Charlotte Charlaque

Charlotte Charlaque (14 September 1892 – 6 February 1963) was a German–American actress. She was an early trans activist and one of the first people to undergo gender reassignment surgery.

Life and work Charlotte Charlaque was born the second child of a German-Jewish family in Berlin-Schöneberg. The misleading statement that Charlaque was born in Mährisch Schönberg (Šumperk) in what is now the Czech Republic is based on Charlaque's repeated efforts after 1933 to disguise her origins so that she would not be handed over to Nazi Germany as a German Jew or Jewish trans woman. Her real birth certificate was found in 2023.

In Berlin In her early years in Berlin, Charlaque performed as a singer, dancer and actress, later she also worked as a language teacher and translator as well as a receptionist at Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science. One of her tasks here was to advise "transvestite" patients on their choice of clothes. In 1929, Charlaque also accompanied Magnus Hirschfeld and his partner Karl Giese to the third international congress of the World League for Sexual Reform (WLSR) in London.

Escape to Czechoslovakia Charlaque was in a relationship with Ebel and the two women lived together from around 1932. As Charlotte Charlaque was Jewish, Toni Ebel converted to Judaism in the early 1930s and both women were staunch opponents of National Socialism, they fled together to Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1934, where they first settled in Karlovy Vary and later in Brno and Prague. While Ebel painted pictures for spa guests and other clients, Charlaque taught English and French, probably also to Jews who were fleeing persecution by the German National Socialists. Alluding to her birth name, she now liked to call herself Carlotta Baroness von Curtius; she also published a text under this pseudonym in the homophile magazine One in 1955. In her private life, she was in contact with the German-American doctor and endocrinologist Harry Benjamin, the "cross-dresser" Louise Lawrence (1912–1976) and Christine Jorgensen, who attracted a great deal of media attention in the course of her gender reassignment in 1952.

Charlaque died completely impoverished in New York on 6 February 1963. At a funeral service a few days later, she was honored in a memorial speech by William Glenesk (1926–2014), who was known as an innovative clergyman and later also as an advocate for people from the LGBTIQ spectrum.