t even ask for ID! Ridiculous since it’s well understood that many kinds of trans people fall under the criteria for getting this vaccine - and not just men
2
1
418
We shouldn’t credit Rowling with any shock-value at her latest tirade against trans people. As if this is new. It’s just facile distortions of a discourse she wants to weaponize.
Bad history, bad rhetoric, bad faith.
9
85
332
The regurgitation of this reductive discourse is ill-informed, damaging, and tiresome. This take forgoes the latest—and most rigorous—historical work: see
@manwithoutatan
,
@L_Marhoefer
and myself (). We have receipts.
@StrewthQueen
But transvestites were largely tolerated by the Nazis as long as there was no "homosexual activity". There was a transvestite pass. What you're doing is appropriating what happened to others which is...awkward.
The Nazis kept meticulous records.
292
8
127
3
37
221
A personal update: I will be joining
@NorthwesternU
’s
@gssnu
and History Department as an Assistant Professor in Summer 2025. (Someone pinch me?).
I could not have landed in a better place to teach and conduct research on what deeply moves and drives me: trans history and theory.
18
4
187
Writing about the complex history of trans surgeries during Weimar Germany today. Occasionally finding myself subconsciously fondling my (new) pecs. Yes, trans surgery has always been sensationalised. Yes, these earlier surgeries have a colonial legacy. But also my pecs rock
3
0
130
But, as a historian of trans life, with a PhD (and forthcoming book) on trans women in Weimar and Nazi Germany, I want to set the record straight on some of her endorsed historical contortions. See her repost of
@TwisterFilm
:
Thread on the persistent claims about trans people and the Nazis 👇
1K
1K
9K
2
27
128
@HaydenHewitt
In case that's too tall an order, there's a thread laying it out for you here:
The regurgitation of this reductive discourse is ill-informed, damaging, and tiresome. This take forgoes the latest—and most rigorous—historical work: see
@manwithoutatan
,
@L_Marhoefer
and myself (). We have receipts.
3
37
221
1
4
111
In fact, my research shows that trans women were persecuted more violently and fatally than their gay male counter parts - in some cases actually mitigating those ‘homosexual’ offences: precisely because the Nazi’s *did not* simply class trans women as gay men.
2
10
110
@KatieLMSutton
@manwithoutatan
@JenniferVEvans
Let’s not lose sight of what is really at stake: the material conditions of trans people *today*.
Rowling declared she wants all doctors who have prescribed trans children with puberty blockers to face prison time this week:
3
25
112
Trans persecution under the NS regime requires a nuanced historical approach, because of the opaque and liminal positionality of transness within the Nazi social order. But this in no way means trans people were not persecuted.
1
3
98
@TwisterFilm
What is facile about this take is that eugenicism *was* science in this era, long before the Nazis. Few strands of medicine across Europe and America were untouched by it.
2
6
100
@KatieLMSutton
@manwithoutatan
@JenniferVEvans
Enough is enough. Call it for what it is: bad history, bad rhetoric, bad faith. But ultimately, it's just transphobia.
6
8
94
As with all systemic violence, there were hierarchies of vulnerability that cut across discrete identities in the Nazi persecution matrix. Trans-ness, as with any other identity category, does not sit in a vacuum. We are not composed of singular parts.
2
5
89
@TwisterFilm
The claims about Hirschfeld as poster-boy for trans medicine—untrue. Scholars thoroughly acknowledge his eugenicist thinking and practice.
2
6
90
@TwisterFilm
Following Rowling’s logic, all practices of women’s healthcare are fundamentally eugenicist and should be banned. Should we know this harrowing past? Certainly. Is the practice of women’s healthcare (today) fundamentally immoral? No, only if done without consent.
2
7
89
State practices are less coherent than often assumed, but no less violent for this incoherence. Yet no one today is claiming that gay men weren’t targeted by the Nazis.
1
7
88
@TwisterFilm
By this argument, most of modern medicine would have to go. Gynaecology? Born from doctor’s dehumanizing and deadly experimentation on captive women’s bodies as the raw and enslaved material from which sex was made known.
1
7
89
Decades old work by Geoffrey Giles has demonstrated how many gay men were let off the hook under Nazism - if they were ‘Aryan’, in the SS, if they were still of use to the war effort. Context matters, cross-hatching identities matter.
1
5
87
@TwisterFilm
Most of science used the logic of eugenics to further its agenda as the arbiter of knowledge that informed social and political practice. Per Rowling endorsement and Clark’s argument, any strand of medicine that was once imbricated in eugenicist practice is eternally dangerous.
1
6
88
No one is ‘just’ trans, gay, Black, white, disabled, etc. Trans experiences are not a monolith—whether that be under Nazism or today. Race, labour value, and sexuality played a significant role in how and why trans people were persecuted.
1
3
85
In fact, one of the most ethically abhorrent versions of this is *denying* access to healthcare (like abortion), which smacks of the same lack of bodily autonomy that has historically harmed people deemed inferior by various racist, imperialist, and genocidal logics.
1
5
86
@TwisterFilm
This is also the racial division of flesh and personhood, where these captive women were denied gender, but in the process, gender was gifted to white women.
2
6
85
It is misrepresentative to try and angle a recognition of trans persecution as claiming the same status as antisemitism and genocide under Nazism-this isn’t a debate. Any historian worth their salt demonstrates the varying, differentiated, and intersecting nature of Nazi...
0
5
82
Trans medicine is likewise not fundamentally immoral (although by no means perfect), with most of the harm engendered by a denial of access to healthcare.
1
5
80
@KatieLMSutton
@manwithoutatan
@JenniferVEvans
By stoking a fire under a highly sensitive, topical, and weighty debate, Rowling succeeds in pooling our energies into proving her wrong, when she was wrong all along, never wanting to have a conversation, and always utilising this discourse as foil for her raging transphobia.
1
12
81
There is so much more to be said. Let’s not even get started on how Rowling’s tweets the past few days have directly disavowed the outcomes of German court cases, the stances of Holocaust memorial and research institutions, and findings of accredited historians with PhDs.
1
14
80
@TwisterFilm
I’m going to respond to some of the more ludicrous takes made by Rowling and by Clark, since there is only so much that can be done on this app (as if twitter is the right kind of platform to do justice to this discourse). But here we go:
1
8
80
Okay the big one! The denial that trans people were victims of National Socialism.
GC’s like Rowling are claiming that trans people were not persecuted due to a lack of laws that targeted them, and if they were, it was because they were gay men. Not true.
1
6
79
But back to the idea that there is a neat split between trans and queer people. It is painfully well-documented that the 19th and 20th C ideas of inversion and the conflation of gender-sexuality in sexology and culture...
1
5
76
@KatieLMSutton
@manwithoutatan
@JenniferVEvans
But I want to end by reiterating how this debate is being stoked in bad faith and we will not succeed in making people like Rowling think otherwise. This ‘debate’ is simply being leveraged for nefarious means to continue the targeting trans people as scapegoats.
2
14
75
This ridiculously blunt rendering of the 'word of law' completely misses how persecution and carcerality works (as if there isn’t a huge body of work on this that is conveniently sidestepped by Rowling and co).
1
4
74
Laws have to be *applied*. What are the conditions of how and why a law is applied? What are the exceptions? Then what about the social determinants? Where does bias and phobia play into who gets targeted by the police in the first place, denounced, sent down?
1
5
72
The laws against “unnatural fornication” (§175) were sometimes levied against trans people, but other laws were too (§183 etc). These laws did not target ‘people’; they targeted acts/actions/behaviours/doings.
1
8
72
This tenuous link, intended to produce a tacit correlation between trans medicine and Nazi medical crimes, is misleading. Many (if not most) professionals who carried out Nazi crimes (and were not Jewish) transferred their expertise and practice from the preceding era.
1
5
73
Gohrbandt may have been mainly interested in promoting his own medical and surgical agendas across both eras. This has no bearing on trans people themselves, or their wish to access healthcare.
1
4
70
Identities are never discrete. Categories and language do not capture the ‘truth’ of matter, they simply index the meaning attached to them in restrictive ways. This is equally applicable to categories of ‘men’, ‘women’, ‘children’:
1
6
70
Ok, onto the claims about Erwin Gohrbandt. He was indeed one of the doctors who operated under the aegis of Hirschfeld’s institute, who then later experimented on incarcerated prisoners at Dachau.
2
6
69
It is reductive to directly link Gohrbandt’s Nazi work back to his involvement in the Institute’s trans surgeries—as if this could have been foreseen—forgetting the complexity of the role of professionals played in the running of the Nazi state.
1
4
68
Medicine was no exception. Gohrbandt was one of thousands of doctors who utilised the opportunities afforded them by the Nazi era of unfettered access to bodies deemed unworthy of humane treatment via incarceration.
1
6
67
So, did trans people exist under Nazism? Were they (read: trans women) targeted for their transness or mislabelled as gay men? Well, its both. Categories are always in flux, as well as the meanings attached to them.
1
4
68
“Risk” (Laurie Marhoefer’s concept) is a useful method for analysing this more qualitative measurement of how danger and persecution related to gender non-conformity under Nazism.
1
3
67
@KatieLMSutton
@manwithoutatan
@JenniferVEvans
It’s old-fashioned transphobia masquerading as facile takes on histories of global importance. To say this is shocking is to undermine a long pattern of the virulent wielding of Rowling’s platform to affect the current hostile climate towards trans people in the UK.
1
4
66
@KatieLMSutton
@manwithoutatan
@JenniferVEvans
Perhaps there are those that are on the fence who will benefit from this kind of information. But Rowing’s online actions the past few days are also a distraction technique. And an effective one: we are forced onto the defensive, and it’s exhausting. We are tired.
1
4
67
... cannot be neatly translated to today’s divergence of gay and trans identity (a later phenomenon).
1
5
67
: these categories are the meaning we attach to them. This has a very ‘real’ effect, but it does not capture some kind of transcendental truth about life.
1
4
65
Our modern-day categories seem neat in comparison. But we need to understand the past on its own terms, with all its plurality, opacity, unevenness, and paradoxes.
1
4
63
The process of this fluctuation can shift in (and across) contexts. So even if we can argue (as I do) that a nascent category of ‘transvestite’ (akin to what we now call trans) functioned as a medico-legal category attached to praxis in Weimar...
1
4
62
...this was not taken up wholesale under Nazism, nor were its insights completely disregarded. This is a time where the convergence-divergence of gender-sexuality (in discourse terms) is in no way settled.
1
4
59
@KatieLMSutton
@manwithoutatan
@JenniferVEvans
This is all happening on the back of the continued gutting of NHS services by the Tories across the past decade. But this specifically affects trans healthcare. I’m sorry, but these things matter more than history debates (I say as a historian).
1
3
58
This was a central area of study that sought to explain deep (scientific) ‘truths’ about humanity and personhood, but the conclusions from different sexologists, doctors, and men of law and politics were plural, and practices attached to them even more so.
1
4
58
Second publication alert! Come for the new source material on trans feminine life under Nazism, stay for the spicy takes
1
14
55
@KatieLMSutton
@manwithoutatan
@JenniferVEvans
Rowling's rhetoric echoes the situation in the US currently, with bills targeting trans and women’s healthcare that would also implicate practitioners.
1
3
55
Waiting at the airport for a connecting flight to Amsterdam, and some kind woman returns my wallet that I had dropped an hour ago, saying: ‘it’s a good thing you’ve got such distinctive hair, or else I wouldn’t have identified you’. Moral of the story: mullets make life better
2
0
54
@KatieLMSutton
@manwithoutatan
@JenniferVEvans
This is in response to the decision by the NHS to stop all new prescriptions of puberty blockers (note: currently only 83 trans youth are on them in the UK, hardly a staggering number).
2
4
53
(This is not to say we have arrived at a more ‘correct’ way of categorizing in the present—this is a whiggish historicism—but rather that today’s categories represent the meaning that is most prominently attached to certain signifiers in today’s world).
1
3
53
To make two things *very clear*:
1) this ‘unevenness’ of outcomes is not unique to trans people. What ‘kind’ of trans person you were, and under what circumstances, mattered. The same is true of gay men and lesbians:
1
4
50
I have used the concept of ‘liminality’ to explain this in direct relation to trans women under Nazism. Yes, transvestism was a category under Nazism, but it was opaque, and liminal, operating within, beside, underneath, and/or between others (such as race, sexuality, labour).
1
3
50
2) Some trans women were only spared the worst of Nazi violence *if* their transness was nullified, first. Transness had to be effectively eliminated for the trans person to not be *directly* eliminated from the world under Nazism.
1
3
49
Sometimes the ‘trans’ element was key to the fatal outcomes of certain cases (Liddy Bacroff's). Sometimes transness was successfully nullified by the Nazis, which also diminished its importance in comparison to other embodied categories (Gerd R. being one of these cases.)
1
3
47
(
@KatieLMSutton
,
@manwithoutatan
,
@JenniferVEvans
are just a few of the scholars that I haven't already mentioned)
1
2
46
Hardly a resounding example of tolerance towards trans women by the Nazi state.
1
2
46
So, if that unevenness disqualifies trans people as victims of National Socialism, it disqualifies other queers, too. Somehow, I think this will not be palatable to GCs.
1
3
46
Not bad for my first article!
Top 2022
#History
papers:
1) Last Voyage of Gloucester, 1682: Politics of a Royal Shipwreck
2) Predictions without Futures
3) Idea of India in the American Diaspora
4) Trans Liminality and the Nazi State
5) Origins of the Swedish Wage Bargaining Model
0
5
10
3
1
45
Please donate to support the preservation of, and access to, the queer/trans past! New archive in Berlin to combine the Spinnboden Lesbian Archive, the Magnus Hirschfeld Society, and Women’s & Feminist Movement Archive.
1
21
42
Honoured to be included on this syllabus. A vital resource. I’m hoping that senior academics, *especially* in the UK, will take note and rethink their passivity towards the rampant transphobia in HE (and the whole country). Bullshit times indeed.
2
11
38
A twitter thread is never going to do justice to this topic. But sometimes the slow nature of academic publishing is ill-suited in countering misinformation. Stop dressing up your transphobia with poorly evidenced historical takes.
0
3
34
Some personal updates! I got my first journal article accepted, and I've finally made a gofundme for top surgery! Please help me celebrate by donating to the link here:
1
17
33
New gender just dropped: got asked if I was Italian at the airport
1
0
33
Hello friends, today is my birthday - it would be really meaningful if instead of a gift or buying me a drink you’d donate that money to my top surgery fund instead!! Link here:
0
17
29
... persecution practices without ever bringing into question its paramount logic of exterminating the Jews. Other victim groups have long been identified—this isn’t an oppression olympics. We can acknowledge different kinds of victimhood, it is not a zero sum game.
1
1
29
Have a read if you want to know about everyday trans life during Weimar, the incoherence of the Nazi persecution matrix, and the emotional journey of a trans woman navigating these (supposedly) juxtaposed regimes - and why a bin is key to analysing all of this 👇
New on advance access: "Trans Liminality and the Nazi State"
#OpenAccess
by
@zavinunn
(
@OxfordHistory
,
@TORCHOxford
,
@OOCDTP
)
#SocialHistory
#CulturalHistory
#HistGender
#TransHistory
#GermanHistory
0
3
9
0
5
28
Getting ‘sired’ all the way through security whilst 1) carrying my testosterone gel 2) showing my passport with my deadname 3) showing my change of name deed 4) getting patted down by a male security officer 5) wearing a faggy dangly earring. I love being transsexual
0
0
23
The responses to this are unhinged - how can one read a death threat letter of such malice, and not conclude that transphobia is the issue and danger here?
My friends and I received thousands of hateful and threatening comments, but this didn't seem to bother
@Docstockk
who thanked and declared her love to the "wonderful" bunch who defend her online. Well, this dangerous hate campaign has resulted in me getting a death threat today.
285
233
1K
3
2
21
Congratulations to this superstar who - to quote the chair - “smashed” their PhD defence and passed with flying colours. Can’t wait for the book! Also can’t wait to write collaboratively on queer history’s affective ‘daddy issues’ with the sexological past 😎
0
1
20
I used to describe my gender as fag, my sexuality as slut.
Realised that’s a tautology: fags famously worship men *and* women!
0
0
18
Excited and honoured to speak with
@manwithoutatan
later this term about all things trans during Nazi Germany - don’t miss out!
Friends! Absolutely stoked to say that I'll be speaking at the Oxford Centre for Gender, Identity & Subjectivity on 9 February together with the inimitable
@zavinunn
! And gosh, are we keeping good company!
Hope we'll see you there!
1
3
18
0
1
19
Thrilled to be giving a public lecture on the history of trans lives after the Anschluss in Vienna next week! For those who can’t make it, the event will be recorded
Der nächste Beitrag der Vortragsreihe findet nächste Woche im Volkskundemuseum Wien statt!
@Volkskundemuse
2
5
17
0
6
17
@Columbia
@sofheyman
I have unending thanks to everyone that has supported, mentored, inspired, and shown up for me in the past years. I could not have done it without you! A special thank you goes to the wonderful people of
@Dukegsf
who made my transition from the UK to America smoother and softer.
0
0
16
I am also honoured to have the opportunity to take up a Fellowship in the Humanities
@Columbia
@sofheyman
for the next academic year, to focus on my research and writing.
3
0
16
@HaydenHewitt
The projection going on here is hilarious. You’ve twisted my work and misrepresented it via cherry picking. Clearly the entire argument of my article - which I am sorry to say is made up multiple, related parts - has gone right over your head.
1
0
13
I’m super excited to be speaking about my work for the Ziegler lecture series at UBC on Monday - please tune in if you can!
0
3
13
A thread explaining the disruption to yesterday’s event. I stand in full solitary with Jack’s statements as his colleague and co-host. While the panel was spectacular, the safety of the participants should never have had to come into question. The University needs to do better.
It was so, so wonderful to co-host the Trans Histories panel
@CGIS_Oxford
yesterday!
I'm so grateful to the speakers & fantastic audience, and want to be transparent about some issues we faced with anti-trans campaigners which ended up with the Vice Chancellor involved.👇
7
116
479
0
0
13
@HaydenHewitt
If you can’t understand why gender transgression is not in and of itself reducible to the act of ‘crossing genders’, and why it matters that different kinds of trans people were persecuted / exploited for reasons including but not limited to being trans, I can’t help you.
1
0
12
Happening this Friday!! For all who want to know more about the history and experience of Section 28 and it’s continued effect on the landscape of gender and sexuality politics in Britain today
Join us and
@CGIS_Oxford
for a discussion on the repeal of Section 28 and the importance of Queer History on Friday 10 March
#queerhistorymonth
0
5
7
0
1
13