The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [30]
The New Woman of the fin de siecle was often coupled in print with a similarly transgressive male figure—the dandy, or aesthete, epitomized by Oscar Wilde and other decadent artists and writers. Languorous men devoted to the “poetry of appearance,” with an intense interest in fashion and interior decoration, dandies were not a new phenomenon, but in the context of late-nineteenth-century industrialization, they were newly disturbing. Wilde was gay, but many other dandies were heterosexual men, the forefathers of today’s “metrosex-ual.” With their attention to style and their embrace of elegance, extravagance, and artificiality, they expressed values coded “feminine” in the nineteenth century. In rejecting a focused professional life for an aesthetic dilettantism, the dandy expressed values once labeled aristocratic—but in the muscular new world of capitalist commerce, such languour appeared unacceptably feminine. The foppish masculinity of the dandies and decadents and their refusal to be “men,” as that term was commonly understood, were just as much a threat to the established order as the steely femininity of the New Woman. This challenge to conventional sex roles went deeper than mere fashion, as conservatives understood very well. Fin de siecle sexual anarchy was the first modern Western assault on patriarchy, and its scouts were New Women, dandies, and “an avant-garde of male artists, sexual radicals and intellectuals who challenged its class structures and roles, its system of inheritance and primogeniture, its compulsory heterosexu-ality and marriage and its cultural authority,” says Showalter.
Hirschfeld himself seems to inhabit a kind of borderline between traditional and modern views of masculinity and femininity. Asserting that “absolute” men or women who adhered perfectly in all respects to the traditional attributes of their sex as commonly defined were only “abstractions, invented extremes,” Hirschfeld nonetheless appears to have shared the traditional view that women were by nature less suited to intellectual work than men, for example. Although he formed political alliances with feminists, he was far from being a feminist himself, as we would define the term today. Masculinity and femininity appear in Hirschfeld’s theory of intermediaries as something akin to Platonic ideals, rather than social roles; the masculine and feminine ideals and their varying expression are, in his view, firmly anchored in biology. “In each person there is a different mixture of manly and womanly substances, and as we cannot find two leaves alike on a tree, then it is highly unlikely that we will find two humans whose manly and womanly characteristics exactly match in kind and number,” Hirschfeld writes.
This organic theory of gender variance led naturally for Hirschfeld to an acceptance of human sexual diversity, including a new tolerance for homosexuality, which was viewed then (as it still is in some quarters today) as the most extreme example of sexual “inversion.” “In a radical departure from earlier medical practices, Hirschfeld developed a psychotherapeutic procedure that emphasized the client’s ability to accept his own homosexuality, rather than to change it,” writes neuro-scientist and author Simon LeVay, who analyzed Hirschfeld’s research in his book Queer Science. Hirschfeld and his colleagues at the institute focused on helping their clients develop “strategies for surviving in a world that was still hostile to homosexuals,” writes LeVay. Hirschfeld’s approach to cross-dressers was equally progressive. He provided letters to the Berlin police, asking that his patients be allowed to dress in the clothes they felt most appropriate, for medical reasons. In many cases, the request was granted.
And in 1920, Hirschfeld began referring patients for sex-reassignment surgery. Though a few surgeons had already carried out some incomplete sex-reassignment surgeries in Berlin and in the United Kingdom