Transphobia Since 1981
Classic anti-trans arguments in ‘The Spiral Path’
Recently, I read The Men with the Pink Triangle, a Holocaust memoir, and I learned from David Fernbach’s 1980 introduction that he wrote when he translated it from German to English.
Fernbach published his own book the following year, The Spiral Path. This is a little-known book, surely out of print, but it’s preserved on Archive.org where you can read it for free. I was excited to read a book-length work by this author.
Fernbach gives a few biographical details. As a teenager,
“I was already committed to communism…I spent much of the 1960s at university (London School of Economics), but was very involved in the campaign against the American war on Vietnam…In 1968 I rushed over to Paris to take part in the May events, and for the next couple of years my main concern was to try and build up a similar movement in Britain.”
From 1970, his involvement with the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) “led me to expand my vision of a liberated society by a whole new dimension, adding the abolition of gender to the abolition of class as a communist goal.” It was through “the gay movement” that he began “to understand my deep-seated antipathy to…
