German writer and activist Johanna Elberskirchen was BOTD in 1864. Born in Bonn in the Kingdom of Prussia, her father was a grocery merchant. Little is known about her early life or education, though by her 20s she was working as an accountant in Rinteln, allowing her some financial independence from her family. She moved to Switzerland in 1891, studying medicine in Bern and law in Zurich. Returning to Bonn in 1898, she began publishing articles on social reform, focusing on women’s suffrage, public health and workers’ rights. Unusually for the time, she identified openly as a lesbian and a feminist, challenging assumptions that women’s sexuality existed solely to produce children. She challenged the exclusionist position of many bourgeoise women’s groups, arguing that feminism required “the total liberation of the entire female sex.” She became one of the few women to be employed by Magnus Hirschfeld‘s Scientific Humanitarian Committee, writing extensively about gay and lesbian sexuality. Declaring “If we women of emancipation are homosexual—well, let us be! Then we have every right to be“. She also challenged prevailing theories about female homosexuality as a third sex or a “masculine” identity, characterising lesbians in terms of their desires for other women. “How can a woman’s love for a woman have a ‘masculine’ element?”, she argued. “The male is excluded.” From 1928, she served as a speaker for the World League for Sexual Reform, delivering lectures at conferences in Copenhagen, London and Vienna. With the rise of the Nazi Party, her writings were declared “degenerate” and destroyed. Elberskirchen was in a long-term relationship with Hildegard Moniac, living together in Rüdersdorf and running a homeopathy practice from their apartment. Little is known about their lives during the Second War War. Elberskirchen died in 1943, aged 79. In 1975, her ashes were rediscovered and buried in Moniac’s grave. In the 2000s, commemorative plaques were erected in honour of Elberskirchen in Rüdersdorf and at her birthplace in Bonn.