It’s Pride Month, and let’s talk about some good news. The twenties are proving to be a time full of progress. Tolerance! LGBT rights! Sexual and gender fluidity! Transgender liberation!
Some might say this is wokeness run amok, but to be clear? I’m talking about the 1920s.
In Germany.
Today’s Moment of Science… Das Institut für Sexualwissenschaft
It’s a bit tricky to throw a dart at history and find a wrinkle when things were just effing peachy for us gays and Jews. Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, a gay German Jew born in 1868, was under no illusions about LGBT activism in the era.
Hirschfeld completed his medical degree in 1892. After graduating, he took some time off to travel and headed to Chicago for eight months. He noticed the gay subculture in Chicago was oddly similar to that in Berlin and wondered if there was a universality to this. In a subsequent research trip that I’m sure in no way doubled as a round-the-world tour-de-ass, he traveled to Brazil, Morocco, and Japan to write about gay subcultures.
When he got back to Germany, he established a private clinic in Magdeburg that would relocate to Berlin by 1896. What drew Hirschfeld into LGBT activism was watching the suffering his patients endured. One patient’s suicide in particular stuck with the doctor, the young man’s final note saying “The thought that you (Hirschfeld) could contribute a future when the German fatherland will think of us in more just terms sweetens the hour of my death.”
Hirschfeld started dabbling in some good trouble here and there. He founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee in 1898 with aims of overturning Germany’s Paragraph 175 (which outlawed homosexual acts between males). Though their effort gained over 6,000 signatures of support, including that of Albert Einstein, the proposed legislation died at the Reichstag.
After WWI, things relaxed a bit under the Weimar Republic government. Not ‘legalize gay stuff’ relaxed, but enough that they weren’t enforcing Paragraph 175. Hirschfeld purchased a building not that far from the Reichstag to open the The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, or Institute for Sexual Science.
They offered medical and psychological services. They had marriage and sex counseling. They offered birth control. They figured out pretty quickly that you couldn’t ‘fix’ someone’s sexual orientation and so they started trying to help people accept and learn about their sexuality. They accepted the concept of a ‘third sex,’ or not conforming to a gender binary. They performed some of the first gender reassignment surgeries (more commonly referred to now as gender confirmation surgery). Hirschfeld even worked on getting local police to stop harassing and arresting trans people for the fucking crime of existing while trans.
Which is even more mind blowing when you consider they barely had a word for being trans at the time.
The term ‘transvestite’ was still used both for anyone who appeared to be cross-dressing or for someone who was transgender. So Hirschfeld worked with the police to make a ‘transvestite pass,’ more or less a trans ID card to identify someone as trans and keep them safe from the cops getting on their case. He would examine someone and do a thorough interview about their life. In a report to the police for their pass application, Hirschfeld would explain that their clothing preference reflected their inner self, and being forced to wear gender-conforming clothes would be harmful. He even convinced the local judiciary to allow name changes from gender-specific to more gender-neutral names.
This all happened about a hundred years ago and the fascists are still screaming ‘what about the kids’ or some shit, so.
In 1932, when Franz von Papen- a goddamn Nazi- assumed the chancellorship, he was like “the cops stopped harassing the gays for a few years? Yeah start doing that again.” The following year when President Fuckface von Hindenburg appointed Hitler to the chancellorship, it was only a matter of time.
Four months later, the institute was attacked, both by a student Nazi organization and then by the real deal. Staff was beaten, the property was damaged, and Hirschfeld’s entire extensive library was removed and burned. The institute was closed.
Magnus Hirschfeld was long gone from Germany by that time on a speaking tour, and he would never return. He moved to France with his two boyfriends, Li Shiu Tong and Karl Giese, and lived out the rest of his days in exile. He died of a heart attack in 1935
Paragraph 175 was only repealed in 1994.
This has been your Moment of Science, suggesting that the moral arc of the universe is bent enough to not be considered straight.
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