The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [26]
“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