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.
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.
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.
Hirschfeld taught that these are natural variations and that law and social customs should be brought into accord in a rational way with this naturally existing diversity of human kinds. I think that his motivations were really noble, and he did tremendous political work on gay rights, transvestite rights, abortion rights. He was a very conscientious, well-meaning, thoughtful man. And he was a modernist, a sexual modernist, who was bringing up these taboo topics, and who recognized that these things that were supposed to be so illicit are just a part of human life. His view was that we shouldn’t act in an irrational, prejudicial, superstitious manner. “We’re all men of science here.”
In a sense I think that he did pathologize, in that he thought that gender and sexuality were appropriate targets for medical intervention. But do you want to call that pathological? What many transsexuals are looking for is a nonpathologized way to say, “I want to interact with medical service providers.” So that treatment is offered much more on a service provider basis, which is of course part of a much broader shift in medicine.
I think that there has always been a tension between people seeking services and people providing services. And as much as I firmly believe that people have autonomy over their own bodies and can choose best for themselves—that people have the capacity to give informed consent—I understand that service providers have concerns. If I as a surgeon am going to do something to a person’s body, I need to be convinced that I’m doing the right thing, because of the Hippocratic oath, and its major principle, do no harm. I respect that and I understand that there’s a need sometimes for transgendered people seeking medical services, to educate the service providers about why, even though this is something that you might not choose for yourself, this is the best thing for me.
However, you can’t just talk about clients and service providers. You have to talk about the role of media as
