Origin Does Not Own Meaning

Via a lens of origin, it becomes a personal responsibility as an adult to put effort into having a working knowledge of where specific symbolism and laws originated, by who, and for what reasons. We inform ourselves so we can make informed decisions.

The pink triangle is a good example. Between 1933 and 1945 the Nazis arrested around 100,000 men under Paragraph 175. About 50,000 went to prison. Thousands went to concentration camps, where the pink triangle placed them at the bottom of the camp hierarchy. They were given the hardest labour, beaten, used in medical experiments and castrated. Historians estimate that up to 60 percent of them died. When the camps were liberated, some were sent back to prison to finish their sentences. West Germany kept the Nazi version of the law until 1969 and removed it in full only in 1994. Germany annulled the Nazi era convictions in 2002 and the postwar convictions in 2017. By then almost every man who wore the triangle was dead.

The Nazis created the pink triangle to degrade, and it became a symbol of pride. Pride exists because of that history. This is what people miss when they ask for a straight pride day. No one was arrested, castrated or worked to death for being straight. Pride is not a claim to be better. It is a refusal to be erased. That kind of rhetoric and a lack of knowledge go hand in hand.

Origin does not own meaning. Paragraph 175 was a law, and laws are written by people, for reasons, in their own time. Understanding origins gives us the lens to see the context of the time we live in now. That lens shows us who needs protection today, and it shows us how protection was denied before.

The ideology behind it has not gone away. There is a rising, organised and well funded movement against everyone who doesn’t look like them or live like them. It runs across borders through think tanks and lobbies. The Heritage Foundation, the organisation behind Project 2025, partners with a think tank funded by the Hungarian government. One parliamentary network tracked over a billion dollars spent on anti gender campaigns in Europe in five years. The narrative is watered down and fed to the public as better for them. Sound familiar? It falls on the marginalised people in our society who don’t look like them or follow their idea of a superior race. That superior race doesn’t exist. It never did. And while this plays out, the real issues we face as a species go unaddressed.

Knowledge alone did not free these men. Laws changed because people organised, campaigned and refused to stay silent. Understanding is where that work begins. We have history books to refer to, so we don’t follow the loudest politician in the room, the one who uses social issues against us. It is also why our knowledge has to be accurate. A story that confirms what we feel still needs checking.

It should not escape our knowledge or attention that Alan Turing, the man whose work broke the Enigma code and kept the Allies ahead of Nazi Germany, was convicted in Britain in 1952 for being gay. He was given a choice between prison and chemical castration. Two years later he was dead, his death ruled a suicide. Britain pardoned him in 2013. In 2017, the same year Germany acted, it pardoned thousands more. The country he helped save treated him as a criminal too.

As a British man, it doesn’t escape my attention that British lawyers helped draft the European Convention on Human Rights after the war, so that what happened under the Nazis could not happen again. Britain wrote those protections into its own law in 1998. Today there are British parties pledging to tear them up.

The challenge we face as a complex society is to find ways to accommodate our differences. It’s in that space we embrace our strengths. Human rights stretch to everyone, or they are not human rights. This knowledge isn’t always comfortable, and it doesn’t always fit our own life experience. But it’s important.

Paul Marshall is the author of Harmonic Being: An Introspective Journey.