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By Root 1982 0

of people believed to be sick. The sexual manifestations of their sickness were carefully listed, and as a rule, described to degeneration,” wrote Erwin A. Haeberle, in The Birth of Sexology. The word “degeneracy” had a very specific meaning for Hirschfeld, his predecessors, and his contemporaries. Degeneracy implied weak or damaged genes, a hereditary defect that manifested in conditions as various as alcoholism, mental retardation, promiscuity, and sexual “disorders” such as homosexuality, transvestism, and fetishism. Today, the word “degeneracy” connotes a moral failing, but to Hirschfeld and his contemporaries it referred to an organic defect that should not be passed on to future generations. Like many physicians of the time, within Germany and without, Hirschfeld was a eugenicist, concerned not just with individual patients but also with the health of society as a whole. His belief in eugenics, and more specifically in biological explanations for human behavior, provided the impetus for his scientific investigations, his medical practice, and his social activism. Biology, in particular the new science of endocrinology, promised to explain everything for Hirschfeld and for his contemporaries, including the riddle of sexual intermediaries.

Hirschfeld defined four types of sexual intermediaries. First came people born with ambiguous genitalia, neither classically male nor classically female—the clinically intersexual. Next, people with cross-gendered secondary sexual characteristics, “men with womanly mammary tissue (gynecomastia) and women without such; women with manly hair, such as manly beard or manly pubes.” Into this group Hirschfeld classed men and women whose body morphology deviated from the norm. These were the unfortunate men and women who were more often mocked, harassed, and/or stopped by police when they were actually wearing the clothes of their biological sex, rather than when they were cross-dressed. One woman mentioned by Hirschfeld was actually stopped by police more than a dozen times when dressed as a woman. Dressed as a man, she encountered no problems at all.

Next came those “persons divergent with regard to their sex drive.” This category included not only homosexuals and bisexuals, but also masochistic men and those who preferred to adopt the “female” role in sex with women, and sadistic women and those who adopted the “male” role in sex with men. So, for example, men attracted to “energetic” women or to women “who are considerably more mature, intellectual and older than themselves” were believed by Hirschfeld to be expressing a kind of femininity that placed them in the same category as homosexuals. Similarly, “women betray their manly mixture in a preference for the womanly type of man, very dependent, very youthful, unusually gentle men, in general for such ones who in their traits of behavior and character correspond more to the feminine type.”

The final category of sexual intermediary included “men whose feminine emotions and feelings are reflected in their manner of love, their direction of taste, their gestures and manners, their sensitivity, and many times their particular way of writing. Also men who more or less dress themselves as women or live totally as such; on the other side women of manly character, manly ways of dressing and thinking and writing, strong tendency towards manly passions, manly dress, naturally also such women who more or less lead the life of men.” These were the people who would eventually be called “transsexual,” though there is some dispute about the origin of the term, which some attribute to Hirschfeld and others attribute to the physician David O. Cauldwell, whose perspective on these patients was considerably less positive.

Using the new science of endocrinology to support his theory of intermediaries, Hirschfeld found the work of the Viennese pathologist Eugen Steinach—who transplanted testicles and ovaries into neutered animals of both sexes—especially significant. Noting that that the sexual behavior of the experimental animal was profoundly affected