Hirschfeld’s theories and the work of his fellow endocrinologists and sexologists fascinated not only fellow physicians but also the general public. “Early in the twentieth century, endocrinology was the shit!” says historian Susan Stryker. “It explained everything. It had this radical view of the body: ‘no one is fully man, no one is fully woman.’ We’re all a mixture of different things, and certain tendencies predominate and that’s why homosexuality can be caused by a glandular imbalance. That whole model that people exist on a continuum was Hirschfeld’s idea. Among the educated, that was more the model for how things were, part of the destabilizing thrust of modernism—that endocrinological view of gender difference,” says Stryker.
In many ways, we are the heirs of that “destabilizing” world view that Hirschfeld and his colleagues sought to anchor in biology. While reading Hirschfeld, I realized with a shock that I would probably qualify as a low-grade intermediary under the Hirschfeld nosology (system of classification). Although I do not have a beard or a male body shape, nor do I desire to be a man, I do exhibit a mix of the natural psychological attributes of absolute “maleness” and “femaleness” identified by Hirschfeld. “Capable, active, enterprising, wandering,” in general, men are “active, aggressive, searching,” says Hirschfeld, and tend to lack the “grace, gentleness, charm and submissiveness of the woman.” “Womanly” women, by contrast, are “receptive, impressionable, sensitive, emotional and more direct than the man while less concerned with the strongly abstract, the racking of one’s brains, or even the purely creative and active side of the human psyche.” Reading this description, I thought back to my research trip to California at the start of this project, in which I drove alone from hilly San Francisco to the fertile midsection of the state to the desert outside Palm Springs and then back up the coast, to San Diego and Los Angeles via San Juan Capistrano. Along the way I interviewed sources whom I had met over the Internet and through my local contacts. The trip required both “masculine” independence and initiative to get me on the road and keep me there, but also “feminine” receptivity and sensitivity as I asked questions, listened, and empathized with the life stories of my sources. If I had been purely “masculine” or purely “feminine,” in the traditional sense, I could not have carried out this work successfully. I should add that I thoroughly enjoyed both aspects of the trip, although, when I returned home, I discovered that my sixteen-year-old daughter had wrecked my new car in my absence! My response to this debacle was both “masculine” and “feminine”—the empathizing female self was exclusively concerned with my daughter’s well-being (thankfully she was fine), while the analytical male self grimly calculated the inconvenience and the expense. Like most “mixed” beings these days, I don’t perceive these aspects of my personality as at war with each other, however, nor do I consider myself transgendered. The definition of “femininity” has, over the past hundred years, expanded to include many qualities once coded “masculine,” and vice versa.
My research trip and my freedom to define myself as a woman in any way I choose are in many ways the consequence of a social revolution that began around the time Hirschfeld was initiating his research, when a “New Woman” appeared to challenge prevailing beliefs about the essential nature of the sexes. “The nineteenth century had cherished a belief in the separate spheres of femininity and masculinity that amounted almost to a religious faith,” comments the distinguished literary scholar Elaine Showalter in Sexual Anarchy, a study of the fin de siecle and that era’s revolutionary retooling of sex. This faith was founded, Professor Showalter and other scholars point out, on the icon of the “womanly woman,” the flower of femininity. The womanly woman was first and foremost a mother and a wife. She was gentle and soft and self-sacrificing. Her natural place was the home, which she sought to make a place of comfort and beauty. “Often compared to a flower, a kitten, or a child, she was modest and pure-minded, unselfish and meek. She knew her place well; naturally fitted to the common round of household duties, she could make a home of a hovel by ministering to the needs of her husband, either as uncomplaining drudge or angel on the hearth. Nothing in herself, the littlest and least of all creation, she achieved greatness not in her own right but in her relat-edness as daughter and wife,” writes historian Patricia Marks. “The ‘womanly woman’ was one of the nineteenth century’s most memorable myths.”
The New Woman, who appeared as if by magic on two continents, Europe and North America, late in the nineteenth century, was an iconoclastic figure who blasphemed this gospel of femininity. She rejected the cult of maternity and self-sacrifice conceived as elements of the essential nature of womanhood. She argued for self-determination and self-fulfillment. She was not exactly a feminist, as her primary goal was not to gain legal or political rights. The defining characteristic trait of the New Woman was her desire to live life on her own terms and her refusal to be defined solely as daughter, wife, or mother. With her masculine thirst for education and work, lack of interest in marriage and motherhood, and demands to be taken seriously as a human being, the New Woman raised disturbing questions about the essential natures of men and women.
In the 1880s, women in England and France were finally granted the right to divorce unfaithful spouses and own property in their own right. Women’s colleges were founded in the United States and England, and in France secular secondary public-school and university education was opened to both sexes. Demographic changes also sent large numbers of women into the workforce, with or without an education. When the 1891 British census revealed that there were approximately nine hundred thousand more females than males in the total population, there was a great deal of public hand-wringing about the eventual fate of such “surplus” women, who might never marry or have children. Instead, they became the first generation of Western women to move to urban areas alone to work as shopgirls, teachers, journalists, and secretaries.
These New Women rejected sexual apartheid in word and deed; the visible emblem of their revolt was their mode of dress. Throwing off corsets, bustles, and back-buttoned bodices, the New Woman advocated “rational dress,” suitable for work, shopping, and exercise. Her divided skirts permitted free movement but were attacked by conservatives as an attempt to usurp the powers and privileges of men. Trousers or “bifurcated garments” defined masculinity, in the same way that restrictive corsets and crinolines defined femininity, and conservatives were determined to enforce not only the inner dichotomy between the sexes but also their external manifestation. The New Woman was in fact a “cross-dresser” of sorts, and she was both mocked and slandered for daring to wear masculine garments. An article in the British medical journal The Lancet declared the wearing of trousers “detrimental to the health and morals” of women. New Women were accused at various times, by various commentators, of being sexually promiscuous, sexually neutered, or lesbians—accusations that were to reappear in the middle of the twentieth century, when second-wave feminists once again began challenging social norms of femininity.
The New Woman of the fin de siecle was often coupled in print with a similarly transgressive male figure—the dandy, or aesthete, epitomized by Oscar Wilde and other decadent artists and writers. Languorous men devoted to the “poetry of appearance,” with an intense interest in fashion and interior decoration, dandies were not a new phenomenon, but in the context of late-nineteenth-century industrialization, they were newly disturbing. Wilde was gay, but many other dandies were heterosexual men, the forefathers of today’s “metrosex-ual.” With their attention to style and their embrace of elegance, extravagance, and artificiality, they expressed values coded “feminine” in the nineteenth century. In rejecting a focused professional life for an aesthetic dilettantism, the dandy expressed values once labeled aristocratic—but in the muscular new world of capitalist commerce, such languour appeared unacceptably feminine. The foppish masculinity of the dandies and decadents and their refusal to be “men,” as that term was commonly understood, were just as
much a threat to the established order as the steely femininity of the New Woman. This challenge to conventional sex roles went deeper than mere fashion, as conservatives understood very well. Fin de siecle sexual anarchy was the first modern Western assault on patriarchy, and its scouts were New Women, dandies, and “an avant-garde of male artists, sexual radicals and intellectuals who challenged its class structures and roles, its system of inheritance and primogeniture, its compulsory heterosexu-ality and marriage and its cultural authority,” says Showalter.
Hirschfeld himself seems to inhabit a kind of borderline between traditional and modern views of masculinity and femininity. Asserting that “absolute” men or women who adhered perfectly in all respects to the traditional attributes of their sex as commonly defined were only “abstractions, invented extremes,” Hirschfeld nonetheless appears to have shared the traditional view that women were by nature less suited to intellectual work than men, for example. Although he formed political alliances with feminists, he was far from being a feminist himself, as we would define the term today. Masculinity and femininity appear in Hirschfeld’s theory of intermediaries as something akin to Platonic ideals, rather than social roles; the masculine and feminine ideals and their varying expression are, in his view, firmly anchored in biology. “In each person there is a different mixture of manly and womanly substances, and as we cannot find two leaves alike on a tree, then it is highly unlikely that we will find two humans whose manly and womanly characteristics exactly match in kind and number,” Hirschfeld writes.
This organic theory of gender variance led naturally for Hirschfeld to an acceptance of human sexual diversity, including a new tolerance for homosexuality, which was viewed then (as it still is in some quarters today) as the most extreme example of sexual “inversion.” “In a radical departure from earlier medical practices, Hirschfeld developed a psychotherapeutic procedure that emphasized the client’s ability to accept his own homosexuality, rather than to change it,” writes neuro-scientist and author Simon LeVay, who analyzed Hirschfeld’s research in his book Queer Science. Hirschfeld and his colleagues at the institute focused on helping their clients develop “strategies for surviving in a world that was still hostile to homosexuals,” writes LeVay. Hirschfeld’s approach to cross-dressers was equally progressive. He provided letters to the Berlin police, asking that his patients be allowed to dress in the clothes they felt most appropriate, for medical reasons. In many cases, the request was granted.
And in 1920, Hirschfeld began referring patients for sex-reassignment surgery. Though a few surgeons had already carried out some incomplete sex-reassignment surgeries in Berlin and in the United Kingdom—removing the sexual organs of their patients without attempting to create new genitalia—the first complete surgeries, encompassing not only the removal of the male sex organs but the creation of a vagina and labia, were carried out by Hirschfeld’s colleagues at the institute, Ludwig Levy-Lenz and Felix Abraham. Abraham published an article reporting the surgeries (with before-and-after photographs) in the journal Zeitschrift fur Sexualwissenschaft in 1931. One of the first to undergo the surgery was a longtime housekeeper at the institute, Dorchen (formerly Rudolf) Richter.
Even people who thought themselves sophisticated and open-minded sometimes found Hirschfeld’s approach to “sexual intermediaries” disturbingly liberal. Christopher Isherwood, for example, provides an amusing and instructive account of his first encounter with the patients and staff at the Institute for Sexual Science. The young writer, who saw himself as a gay sexual adventurer, liberated from middle-class standards and sensibilities, found himself definitively “out-queered” by the institute’s staff and guests. “I remember the shock with which Christopher first realized that one of the apparently female guests was a man. He had pictured transvestites as loud, screaming, willfully unnatural creatures. This one seemed as quietly natural as an animal and his disguise was accepted by everyone else as a matter of course. Christopher had been telling himself that he had rejected respectability and that he now regarded it with amused contempt. But the Hirschfeld kind of respectability disturbed his latent puritanism.”
Another visitor to the Institute for Sexual Science also was disturbed by the sexual intermediaries she found there, though grateful for the support and healing she found within its walls. In the fictionalized biography Man into Woman, the author, Niels Hoyer, describes the torment that drove his friend “Andreas” (in real life the Danish painter Einar Wegener) to seek out Hirschfeld in Berlin in the spring of 1930. Wegener had been cross-dressing for years, and Lili, the female self, was growing stronger and more insistent in her demands for fulfillment. “Andreas” had visited doctor after doctor, searching fruitlessly for medical assistance, until he met the Dresden gynecologist who sent him to Hirschfeld. “Some of the doctors to whom he went thought him neurotic, some thought him homosexual; but he himself denied the truth of both these diagnoses,” writes the British sexologist Norman Haire in the introduction to Man into Woman. The Dresden gynecologist “Kreutz,” on the other hand,agreed that Andreas [Einar] was probably an intermediate sexual type, furnished, by some sport of nature, with both male and female gonads. He explained that there were probably rudimentary ovaries in Andreas’ abdomen, but that these were unable to develop properly because of the inhibiting influence of the testicles which Andreas also possessed. He proposed that Andreas should go to Berlin, where certain investigations were to be undertaken. If these investigations confirmed his suppositions he promised to remove Andreas’ male organs and transplant into him ovaries from a young woman, which would, as the work of the Steinach school had shown, activate the rudimentary ovaries lying dormant in Andreas’ abdomen.
Wegener traveled to Berlin to be diagnosed definitively by Hirschfeld. His first visit to the clinic was not auspicious. “ ‘Why have I been sent here?’ he wondered. ‘What do I have to do here?’ He felt intensely uncomfortable. In this large room a group of abnormal persons seemed to be holding a meeting—women who appeared to be dressed up as men, and men of whom one could scarcely believe that they were men. The manner in which they were conversing disgusted him; their movements, their voices, the way in which they were attired, produced a feeling of nausea.”
Wegener’s meeting with Hirschfeld (called “Hardenfeld” in the book) was even more disturbing. “By means of a thousand penetrating questions, this man explored the patient’s emotional life for hours. He had to submit to an inquisition of the most ruthless kind. The shame of shamelessness is something that actually exists, he thought, during those hours, and clung to this definition, which he had once found in some philosophical work, in an effort to banish the feeling he had of standing there as if in the pillory. His emotional life was undergoing an ordeal which resembled running the gantlet. And when this torture came at last to an end, the inquisitor dismissed him with the words: I shall expect you tomorrow morning at the same time.’”
With his status as a sexual intermediary validated by Hirschfeld, Wegener was castrated, his testicles removed—probably by Hirschfeld’s colleague Felix Abraham (called “Dr. Arns” in the book). “The first operation, which only represents a beginning, has been successful beyond all expectations. Andreas had ceased to exist, they said. His germ glands—oh, mystic words—have been removed. What has still to happen will take place in Dresden under the hands of Professor Kreutz. The doctors talked about hormones; I behaved as if I knew what they meant. Now I have looked up this word in the dictionary and find that it refers to the secretions of internal organs which are important for vital processes. But I am no wiser than I was before. Must one equip oneself then, with wisdom and knowledge in order to understand a miracle?”
The “miracle” of sex reassignment continued in Dresden a few months later, when “Kreutz” removed Wegener’s penis, opened his abdomen, and found the rudimentary ovaries that provided physical confirmation of the patient’s intermediary status. In keeping with Steinach’s theories, the doctor then implanted healthy ovari
an tissue from a young woman into Wegener, tissue that was rejected, requiring further surgery. Nonetheless, Lili Elbe had successfully ousted Einar Wegener, a coup for which she apparently felt both relief and guilt. “I feel like a bridge-builder. But it is a strange bridge that I am building,” Wegener (now Lili Elbe) writes. “I stand on one of the banks, which is the present day. There I have driven in the first pile. And I must build it clear across the other bank, which often I cannot see at all and sometimes only vaguely, and now and then in a dream. And then I often do not know whether the other bank is the past or the future. Frequently the question plagues me: Have I had only a past, or have I had no past at all? Or have I only a future without a past?” These were questions that would echo in the lives of later generations of transsexual people who crossed the bridge that Lili helped construct.
According to Hoyer, when Wegener’s surgeon in Dresden opened his patient’s abdomen he discovered “withered” ovaries. Einar/Lili was, in medical terms, a true hermaphrodite, possessing both testicular and ovarian tissue; this explained Wegener’s feminine mannerisms, slight build, and small breasts, and also the genital “underdevelop-ment” noted by Norman Haire in the introduction to Man into Woman. After recovering from surgery, Wegener was issued a new passport by Danish authorities, in the name of Lili Elbe. The king of Denmark declared the marriage between Wegener and his artist wife, Gerda, “null and void.” (The faithful Gerda, who had supported Wegener throughout the transformation, married a mutual friend shortly thereafter.) Another friend, called “Claude” in the book, who had known the secret of Einar/Lili for many years, then proposed marriage to Lili. She accepted, under the condition that he wait until she underwent one final surgery, one that would make her fully a woman in her own eyes.
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