The Riddle of Gender

by Deborah Rudacille

  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 The Transsexual Phenomenon, the first book-length scientific treatment of transsexual-ity and sex reassignment, recalled that it was Kopp who introduced him to Hirschfeld. “A couple of times I was invited to accompany Hirschfeld and Kopp, who were good friends, on tours through a few gay bars in Berlin. The most famous was the Eldorado, where mainly transvestites gathered and female impersonators performed. Hirschfeld was well known there and referred to as ‘Tante Magnesia.’”

  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 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 g
reat 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 time, and then remains almost unchanged for their entire life.” Second, he found that far from exhibiting symptoms of general pathology or derangement, most of the transvestites he knew appeared to be socially and economically successful people, whose only deviation from the norm lay in their persistent and often compulsive desire to cross-dress. “The transvestites that we have come to know here are intelligent, conscientious people who have diverse interests and a broad education,” he writes in Die Transvestiten. “In school, almost all of them excelled in motivation, diligence, and especially in their ease of understanding (which many psychiatrists today of course look upon as a slight stigma of degeneration). At present, all of them find themselves in good financial standing and in good jobs in which they have been promoted because of their great energy and proficiency.”

  To understand the curious nature of that assertion, its generally positive and complimentary tone marred only by the reference to “degeneration,” one must know something about the context in which Hirschfeld was working. To the sexologists who came before him and even to his peers, all forms of sexual nonconformity, including homosexuality, were indications of disease. “The pre-sexological era of modern sex research was almost exclusively devoted to the study of people believed to be sick. The sexual manifestations of their sickness were carefully listed, and as a rule, described to degeneration,” wrote Erwin A. Haeberle, in The Birth of Sexology. The word “degeneracy” had a very specific meaning for Hirschfeld, his predecessors, and his contemporaries. Degeneracy implied weak or damaged genes, a hereditary defect that manifested in conditions as various as alcoholism, mental retardation, promiscuity, and sexual “disorders” such as homosexuality, transvestism, and fetishism. Today, the word “degeneracy” connotes a moral failing, but to Hirschfeld and his contemporaries it referred to an organic defect that should not be passed on to future generations. Like many physicians of the time, within Germany and without, Hirschfeld was a eugenicist, concerned not just with individual patients but also with the health of society as a whole. His belief in eugenics, and more specifically in biological explanations for human behavior, provided the impetus for his scientific investigations, his medical practice, and his social activism. Biology, in particular the new science of endocrinology, promised to explain everything for Hirschfeld and for his contemporaries, including the riddle of sexual intermediaries.

  Hirschfeld defined four types of sexual intermediaries. First came people born with ambiguous genitalia, neither classically male nor classically female—the clinically intersexual. Next, people with cross-gendered secondary sexual characteristics, “men with womanly mammary tissue (gynecomastia) and women without such; women with manly hair, such as manly beard or manly pubes.” Into this group Hirschfeld classed men and women whose body morphology deviated from the norm. These were the unfortunate men and women who were more often mocked, harassed, and/or stopped by police when they were actually wearing the clothes of their biological sex, rather than when they were cross-dressed. One woman mentioned by Hirschfeld was actually stopped by police more than a dozen times when dressed as a woman. Dressed as a man, she encountered no problems at all.

  Next came those “persons divergent with regard to their sex drive.” This category included not only homosexuals and bisexuals, but also masochistic men and those who preferred to adopt the “female” role in sex with women, and sadistic women and those who adopted the “male” role in sex with men. So, for example, men attracted to “energetic” women or to women “who are considerably more mature, intellectual and older than themselves” were believed by Hirschfeld to be expressing a kind of femininity that placed them in the same category as homosexuals. Similarly, “women betray their manly mixture in a preference for the womanly type of man, very dependent, very youthful, unusually gentle men, in general for such ones who in their traits of behavior and character correspond more to the feminine type.”

  The final category of sexual intermediary included “men whose feminine emotions and feelings are reflected in their manner of love, their direction of taste, their gestures and manners, their sensitivity, and many times their particular way of writing. Also men who more or less dress themselves as women or live totally as such; on the other side women of manly character, manly ways of dressing and thinking and writing, strong tendency towards manly passions, manly dress, naturally also such women w
ho more or less lead the life of men.” These were the people who would eventually be called “transsexual,” though there is some dispute about the origin of the term, which some attribute to Hirschfeld and others attribute to the physician David O. Cauldwell, whose perspective on these patients was considerably less positive.

  Using the new science of endocrinology to support his theory of intermediaries, Hirschfeld found the work of the Viennese pathologist Eugen Steinach—who transplanted testicles and ovaries into neutered animals of both sexes—especially significant. Noting that that the sexual behavior of the experimental animal was profoundly affected by the type of gonad that Steinach implanted, Hirschfeld concluded that in addition to germ cells (sperm or eggs), testicles and ovaries produced secretions that masculinized or feminized experimental animals irrespective of their birth sex. Extrapolating from the animal data, Hirschfeld concluded that the various forms of gender variance (including homosexuality) were the result of endocrine anomalies. The production of sex hormones in testicles and ovaries would soon be confirmed by endocrinologists, but the second half of Hirschfeld’s hypothesis—that homosexuality and other forms of gender variance were the result of endocrine anomalies—has been vigorously contested ever since.