The Riddle of Gender

of the sexual freedom they could not find as gay men at home in England. Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories formed the basis for the Broadway show (and later film) Cabaret. Years later, in his frank memoir, Christopher and His Kind, published in 1976, Isherwood reveals the sly artifice behind the city’s seedy reputation, the knowing wink that accompanied the perverse erotic invitation. He contrasts the ambience of his favorite gay bar, The Cosy Corner, “plain, homely and unpretentious,” with the tourist traps of West End Berlin, “dens of pseudo-vice catering to heterosexual tourists. Here screaming boys in drag and mono-cled, Eton-cropped girls in dinner jackets play-acted the hijinks of Sodom and Gomorrah, horrifying the onlookers and reassuring them that Berlin was still the most decadent city in Europe.” Wryly, Isher- wood questions whether or not Berlin’s “famous decadence” wasn’t simply a public relations ploy, “a commercial line which the Berliners had instinctively developed in their competition with Paris. Paris had long since cornered the straight girl—market, so what was Berlin left to offer its visitors but a masquerade of perversions?” Like many hard- luck ladies, Berlin may have found that offering forbidden sex to strangers put food on the table. Still, the city’s winking tolerance of homosexuality and gender diversity was real, not feigned.

This tolerance was surely due in part to the efforts of Hirschfeld and his colleagues, who worked for nearly three decades to increase public and scientific understanding of homosexuality, under the auspices of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, widely acknowledged as the world’s first gay-rights organization. The committee produced the first scientific journal focusing on homosexuality and other sexual variations, the Yearbook of Intermediate Sexual Stages, which published articles by all the pioneers of sexology. In 1921, Hirschfeld organized the first International Congress for Sexual Reform on a Sexological Basis, and in 1928, he organized and served as one of the first presidents of the World League for Sexual Reform. All of this activity, combined with his heavy schedule of speaking engagements, primarily to working-class audiences, bore fruit in the increasing tolerance and acceptance of homosexuality and gender variance in Weimar Germany.

Perhaps the most significant of Hirschfeld’s achievements was the founding of the Institute for Sexual Science. Researchers at the institute created the first premarital counseling service in Germany and advised young couples planning to marry on the likelihood of health problems in their children, based upon their genetic history. They studied and treated impotence and venereal disease, intersex and trans-gender conditions, all types of fetishes, and what later came to be called “paraphilias” (disorders of desire). Men who were being prosecuted under Paragraph 175 came to the institute for treatment and lived under the protection of Hirschfeld until their cases came to trial, at which time they were represented by the institute’s legal staff. The staff of the institute delivered public presentations in an auditorium decorated with busts of Darwin and the German biologist Ernst Haeckel. Scholars and visitors from around the world came to the institute and carried out research in its library, which contained more than twenty thousand volumes and thirty-five thousand pictures and photographs. Many years later, Christopher Isherwood described the broad impact of the institute: “It was a place of education for the public, its lawmakers and its police.”

Hirschfeld’s great mission was the reduction of suffering through a scientific understanding of sex, a goal he shared with many prominent physicians and scientists of his time. By proving that homosexuality and gender variance were based in biology, Hirschfeld hoped to bring an end to the persecution of what he called “sexual intermediaries,” people who lived somewhere between the boundaries of male and female. “By sexual intermediaries we understand manly-formed women and womanly-formed men at every possible stage or, in other words, men with womanly characteristics, and women with manly ones,” Hirschfeld writes in his groundbreaking study of cross-dressing, Die Transvestiten, published in Germany in 1910.

In Die Transvestiten, Hirschfeld illuminated a previously unstudied phenomenon. Most of Hirschfeld’s contemporaries shared the view of earlier researchers such as Carl von Westphal that homosexuality and transvestitism were nearly synonymous. Hirschfeld himself confesses in Die Transvestiten that when he first encountered transvestites, or to use the modern term, cross- dressers, he was “inclined to assume that we again had homosexuality before us, perhaps unconscious.” He soon found, however, that this was far from the case, “because the main marker of homosexuality, as its root word - homos, or ‘same,’ indicates, is the direction of the sex drive toward persons of the same sex. We saw in most of our cases that there was not a trace of it; that, on the other hand, there was an even stronger antipathy than normally appears in other heterosexuals.”

In other words, Hirschfeld discovered that many of his male cross-dressing subjects were rampantly homophobic and described themselves as sickened by the thought of having sex with another man. Hirschfeld suspected that transvestism was far more common than assumed, though he admitted that he didn’t have enough data to make a positive statement about its prevalence. “Whether erotic transvestism is a rare and exceptional phenomenon, or whether it occurs more often than we might at first imagine, more evaluation is needed at this time,” he writes, adding that “with regards to homosexuality, for a long time people believed it to be a rarity too, until they gradually recognized its relative frequency.”

Hirschfeld quotes his clients extensively in the case studies that introduce the book, and the stories they tell provide some indication of the range of gender variance that Hirschfeld encountered in his practice.“My sex life is not so great. Whenever I do not have on a dress, I have absolutely none at all. I have intercourse with my wife every six or eight weeks. Otherwise, we live a happy life. Also, I treat my wife very well because I take care of almost all of the housework…. Unfortunately, my feminine tendencies also got us into financial trouble. Because the mania for dresses is very great in me, it hardly helps at all when I can get dressed after the day’s work. Lately, it is almost impossible for me to fall asleep without putting on a slip. It is a force in me that I cannot withstand. This constant battling against a power that I cannot withstand has already frazzled my nerves. Because I have to use my hands at work, I have to control myself in order to work. Then it suddenly comes over me like a storm, my nerves fail, and I have to leave work, stay at home, which many times costs me my job, because today there are many workers available…. When I am permitted to wear dresses permanently, and when I can wear these clothes in front of other women without having to feel degraded, then my life will take a turn for the better.” (Case 16)“As a rule I only cross-dress when my girlfriend is with me; sometimes the urge is so strong that I masturbate in costume. The yearning to feel totally like a woman also leads me to have coitus ‘with myself using wax candles, cigars, and things like that. … So the main content of my yearning is to be a woman completely. An extraordinary fascination for me would be to shave myself completely, put on make-up, put on women’s clothing; to be sure, truly elegant, the ‘last word’ but not too loud, underwear fine and silky, narrow shoes, lots of embroidery, artistic hat, in short, to be like a brilliantly entertaining prostitute…. I am a good sportsman, marksman, ride well and have proved myself in the military. Nevertheless I feel freer in the company of women and drawn to them as if by an invisible bond.” (Case 8)“When I put on a woman’s dress my whole relationship to the external world changes. During this metamorphosis, which extends to how I dress my hair, I have a totally different view into the environment; the outside world affects me differently, finer and gentler, and challenges me to appreciate the delicate and the gentle. Noteworthy is that this effect is so universal that, in cross-dressing, I am repulsed by both beer and smoking, in spite of the fact that I am a lover of both. My greatest desire goes so far as to be able to live untroubled and undistinguished as a woman, and what is worse, what I see in my future is the impossibility of the fulfillment of this yearning.” (Case 3)“I myself, as a child, took every opportunity to wear my sister’s clothing, was often beaten for it, mocked and teased, played with girls, and yearned for the time when I would finish school and work as a nanny. I finally stole the clothes of a young woman, and her certificate of domicile and, dressed as a woman, fled to Switzerland, so that for years no one knew where I was. …” (Case 13)“I cannot report anything of much importance from my childhood, only that I had the burning desire that I was really a boy. I often blamed my dear father because I was not a boy, but what could the poor man do? My dear parents made every possible effort to make me into a quiet, gentle being. At age fourteen they sent me to a priest in a boarding house so that I would become totally domesticated, homely, in short a patient sheep. But it failed totally. After three months I disappeared through a window. Not because I committed a crime, but rather because the priest had the audacity to give me a box on the ears and for what? Only because we were having a bit of fun, and when he was away, we danced. Of course, I was the one who incited it. We were, that is to say, nine boarders and we were supposed to do as we were told. But what did such a country priest know about Berlin blood? Well, I made it clear to him many times he should not try to hit a Berliner but continue to pick his country oranges.” (Case 15)

Hirschfeld noted certain shared traits in the people he studied. First, and most important, their cross- dressing began at a very young age and was generally lifelong. “In most of the cases we can trace the urge back to their early childhood. It increases during puberty; the conviction becomes even clearer in their awareness at that