Dora Richter

Dora Rudolfine Richter (16 April 1892 – 26 April 1966) was a German trans woman and the first known person to undergo complete male-to-female gender-affirming surgery. She was one of a number of transgender people in the care of sex-research pioneer Magnus Hirschfeld at Berlin's Institute for Sexual Research during the 1920s and early 1930s.

Richter was born as the second child of seven in Seifen (now Ryžovna [de; cs; eo]), a small town in the Bohemian Ore Mountains region to a poor farming family on 16 April 1892. Her mother was Antonia Richter (née Kraus; 1867–1938), and her father, Josef Richter (1862–1931), was a musician. She was baptized into the Catholic Church on 17 April 1892.

Early in childhood, Richter displayed a "tendency to act and carry on in a feminine way". At the age of 6, she apparently tried to remove her penis with a tourniquet.

In 1909, after a baker apprenticeship, she left her small town and moved to a bigger one, where she continued to dress as a girl in her free time. She joined a wandering theater troupe and moved to Leipzig, where she stayed for two years. In 1916, she got drafted to the army, but was discharged in just two weeks. From Leipzig she came back to her hometown, where she was encouraged by a friend to go to Magnus Hirschfeld's practice in Berlin.

While living in Berlin, Richter worked as a cook and waiter at hotels using her birth name and presenting herself as a man. She was arrested several times in Berlin for dressing in women's clothes in public and was sent to male prisons.

In 1922, Richter underwent an orchiectomy, a surgical removal of the testicles, performed by Berlin surgeon Erwin Gohrbandt at the Charité Universitätsmedizin. From May 1923, she worked with other transgender people as a domestic servant at Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Research, one of the few places where a trans person could be employed, where she was affectionately nicknamed "Dörchen" by Hirschfeld.

In early 1931, Richter had a penectomy performed by Institute physician Ludwig Levy-Lenz, and in June that year an artificial vagina was surgically grafted by Gohrbandt, making her the first recorded transgender woman to undergo vaginoplasty.

In 1931, Felix Abraham [de], a psychiatrist working at the institute, published a paper about Richter's (and Toni Ebel's) gender confirming surgeries as a case study in the Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft und Sexualpolitik: "Her castration had the effect – albeit not very extensive – of making her body become fuller, restricting her beard growth, making visible the first signs of breast development, and giving the pelvic fat pad... a more feminine shape."