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20 July 2022

Emi Wolters (Luz Fraumann) performer (186? - ?)

Wolters wore girls’ clothing until the start of school, and still then during vacations: she was called Hanne by the farm personnel and still later by grandfather. At the age of 13, her custody was transferred to an uncle, a professor. And the wearing of female clothing was stopped completely. Wolter’s voice did not change until the age of 20, and there was no beard growth until age 25. 

As a man Wolters took a wife, and developed a career on stage. By 1906 Wolters had written Weiberbeute, a forced-femininity novel about a mannish woman who hypnotises her stepson to think that he is a woman. She then induces a phantom pregnancy on him, and persuades him that her son is his. Her death-bed confession is dismissed by her victim as delusion. The novel was published in Budapest under the pseudonym Luz Fraumann. 

Magnus Hirschfeld included Wolters as Case #3 in his 1910 Die Transvestiten where she is referred to as Mr C. Hirschfeld also gives an extended quotation from Weiberbeute

During the Great War, Wolters (under her male name of Emil Mauder) was a senior lieutenant in the German army, and was taken captive by the Russians. 

In the 1920s Wolters became a well-known columnist in the trans magazines, Die Freundin and Das 3, Geschlecht. She wrote the following in Die Freundin in 1931.

“Dear Sister Ilse P.! I am one of the oldest and first cases of medical advisor Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld and I know from forty years of experience that even this great researcher in sexuality had first had to learn from us and how he changed his original views and findings. [...] But above all, dear fellow sisters, you should read up on the transvestite literature (I mean especially the scientific literature!). Dr. Hirschfeld has worked hard and thoroughly for us. The fact that he previously described the cross-dressing drive as pathological, and coined the not entirely accurate word "transvestitism" etc. is nothing essential, but came from developments in this field.“ 

In 1932 she drew upon more than 100 letters sent into Die Freudin, as well as newspaper reports and Hirschfeld’s Sittengeschichte des Weltkrieges (Sexual History of the World War), 1930, to highlight patriotic deeds and courage under fire of both trans men and trans women. Also that year she wrote an account of how the English Queen Elizabeth Tudor had been biologically male.

++The next year, after the Nazi takeover, Wolters was mentioned several times as a correspondent an contributing author during the trial of fellow trans person Anton Maier, but was not herself arrested.

  • Luz Frauman.Weiberbeute:Ein merkwürdiger Roman. Budapest: Verlag von M. W. Schneider, 1906.
  • Magnus Hirschfeld. Die Transvestiten; ein Untersuchung uber den erotischen Verkleidungstrieb: mit umfangreichem casuistischen und historischen Materia.  Berlin: Pulvermacher, 1910: 18-25, 171-7. English translation by Michael A Lombardi-Nash. Tranvestites: The Erotic urge to Crossdress. Prometheus Books, 1991: 27-32, 132-9.
  • Emi von Wolters. “Die Welt der Transvestism”. Die Freundin, 7, 26, 1931.
  • Emi Wolters, “Transvestiten im Weltkriege [8-part series, 24 February to 13April 1932, in ‘Die Welt der Transvestiten’ supplement],” Die Freundin 8, nos. 8 to 15 (1932).
  • Emi Wolters. “Ein Transvestit als Königin”. Das 3, Geschlect,5, May 1932: 16-25.
  • Annette Runte. Biographische Operationen : Diskurse der Transsexualität.Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1996: 131,412, 568, 582.
  • Graham Robb. Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century. WW Norton & Company, 2003: 205.
  • Rainer Herrn. Schnittmuster des Geschlechts: Transvestitismus und Transsexualität in der frühen Sexualwissenschaft. Psychosozial-Verlag, 2005: 35.
  • Rainer Herrn. "Transvestitismus in der NS-Zeit – Ein Forschungsdesiderat".  Zeitschrift fur Sexualforschung, 26, 2013: 349.
  • Katie Sutton. Sex between Body and Mind: Psychoanalysis and Sexology in the German-speaking World, 1890s–1930s. University of Michigan Press, 2019: 115, 193, 196, 257n96, 284n109
  • “Luz Fraumann (Hirschfeld 3)”. Lili Elbe library. Online.

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