The fight waged by Hirschfeld and his allies produced greater tolerance for homosexuality and gender variance during the period of liberalism in Germany between the wars, but it also nourished a violent countermovement that viewed the liberal approach as morally bankrupt. The Nazis, like most social conservatives, insisted on firm boundaries between the sexes and compulsory heterosexuality Hirschfeld’s theory of sexual intermediaries and his advocacy of gay and gender-variant individuals were perceived as an assault on the natural order and a violation (akin to rape) of German society. For that reason, all memory of his work was erased. Sexology as Hirschfeld conceived it—as a science that would liberate rather than imprison desire and identity—had been dealt a blow from which it would take decades to recover. Hirschfeld himself died in exile in France in 1935.
Psychological explanations for homosexuality and gender variance prevailed after the Second World War and the Nazi persecution of homosexuals, when Hirschfeld’s view that homosexuality and gender variance were biologically based “became very suspect,” neuroscien-tist Simon LeVay told me in a 2001 interview. “The German academic community became totally absorbed in socialization theory. They rejected all biological explanations for human diversity. And the idea came about that Hirschfeld was somehow responsible for the Nazi persecution of gay people, that by portraying gay people as a natural kind, as being born that way, he put them in the same category as racial groups and opened the door to the idea of exterminating them. I’ve even read stuff saying that he actually collaborated in efforts to have gay people arrested. I don’t think that any of that is true. But somehow the most positive thing you can read about him in the postwar German literature is that, yeah, he was trying to do something for gay people, but he did it in a very misguided way. And that he was wrong.”
Among scientists, Magnus Hirschfeld’s belief that homosexuality, cross-dressing, and all other forms of gender variance were “widespread and important phenomena” and “natural” variations, not perversions or pathologies, was largely abandoned. The postwar era was notable not only for its fertility, but also for its rigid reinforcement of sex roles. The theory of sexual intermediaries didn’t resonate in an era devoted to reinforcing the distinctions between the sexes. Masculinity and femininity were no longer viewed as liquid entities, capable of being combined in varying proportions; instead they were once again solid and opaque. The middle ground between the sexes became as impenetrable a border as the wire-topped wall dividing the formerly liminal city of Berlin.
CONVERSATION WITH SUSAN STRYKER, PH.D.
Susan Stryker earned her Ph.D. in history at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1992 and held a postdoctoral research fellowship at Stanford University from 1998 to 2000. She has been executive director of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco since 1999 and is currently working on a documentary film about the transgender riot in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District in 1966, and on a memoir for Oxford University Press. In 1992, Stryker cofounded Transgender Nation, an activist group. We spoke at her office at the San Francisco GLBT Historical Society.
Q: Who was the first transsexual?”
That depends on what you mean by “transsexual.” In all cultures, throughout all periods of history, there have been people who fall outside of what we think of as normal, heterosexual masculine male manhood and feminine female womanhood. The binary is really a historical construct; physical bodies are much more diverse than that. Gender systems historically are much more complex than that. When we say, Who was the first transsexual? do we mean who was the first person to use hormones and genital surgery to effect a legal change in their social status? I don’t know who that was, because the medical techniques came together over time. Legal discourses came together over time.
It’s really hard to say who the first person would be. When you start looking at transsexual history, it’s like somebody had a hysterectomy, but they did it because they didn’t like having a uterus because they thought of themselves psychologically as a man. Is that the first transsexual surgery? There was this person in New York in the early twentieth century named Earl Lenz who thought of himself/herself as a feminine soul trapped in a masculine body, and this person had their testicles removed, supposedly because they were having horrible problems with nocturnal emissions. And the doctors were like, “Oh, nocturnal emissions, bad news. Let’s remove those testicles.” Was that person a transsexual? He surgically modified his body so that his body more closely reflected his psychological sense of self. Was he a transsexual? I don’t know.
Certainly by the early 1920s in Germany, at the Hirschfeld institute there were people that we could call at least proto-transsexuals. They were people who did what modern-day transsexuals do, which is to say, “If I do this thing to my body, if I change my genitals this way so that they more resemble the genitals of people who have a different social status than me, and if I take these hormones and redistribute my body fat and body hair, and present evidence of these medical procedures to civil authorities of some kind, then I can change my social designation as being a man or a woman, and I can then live in accordance with general social expectations of what a man or a woman is supposed to be.” That was in place by the twenties or early thirties. The first well-documented case was in 1930 at the Hirschfeld institute. Felix Abraham, a young doctor at the Hirschfeld institute, published a paper on two transvestites who underwent genital surgery. That paper was written up in 1930 or ‘31. In the case of Lili Elbe, the book about her surgery was published in ‘33, though the events happened a couple of years earlier.
Q: It seems significant that these people transitioned in Germany. The research and treatment at the Hirschfeld Institute were so significant, both scientifically and socially, and yet most people, even many transgendered people, have never heard of him or the institute. Why not?
I think there are two reasons we haven’t given Hirschfeld his due. One is that so much of his work was destroyed by the Nazis, and, secondly, he was also sort of a promiscuous publisher. He didn’t care much about publishing in the most reputable journals. Then, too, some of his ideas about the endocrinological or somatic roots of sexual and gender diversity have really fallen out of favor—I think rightly so. However, even though he came out of a different conceptual or intellectual framework than is currently fashionable, or accurate—I mean I think he was wrong about a lot of things—I think his political approach to the topic was good. He did try to root cultural differences about sexuality and gender in the body and he did that as a way of attempting to naturalize these differences and say, “People can’t help it. There are many different kinds of people, there aren’t just two.” He recognized that there are a whole lot of sexual intermediaries, and that more or less everybody is a sexual intermediary.