This letter was originally published in Norwegian.
17 March 2026
“True humanism is a fighting humanism… we must remain vigilant and always speak out against injustice.”
– Henriette Bie Lorentzen, 1945
Sometimes it is the fact that no one says anything that remains.
When Henriette Bie Lorentzen opened the national conference of the Norwegian women’s rights movement in 1945, she had survived torture and a Nazi concentration camp. She had seen what happens when people stop being seen as human beings.
It is difficult to read her brave words today without recognizing the gravity.
A warning
In March this year, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention published its third red flag alert about anti-trans genocide in the United States. They state that the United States is now “squarely within the early to middle stages of a genocidal process against trans people, the goal of which is to completely erase transgender people not only from public life but also from existence in the U.S. and globally.”
It is about boundaries that are constantly shifting. About what becomes possible to say, what kind of policies it becomes possible to adopt, and ultimately what becomes possible to do to fellow human beings.
In recent years, a large number of laws have been introduced that make life difficult for trans people in the United States. In 2025 alone, more than a hundred anti-trans bills were adopted. The attacks on trans people affect everyday life in many ways — in access to healthcare, in schools, in identity documents, and in who is allowed to move where.
When people are forced to state a gender that does not correspond to how they live, or lose access to healthcare and public recognition, their space for living is narrowed. At the same time, the boundaries of who is allowed to exist are being shifted. In March came the news that ICE stands ready to arrest trans people.
Language is also changing. Trans people are made into a problem, a threat, something society must protect itself against.
On silence
At the same time, there is much that is not being said.
Also in Norway, many who otherwise place themselves within a feminist tradition have been reluctant to take a clear stand against the attacks on trans people — both abroad and at home. Some treat it as something distant, others as a question that is difficult to have an opinion on.
That feminists, too, can remain silent is nothing new. What matters is what one chooses to do when one sees what is happening.
It is easy to treat this as something that is happening somewhere else.
It is not.
What is happening is happening now. It is happening here.
It is entirely possible to follow along without saying anything. That, too, is a choice.
Henriette Bie Lorentzen: “Humanism as reality, not just a beautiful dream”
Henriette Bie Lorentzen (1911–2001) was a humanist, feminist, human rights advocate, peace activist, Ibsen scholar, and journalist. A universal, broad, and humanistically grounded commitment to human rights for all was the guiding ideal throughout her work.
Henriette was one of the founders of the Nansen Academy before the war and contributed to introducing humanism as a philosophy and way of life in Norway. She initiated the Nansen Academy’s first course, “What is humanism?”, which was aimed at women and was held in May 1939 – before the school had formally opened. There she taught topics such as “women and society” and “women and peace.” Dagbladet described the course as “humanism as reality, not just a beautiful dream.”
Henriette helped chart the anti-Nazi course that the Nansen Academy stood for, both before and after the war. Henriette said: “Always have the courage of your convictions.” As an active member of the resistance, she was tortured by the Gestapo and imprisoned in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. When she was later asked about her motivations, thoughts, and feelings when she entered the resistance struggle against Nazism, she referred to Kristian Schjelderup’s message to the Nansen Academy’s students: “Make choices and get involved!”
Several of the women who were imprisoned in Ravensbrück together with Henriette later said that she was a very important person to them, a source of encouragement and positivity, who knew Kristin Lavransdatter and a number of Ibsen’s works by heart and retold them in the darkness in the evenings in Ravensbrück. In the spring of 1945, she was rescued by the White Buses.
In the period immediately after the war, she travelled around the country with the lecture “Human dignity,” in which she shared her experiences and encounters with people during her imprisonment by the Gestapo and in the concentration camp, with a humanity that made a strong impression. In 1946 and 1947 she gave over a hundred lectures. At the end of 1945, she founded the women’s magazine Kvinnen og Tiden, with Margarete Bonnevie, Eva Kolstad, and Inger Hagerup on the editorial board. She co-founded the Oslo Women’s Rights Association and brought her cousins Eva and Nora onto the board. She later became one of the earliest activists in Amnesty Norway.
“True humanism is a fighting humanism … we must remain vigilant and always speak out against injustice”
The quote is from Henriette’s opening speech at the Norwegian Association for Women’s Rights’ national conference in 1945. In Where Were the Women? Eleven Women on the Years 1945–1960, a collection of essays edited by Kari Skjønsberg, Henriette wrote that after the war she felt it was her task to help build “a society with freedom from want and fear, a world with equal rights for all, regardless of colour, race or gender.”
Henriette placed great emphasis on hope: in 1995 she said, “Hope is what we need most today … young people must not forget that in all countries, in all parts of the world, even where war and genocide are taking place, there are people who are fighting for tolerance, human dignity, freedom of expression, and peace.”