The Gay Agenda

A Comprehensive Queer Resource

Magnus Hirschfeld

By: Andromeda Pearson

Magnus Hirschfeld, 1928.
Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo/Alamy 
Magnus Hirshfeld was born in 1868 in the German city of Kolberg. In 1887 Hirschfeld began his university studies, soon committing to medicine, and by 1892 he had become a doctor. By 1896 he found himself back in Berlin, about to take up a new medical practice. It isn’t clear when Hirschfeld realized he was a homosexual. He would never publicly admit it, though his political involvement and his long-term partner, Karl Giese, made it an open secret by the turn of the century. It’s probably safe to assume that he understood his sexuality by the time he returned to Berlin. 
Magnus Hirschfeld was deeply affected by the suicide of one of his new patients. The man, an officer in the German army, had been pressured to get married, but on the eve of his wedding he shot himself in the head. The man bequeathed a number of his personal notes, papers, and drawings, along with a letter stating:

“The thought that you could contribute to [a future] when the German fatherland will think of us in more just terms, sweetens the hour of death.”

Hirschfeld would be haunted by this loss, referring to it throughout his life as a catalyst which caused him to leave his practice to pursue justice through science, particularly through the field of sexology. Sexology was an intellectual movement which attempted to analyze sexuality and gender identity as scientific phenomena. Many of Hirshfeld’s predecessors viewed homosexuality as being pathological, pointing to it as a sign of mental illness or perversion. This is a view which persisted long past Hirschfeld’s time, with homosexuality still being categorized in the DSM as a psychiatric disorder up until 1974. Hirschfeld, however, proposed that a person could be born with characteristics which did not fit into heterosexual, binary categories. 
The letter provoked Hirschfeld to write his first work about homosexuality, entitled Sappho and Socrates: How Can One Explain the Love of Men and Women for People of Their Own Sex? It was published with the help of Max Spohr. Max Spohr was the owner of a publishing company in Leipzig who started to explore the market for publishing materials about homosexuality in 1893. The trial of Oscar Wilde, only a year prior, had caused much public discussion and Hirshfeld hoped that interjecting science into the debate would lead to some progress on legal treatment and public attitudes. This first work, Sappho and Socrates, was published under a pseudonym, however, by the following year he was ready to take a more public stance. 
On May 15, 1897 he invited Max Spohr and Eduard Oberg to his home in the middle-class Berlin suburb of Charlottenburg. Together, they wrote the articles of association for the world’s first homosexual organization – the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee. The first major product of this committee was the 1899 Jahrbuch für Sexuelle Zwischenstufen, or the Yearbook for Sexual Intermediaries, which aimed to spread scientific research to carry out advocacy on behalf of sexual minorities. Appearing in annual editions for more than a quarter of a century, it totalled over 11,000 pages long. Within its pages, it claimed homosexuality to be natural, tracked the existence of homosexual identity throughout history, and mapped its contemporary presence. At first the group met in Hirschfeld’s apartment, but within a few years they had grown enough to justify renting rooms in the Prinz Albrecht, one of the city’s fanciest hotels. It pursued a wide range of activities, from promoting scientific research on homosexuality to combating prevailing social prejudices against it, and working on repealing the country’s sodomy law - Paragraph 175.  Soon the WhK was joined by other individuals and groups wanting to change the country’s attitudes on homosexuality and together they formed a vibrant and dynamic movement. 
Dr. Magnus Hirshfeld’s first major individual publication on sexuality and gender identity was published in 1904. Berlins Drittes Geschlecht, or Berlin’s Third Sex, was formed from Hirschfeld’s time going out into society and actively participating in the lives of those he was writing about. It is a foundational text of modern gay and trans identity, and effectively gained the public’s sympathy for queer identities through its appeal to emotion. As Hirschfeld wrote about one Christmastime party he attended:

“Many think about their shattered hopes, what they could have achieved if old prejudices had not hindered their progress, and others in respectable positions ponder the heavy lie they must live. Many think about their parents who are dead – or for whom they are dead – and all in deepest sorrow think of the woman they loved most of all and who loved them most of all – their mother.” 

Berlins Drittes Geschlecht, 1904
Whilst notably concerned with documenting expressions of same-sex attraction, Berlin’s Third Sex also documented the lives of gender non-conforming people, leaving lives contrary to their assigned gender. Hirschfeld saw that the denial of their identity was leading them to depression and even suicide. One of Hirschfeld’s most profound contributions in this text was to acknowledge the existence and validity of transgender individuals. 

In 1905 Hirshfeld published a new study entitled Sexual Transitions, which was based on his own observations as a physician on the differences between men and women. This work, filled with clinical photographs and sketches, made the arguments that “taken in very strong scientific terms, one is not able in this sense to speak of man and woman, but on the contrary only of people that are for the most part male or for the most part female.” The book gave visual examples of male bodies with rounded hips and female bodies with small breasts. It further developed Hirschfeld’s idea that we all begin life as one asexual creature, only then to develop various sexual characteristics after being exposed to hormones and physical maturation. Everyone experiences this development in unique ways, however, and consequently we all represent slightly different mixtures of these various sexual characteristics. To put it in other terms, there is no absolute male or absolute female. This is a concept that resembles our understanding of sex today. 

In 1909 Hirschfeld convinced local authorities in Berlin to experiment with “transvestite passes” which provided legal protection for his patients, allowing them to crossdress in public without being arrested for disorderly conduct or being harassed by the police in other ways. While making his case, he discovered that there was some public sympathy for these individuals since several books and newspaper reports had recently reported on the difficulties that they faced. 

Furthermore, in 1910 he coined the term transvestite in his work Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress, while offering the first major empirical study on the subject. During his study, Sexual Transitions, he had befriended a number of cross-dressers and argued that transvestitism was a variation distinct from homosexuality. He insisted that all gender characteristics and sexual variations had their root in biological development. He argued that this manifested itself in four distinct ways – which would become the basis for what is often considered his most important work, The Homosexuality of Men and Women, published in 1914. These manifestations, according to Hirschfeld, were the sex organs, sexual orientation, emotional characteristics, and secondary sexual characteristics such as voice and facial hair. Although we know today that gender is a social concept and is not distinctly naturalistic, as Hirschfeld argued, his theories still hold some ground in our understandings of sex and gender today.

Hirschfeld’s research was just one part of his life at this time. In the early years of the 20th century he found himself increasingly called upon as a witness in trials involving homosexuality. At the time, courts listened increasingly to the reports of psychiatrists and other professionals. Although he was not always able to get acquittals, he was often able to get reduced sentences on these cases. 

While not in court, he was working as first chairman of the WhK. The first major product of this committee was the 1899 Jahrbuch für Sexuelle Zwischenstufen, or the Yearbook for Sexual Intermediaries, which aimed to spread scientific research to carry out advocacy on behalf of sexual minorities. Appearing in annual editions for more than a quarter of a century, it totalled over 11,000 pages long. Within its pages, it claimed homosexuality to be natural, tracked the existence of homosexual identity throughout history, and mapped its contemporary presence. Then, in 1901 they began to put out a newsletter - The Monthly Report. 

One of the main goals of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee was to draft and circulate a petition for the repeal of the country’s sodomy law - Paragraph 175, gaining over 900 signatures by the time it was first presented to the Reichstag in 1898. While it found little support in Germany’s parliament, it continued circulating and by 1914 had received signatures from over 3,000 doctors, 750 university professors, and thousands of others. The signatures included such influential figures and prominent Germans of the time such as the scientist Albert Einstein, the writers Herman Hesse and Thomas Mann, poet Rainer Maria Rilfe, famous philosopher Martin Buber, the sexologist Kraft-Ebbing, and several prominent figures of the Social Democratic Party (SDP). Though the petition was unsuccessful in overturning the law, it conveyed the magnitude of the rising gay rights movement in Berlin at the time. 

In 1919, with financial assistance from the government and aid from the Foundation for Scientific Sexual Research, Hirschfeld purchased a palatial mansion at the edge of Berlin’s Tiergarten. Working with a colleague, the psychiatrist Arthur Kronfeld, he established a cutting-edge facility for sexual science and medical assistance that by July had become fully operational. The Institute’s stated purpose was to be a place of “research, teaching, healing, and refuge.” In this building he would provide sex education, counseling, health clinics, advice on contraception, and research on gender and sexuality. 

As it had once belonged to a famous Berlin violinist, the villa was furnished in style. The institute was often regarded as an architectural gem, blurring the lines between professional and intimate living spaces. It was described as being “full of life everywhere” and as having a magisterial yet homely atmosphere. Christopher Isherwood, a famous gay British writer, had lunch at the institute and stated that, ““Their furniture was classic, pillared, garlanded, their marble massive, their curtains solemnly sculpted, their engravings grave.” Another visitor was surprised by the decor: “That–a scientific institute? No cold walls, no linoleum on the floors, no uncomfortable chairs and no smell of disinfectants. This is a private house: carpets, pictures on the wall, and nowhere a plate saying “No Entrance”. Seated next to the building was a house that Hirschfeld purchased in 1921 and remodeled so that it connected to the original site and served as the main entrance to the institute. Over the main entrance a sign stood with the inscription (In Latin) “Sacred to Love and Sorrow.”  The Institute for Sexology would gain widespread media attention for its groundbreaking research into sexuality and gender identity and as a provider of medical and psychological services. So much so that in 1928 lesbian poet Elsa Gidlow joined Hirschfeld for lunch at the Institute.
A costume party at the Institute for Sexology. Hirschfeld (right) can be seen holding hands with his partner Karl Giese, (center). 
The building was spacious and finely decorated, but it was also full of people going about their business. The institute was staffed by four physicians and their assistants and it became a pioneer in offering sex counseling services, including marriage counseling, psychiatric therapy, sex education programs, and VD testing and treatment. Over the years, Hirshfeld had developed a method of therapy designed to guide queer patients towards self-acceptance and happiness, so naturally many queer individuals visited the clinic. In the first year of operations alone, over 1,800 consultations were given. Additionally, the doctors saw patients suffering from various endocrine dysfunctions, and even offered assistance to drug addicts and alcoholics. In 1920 the clinic carried out its first tests with artificial insemination. The doctors frequently took on legal cases, collecting evidence that would be presented in court and offered lectures on a variety of subjects including, psychoanalysis, sexual pathology, forensic sexology, and the physiology of sexual differences. 

At the Institute for Sexual Science, Magnus Hirshfeld and his associates would perform the first gender-affirming surgeries, housing famous patients such as Dora Richter and Lili Elbe. In 1920, Arthur Kronfeld began the first ever sex-reassignment surgery. Afraid that their twenty-three-year-old patient might commit suicide if it was not done, they performed the first male-to-female sex-reassignment surgery. It was often regarded as a homely place, and five trans women who had difficulty supporting themselves with work after surgery were employed at the institute. 

Rooms in the main building were set aside for use by Hirschfeld and his assistant, collaborator, and longtime lover, Karl Giese. This included Hirschfeld’s large consulting room with a desk and three huge windows that overlooked the balcony. Beside it was a comfortable salon with a grand piano and a statue of Icarus. Space was also allocated for the headquarters of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee. 

Above all, the institute was dedicated to expanding knowledge about every aspect of sexuality - biological, sociological, ethnographic, and psychological. Rooms were set aside for laboratories used to carry out scientific research. Its halls would come to house an immense library and archive on sexuality and gender identity, gathered over many years and documenting protocols for male-to-female surgical transition as well as rare documents pertaining to the history of sexuality and gender identity. The institute’s library and archive housed some 20,000 volumes and over 30,000 photographs which attracted scientists from all over the world. For tourists, there was even a museum dedicated to the history and variety of sexuality. The Institute was widely respected and it was much more understood than it is today that the doctors speaking on the part of the patients had much more authority and experience behind their words.

Richard Oswald, an Austrian-Jewish director who had moved to Berlin shortly before the war broke out, started up his own film company in the city and quickly made a name for himself for covering morally or politically sensitive topics. At the beginning of 1919, he approached Hirschfeld with an idea for a film dealing with the topic of homosexuality. The Cinema Law was not yet on the agenda so Different from the Rest (Anders als die Andern) was filmed in the first months of the year and then released on May 24th, 1919. It premiered at the Apollo Theater, one of Berlin’s largest cinema houses. It starred Conrad Viedt, best known for his role as the Nazi officer Major Stasser in the 1942 Hollywood film Casablanca.  Viedt played the violinist, Pall Korner who falls in love with one of his music students, thereby exposing himself to blackmail and eventually committing suicide. The plot of the film offered Magnus Hirschfeld an opportunity to make an appearance in which he lectured the audience on the nature and unfortunate fate of “sexual intermediaries”. In case the audience had missed the message, the film ended with an image of Paragraph 175 being penciled out. It generated an enormous public debate on the topic. After being premiered in Berlin, it was distributed widely in Germany and abroad. After the passing of the 1920 Cinema Law, the review board banned the film from distribution in August - it could still be shown to scientists and other specialists, but was no longer available to the public. By this point it had become an enormous box-office hit and had achieved the critical goal of getting people to talk about the issue.
Magnus Hirschfeld (right) appearing as himself in the 1918 film Anders Als die Andern
Hirshfeld continued to be active in trying to use scientific research for legal reform. In September 1921, he organized a major sexological conference in Berlin. The First International Congress for Sex Reform on the Basis of Sexual Science brought together prominent doctors and academics from all around the world. The congress would be repeated in 1928 at Copenhagen at which Hirschfeld helped establish the World League for Sexual Reform (WLSR) and he would share a position on the executive board. The program advocated for the liberalization of marriage laws, free access to contraception, repeal of laws against homosexuality, and toleration of nonmarital sexual relationships. Worth noting is that the organization’s claim to be a world organization was quite exaggerated as there were very few members who did not herald from Germany or England.  By the early 1930s it held over 190,000 members who would lay the groundwork for international cooperation among activists interested in sexual issues.
Now, let’s discuss more of Magnus Hirshfeld’s theories and work involving sexuality and gender identity. Magnus Hirschfeld proposed the term “sexual intermediaries” to refer to nonconforming people. Included under this terminology were both “situational” and “constitutional” homosexuals, essentially recognizing the wide spectrum of sexuality. As previously mentioned, Hirshfeld coined the term transvestite in 1910. And in 1923 he coined the term “transsexual” in his work Die Intersexuelle Konstitution, or The Intersexual Constitution, however this terminology would not enter wider use until his American colleague Harry Benjamin’s use of it in his work The Transssexual Phenomenon, published in 1966 and the word “transsexual” then came to primarily indicate those who accessed medical transition: using hormones and/or surgery to change their physical appearance to match that of the gender they identified as, however, Hirshfeld had a different understanding of this terminology which was lost in translation. As Katie Sutton observes, “This term was understood in a Hirshfeldian sense as going beyond cross-dressing to encompass other aspects of gender identity that would today be understood under the banner of ‘transgender.’” Dr. Magnus Hirshfeld actually understood and intended for the terms  “transvestite” and “transsexual” to cover a broad range of trans identities including those who transitioned medically, socially, and people who changed their gender expression some but not all of the time. He believed trans people to be acting “in accordance with their nature,” rather than against it, and that people may be born with a nature contrary to their assigned gender. He believed that in cases where the desire to live as the opposite sex was strong, that science should provide a means of transition. One soldier Hirschfeld had been working with described wearing women’s clothing as the chance “to be a human being at least for a moment.” Although his understanding of trans identities is still outdated in terms of our understandings of these today, his definitions and terminology more closely resemble our understanding of transness today and it would take many decades for modern sexological work and understandings, such as the work of Harry Benjamin, to catch up to the concepts and terminology which Hirshfeld established in the early 1900s.  
Now, an important and rather controversial topic to cover involving Hirshfeld’s work is that eugenics was a recurring theme in Hirshfeld’s work in the 1920s. These days, eugenics is connected with the worst kinds of racism and cannot be discussed without thinking of Nazi style-breeding or forced sterilization. The prevalence of it within the homosexual emancipation movement could easily be read as laying the scientific and ethical groundwork for Nazi brutality. And it’s true that while still enlightened progressives by the standard of their age, Hirschfeld and his coworkers were still trapped with a eugenic and biological framework. As Paul Windling states, “eugenics did not necessarily point the way to Nazi racism” but it is still inherently “authoritarian in that it offered the state and profession unlimited power to eradicate disease and improve the health of future generations.” The idea that humanity could take charge of its evolution through an application of science and medicine was not entirely uncommon at the time. Hirshfeld’s interest in eugenics was very typical of middle-class doctors, sexologists, and participants in the broader sex reform movement. For their part, many sex reformers saw eugenics as intricately caught up in the reforms they hoped to make, largely advocating for free access to birth control, legalized abortion, widely available sex education, and sometimes, when necessary, sterilization. Hirschfeld was a firm believer in the power of modern scientific research and medical intervention to make life better, and eugenics seemed to make a lot of sense from this perspective. Unlike some sexologists, he did not see homosexuality as a sign of degeneracy and so eugenic methods were not needed to weed out this natural variation of biology. His brand of eugenics had very little in common with that practiced by the Nazis. He resisted the calls of some physicians for state-operated marriage bureaus that would investigate the moral, social, and family background of individuals before they were wed, which he thought to be too intrusive. As Larie Marhoefer writes, “Historians have concluded, rightly, that ideas about degeneration and support for eugenics within the homosexual emancipation movement did not pave the way for Nazi programs.” and that “sex reform and social medicine underwent a definitive and irrevocable break in 1933”, evidenced by the destruction of everything Hirschfeld worked for after the Nazi takeover. So, while eugenics was a recurring theme in Hirschfeld’s work in the 1920s, it did not lay the groundwork for the Nazi’s brand of eugenics and the inhumane programs they created during the span of their regime. While still an aspect of his work worthy of criticism, due to its authoritarian nature, it’s important to acknowledge that his brand of eugenics is not highly linked to the popular understanding of it today that has been so ingrained with the mark of Nazism on history and the use of this field of study to carry out racist and inhumane programs. 

A dark shadow was on the horizon of Hirshfeld’s life and work as the Nazi Party began to gain popularity and power. We’ll discuss the Nazi rise to power, suppression, and persecution of queer people in more detail in a future video, this section of the video will merely focus on the way in which this affected Hirschfeld’s life and work. On May 6, 1933 the Nazis seized and ransacked Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science. Hitler youth, students, and soldiers participated in the destruction and, in the first and largest of Nazi book burnings, they burned the institute’s library and later its archive of over 20,000 books, several of which were rare documents which helped provide a historiography of sexuality and of gender non-conforming people. This event would be recorded and photographed, being exhibited as one of the oppressive events of the Nazi regime, and the infamous photo of this event is frequently included in history books, though it has often been decontextualized and it is not acknowledged that these photos exhibit an institute that is often regarded as the world’s first trans clinic and that was monumental in advancing scientific research and public understanding of sexuality and gender identity.
The Nazi burning of the Institute for Sexology’s over 20,000 documents on sexuality and gender identity. May 10, 1933. 
After the attack on the Institute, the Nazis continued their persecution of queerness by expanding and enforcing legislation that criminalized homosexuality. Fortunately, Magnus Hirschfeld had been away on an international speaking tour at the time of the attack. Karl Giese, Hirschfeld’s partner, joined Hirschfeld and his protege, Li Shiu Tong, in Paris. Hirshfeld continued his life’s work and they had hopes of rebuilding the institute, but these were never successful as Magnus Hirschfeld died of a sudden stroke in 1935, just weeks before Paragraph 175 was redrafted to prohibit all forms of perceived homosexual contact in Germany.
Despite the destruction of much of Dr. Magnus Hirshfeld’s life’s work in the raid on the Institute and subsequent Nazi book burning, Hirshfeld has still left a monumental impression on the history of understandings of sexuality and gender identity and the lives of queer individuals. His work would provide the basis for modern understandings of sexuality and gender identity, and although these understandings would take many decades to match and then surpass Hirshfeld’s understandings of these, his work still provided the first steps in the foundation of our understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality today.

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