I feel like I had this gender issue, I dealt with it, and it’s resolved. The most important thing is that I’ve been happy. I’ve been so much happier. I enjoy life now.
Q: It seems like FTMs in general choose to transition and then get on with their lives. They don’t seem so interested in activism, in being out and politically active as MTFs.
Well, I’m out. I don’t hide it. Hiding is why people are so ignorant about transsexuality. That’s why it took me so long to figure it out. But I think that males to females are so much more defensive in how they deal with it afterward. It seems to me that not that many males to females remain in the same job that they were in before they changed. For example, a geology professor here at Stanford changed male to female, and she totally changed her research. She does gender studies now. She had a much rougher time [than I]. She had a very difficult time. I think that the medical school is a more accepting environment because we are biologists, familiar with biological variation. Geology is much more of a macho, male-dominated field.
Q: What do you think about gender? Is it in the body or the mind? Is it biological or is it social?
I think that there is something bimodal about gender. Biologically bimodal because it’s important for evolution and all species have it. Males and females are designed differently, and it’s all under the influence of hormone-driven programs, and if you look at behavior, male and female behavior is different, and I don’t think that’s all social. In fact, some of the best evidence for that comes from transsexuals. If you look at female-to-male transsexuals and results of their spatial tests before and after testosterone—and hundreds of studies have shown, and everyone agrees, that males and females differ in certain verbal and spatial tests—what’s cool about transsexuals is that they are their own control; you can do before-and-after tests. They have the same genes; the only thing that’s different is the hormones—and you find that female-to-male transsexuals become more malelike in their spatial abilities after testosterone. So there clearly are some gender-specific things that are controlled by hormones.
So it’s a very bimodal thing, but of course in any spectrum there’s going to be something in between. I just think that’s biology; it’s just the way we are. I would think that a lot of transsexuals feel this way because otherwise why do they feel so strongly from the time they are born that there’s something wrong? Why can’t they just get used to the way they are? That doesn’t come from the way society treated me. That comes from deep within. It comes from within. That’s my own personal view.
Two
THROUGH SCIENCE TO JUSTICE
Plato was acquainted with persons on the borderline of both emotional worlds, that of man and that of women. “Mixed beings” they are called. But here in my sickly body dwelt two beings, separate from each other, unrelated to each other, hostile to each other, although they had compassion on each other, as they knew that this body had room for only one of them. One of these two beings had to disappear, or else both had to perish.
Western science first took notice of cross-gendered people and tried to provide some kind of therapeutic assistance for those who sought it in the first decades of the twentieth century. Much of this work was carried out in Berlin, at the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science), founded in 1919 by the pioneering physician and activist Magnus Hirschfeld. Housed in a beautiful old building in the heart of Berlin once owned by the violinist Joseph Joachim, the institute served as a doctor’s office for Hirschfeld and his colleagues, research facility, library, museum, and lecture hall. Hirschfeld and his staff studied a wide range of sexual behaviors and treated a broad array of clients, acquiring data on the gender identities and sexual practices of more than ten thousand men and women through a tool that Hirschfeld termed a “psychobiological questionnaire.”
Few people today recognize Hirschfeld’s name, and yet he was one of the most famous scientists in the world during the 1920s. Hirschfeld was the most prominent public figure in the first generation of sexologists, biological and social scientists who approached the study of human sexual behavior as a serious scholarly endeavor, best suited to interdisciplinary study. Hirschfeld was born in 1868. Early in his career as a physician he was drawn to the subjects that would become his life’s work. Stirred by the international furor over the trial of Oscar Wilde in England, Hirschfeld published a thirty-four-page monograph titled Sappho und Socrates, in which he asked, “How can one explain the love of men and women for people of their own sex?” In 1897 Hirschfeld founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, a group of scientists and activists who would work tirelessly for the next thirty years for the repeal of Paragraph 175, a German law criminalizing sexual acts between men. The motto of the committee was “through science to justice.”
In Hirschfeld’s Berlin, two crucial strands of modernity met and mingled. Berlin was a great scientific center in an era when Germany led the world in research, and it was also a place where gay and trans people were visible and in some respects tolerated. At the center of this coupling stood Hirschfeld, a gay man and a scientist, who existed comfortably in both worlds and brought them together in his work. The city of Berlin, “a strange million-headed city like a cuirass,” in the words of Hirschfeld’s patient Einar Wegener, was the womb that nurtured the budding sexologist. “Berlin, in Hirschfeld’s time, changed from a quiet, almost rural Prussian town into the large German capital and hectic metropolis,” writes Erwin J. Haeberle, in The Birth of Sexology, describing the environment that incubated the study of human sexual behavior. Haeberle notes that Hirschfeld and his contemporaries “lived through the most extraordinary scientific upheavals, technological innovations, cultural breakthroughs, social upheavals and political changes,” as Berlin was transformed from the city of Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm’s imperial residence to the heart of Weimar culture. “All of this had its impact on our pioneers,” Haeberle says. “It constituted the climate in which sexology was conceived and could grow.”
By the time Hirschfeld moved to Berlin, around the turn of the century, it was home to a growing gay subculture. Though still relatively quiet and discreet, Berlin’s gay underground proved a fertile environment for both the man and the researcher. Hirschfeld’s biographer Charlotte Wolff describes the city’s impact on the young physician.
“During the early years of the twentieth century, Hirschfeld certainly had a field day visiting pubs, hotels and the private houses of homosexuals to see, to learn and to live in an atmosphere which was close to his heart. His homosexuality was still a secret to many but, surely, clear to himself,” she says. But Hirschfeld wasn’t looking just for sex, love, and acceptance in Berlin’s gay bars and clubs. He was looking for research subjects—and attempting to persuade influential people that members of the “third sex” (homosexuals and gender-variant people) posed no threat to the community.
Hirschfeld escorted friends, fellow academics, and foreign writers to the bars. He even brought Dr. H. Kopp, the Kriminalkommissar (chief inspector) for sex offenses of the Berlin police department. Like many others who came into contact with Hirschfeld, Kopp was converted to his view and became a supporter of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee. In fact, the professor and the detective became friends, and many years later Dr. Harry Benjamin, author of The Transsexual Phenomenon, the first book-length scientific treatment of transsexual-ity and sex reassignment, recalled that it was Kopp who introduced him to Hirschfeld. “A couple of times I was invited to accompany Hirschfeld and Kopp, who were good friends, on tours through a few gay bars in Berlin. The most famous was the Eldorado, where mainly transvestites gathered and female impersonators performed. Hirschfeld was well known there and referred to as ‘Tante Magnesia.’”