The Riddle of Gender

by Deborah Rudacille

  A “womanly woman,” Elbe wanted to become both a wife and a mother. “All that I desire is nothing less than the last fulfilment of a real woman; to be protected from life by the sterner being, the husband,” she wrote to a friend in August 1931. “You must sympathize with me in my desire for maternity, to have a child, for I want nothing more ardently than to demonstrate that Andreas has been completely obliterated in me—is dead. Through a child I should be able to convince myself in the most unequivocal manner that I have been a woman from the very beginning. Whether this wish can be fulfilled or not, the fact that I can openly acknowledge this desire from the fullness of a pure woman’s heart is an infinite happiness for me. The fact that I may experience this happiness justifies everything that has happened to me here in Dresden.”

  However, medical science then (as now) had no means of fulfilling Elbe’s wish to be a mother, though her physician apparently tried to do what he could. Elbe underwent a final surgery, most likely a vagino-plasty (surgical creation of a vagina). She speaks of “effecting a natural outlet from the womb” in her letters. This final surgery was “an abyss of suffering,” Elbe writes. She was confined to bed for months afterward, without the recovery that had accompanied her previous surgeries. By early September, she intuited that she was dying. In a letter to her sister, she wrote, “Now I know that death is near.” Lili Elbe died in Dresden on September 12, 1931, of an apparent heart attack. “Paralysis of the heart put an end to her short young woman’s life which was so excruciating and yet so wonderful,” writes Hoyer. She was buried in a cemetery on the grounds of the hospital. A medical pioneer, whose transformation was covered in the Danish and German press in 1931, Lili Elbe was largely forgotten as war swept over the continent.

  Magnus Hirschfeld suffered a similar fate. As a homosexual, a Jew, and a spokesman for progressive causes, he found his position becoming increasingly difficult in Germany as fascist ideology claimed more adherents. His lectures were disrupted by hecklers, and stink bombs were thrown at the audience by agitators during some of his talks. He was threatened with bodily harm if he continued to give public lectures, but he ignored the threats and continued to speak. As early as 1920, he was assaulted and injured so severely after leaving a lecture that his death was reported in a number of newspapers, both in Germany and abroad. After it was revealed that he was not dead, merely injured, an editorial writer at a Dresden newspaper wrote: “Weeds never die. The well-known Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld has been hurt enough to be put on the death list. We hear now that he is in fact recovering from his wounds. We have no hesitation in saying that we regret that this shameless and horrible poisoner of our people has not found his well-deserved end.” On October 31,1928, the official paper of the Nazi party featured a headline denouncing “Homosexuals as Speakers in Boys’ Schools. Magnus Hirschfeld, the fighter for the abolition of Paragraph 175, is allowed to speak in German high schools. The Destruction of Youth! German Mothers, Women Workers! Do You Want to Hand Your Children Over to Homosexuals?” Der Stürmer, another anti-Semitic paper, called Hirschfeld “an apostle of lewdness.” Hirschfeld prudently decamped from Germany late in 1930, mere months after meeting Einar Wegener, to embark on an around-the-world lecture tour.

  On May 3, 1933, a few months after Hitler assumed power in Germany, the Institute for Sexual Science, in Berlin, was vandalized and looted by a mob of Nazi “students.” Three days later, the institute’s archives—thousands of books, photographs, questionnaires, and other memorabilia accumulated by Hirschfeld during thirty years of research—were publicly burned in Berlin’s Opera Square. Photographs of the book burning show the mob marching to the square with a bust of Hirschfeld held high. The bust was rescued from the flames by a friend, who sent it to Hirschfeld, then living in Paris, where he witnessed the destruction of his institute on a newsreel in a movie theater. Friends had managed to salvage a few mementos from the wreckage, but the Institute for Sexual Science was essentially obliterated. Some have argued that the institute’s files contained sensitive personal information about members of the Nazi leadership, and while that might well have been true, it is also indisputable that the liberal acceptance of homosexuality and gender variance was anathema to social conservatives. The Institute for Sexual Science was an icon of Weimar culture— and a symbol of all that the National Socialists and their silent allies in the German population found weak and decadent in that culture.

  The fight waged by Hirschfeld and his allies produced greater tolerance for homosexuality and gender variance during the period of liberalism in Germany between the wars, but it also nourished a violent countermovement that viewed the liberal approach as morally bankrupt. The Nazis, like most social conservatives, insisted on firm boundaries between the sexes and compulsory heterosexuality Hirschfeld’s theory of sexual intermediaries and his advocacy of gay and gender-variant individuals were perceived as an assault on the natural order and a violation (akin to rape) of German society. For that reason, all memory of his work was erased. Sexology as Hirschfeld conceived it—as a science that would liberate rather than imprison desire and identity—had been dealt a blow from which it would take decades to recover. Hirschfeld himself died in exile in France in 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.

  Susan Stryker earned her Ph.D. in history at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1992 and held a postdoctoral research fellowship at Stanford University from 1998 to 2000. She has been executive director of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco since 1999 and is currently working on a documentary film about the transgender riot in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District in 1966, and on a memoir for Oxford University Press. In 1992, Stryker cofounded Transgender Nation, an activist group. We spoke at her office at the San Francisco GLBT Historical Society.

  Q: Who was the first transsexual?”

  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.

  Q: It seems significant that these people transitioned in Germany. The research and treatment at the Hirschfeld Institute were so significant, both scientifically and socially, and yet most people, even many transgendered people, have never heard of him or the institute. Why not?

  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.”

  Q: His unwillingness to pathologize sexual intermediaries was at odds with most of the other sexologists of the time, wasn’t it?

  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.

  Q: The history of interactions between transgendered people and the medical community is a very complex one, isn’t it? In one sense, it was very consumer-driven, with transsexuals seeking out physicians and requesting that they provide certain services like hormone treatments and surgery. It seems that early on, the relationship was much friendlier between clients and service provider than it is today, though. Why do you think that is the case?

  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 well, in publicizing the fact that certain options are available. At least in modern Western European culture, there are many people who feel like “my body isn’t shaped right” and it’s not an aesthetic question, really, so much as a question about how we internalize ideas about gender, historically and culturally. To develop a gender identity and feel like my body does not communicate my sense of self to my audience—and then to know that there are techniques for body manipulation that are available because I’ve read about them.

  Even before Jorgensen, people who were looking for help would turn to science and medicine and say, “Look, I know you can do this, I’m reading about Eugen Steinach in Vienna, and he’s doing these gonad transplant things and these hormone injection things; sign me up.” And then they were perceived as crazy because they wanted to do that. So there’s been an awareness on the part of people seeking services that some techniques were available, and they could see an application of that technique to their situation, and then they would have to persuade a service provider that it was a legitimate thing to do.

  So there was always that tension, and there have been some service providers like Hirschfeld and Harry Benjamin who have been like, “Oh, okay, there’s no reason we shouldn’t do that.” They get it, at some level, for whatever reason. And then there were many other people who were like, “No, get out of here.”

  Even with Jorgensen—though she certainly spoke well of her surgeons—there was more tension behind the scenes. She didn’t know of any other way to get what she wanted. There really wasn’t any other way at that point. So she volunteered to be an experiment. And her en-docrinologist decided, “Yes, this is a rare thing, and this person is more female than male. This is the most advanced case of intersex we have ever seen—the most truly feminine balanced with the most obvious male.” They wrote among themselves, evaluating. “Is this an effeminate homosexual? Is this a transvestite?” They knew those categories, but the prevailing belief at the time was there could be glandular imbalances, that she might have some female germ cells, and so the surgery was justified. It wasn’t really that long ago either: this was in the fifties, in the lifetime of people who are alive and well and running marathons today. And when you look back and read the medical discourses around it, the belief in what endocrinology meant and how the gender system worked, it’s so clear how ideologically constructed the rel
ationship between gender and the body is.

  That’s not to say that there aren’t real physical differences between bodies, but we have this cultural belief about the relationship between someone’s sense of self and how they interact with other human subjects, and how that relates to their physical embodiment, and we materialize gender through the body in accordance with certain cultural assumptions. That’s part of the radicalness about transgender politics in the later part of the twentieth century—that it just flies in the face of that construction. Part of why we (as transpeople) are so marginalized is that we offer this very radical critique of a very pervasive set of assumptions about gender.

  Q: But isn’t that critique somewhat paradoxical in that transsexuals do essentially gender by saying that I need a certain kind of body in order to fully express my gender?

  Admittedly my position is a minority position, but I see that whole “transsexuals are essentializing gender because they are so concerned with the body” as an artifact of Cartesian dualism, the mind/body split. You don’t ever not have a body; your body is that through which you interact with other people. There is a language of the body. There is an appearance of the body. We’re never disembodied people. My own sense of what I did is that I had this sense of self, whatever story you want tell about how that came about. There was that sense for me that it was more appropriate for me to answer to the pronoun “she” than “he”—it goes way back—and there was a perception growing up that “I’m in a situation that I can’t control, and that I can’t get out of,” and there was affect around that. I was really sad about it. I would try to put it aside and go about my business in life, but it proved to be really intractable and unshakable, and when at some point I figured, “Oh, I can do these things,” it was like a paradigm shift in my own head.