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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
Berlin’s reputation as the decadent drag nightclub of the Continent attracted many foreign visitors. Some of the most vivid descriptions of Weimar Berlin and its inhabitants were penned by the writer Christopher Isherwood, who with his friends Wystan and Stephen (the poets W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender) traveled to Berlin in search
