The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [25]
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 great 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,