The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [31]
Even people who thought themselves sophisticated and open-minded sometimes found Hirschfeld’s approach to “sexual intermediaries” disturbingly liberal. Christopher Isherwood, for example, provides an amusing and instructive account of his first encounter with the patients and staff at the Institute for Sexual Science. The young writer, who saw himself as a gay sexual adventurer, liberated from middle-class standards and sensibilities, found himself definitively “out-queered” by the institute’s staff and guests. “I remember the shock with which Christopher first realized that one of the apparently female guests was a man. He had pictured transvestites as loud, screaming, willfully unnatural creatures. This one seemed as quietly natural as an animal and his disguise was accepted by everyone else as a matter of course. Christopher had been telling himself that he had rejected respectability and that he now regarded it with amused contempt. But the Hirschfeld kind of respectability disturbed his latent puritanism.”
Another visitor to the Institute for Sexual Science also was disturbed by the sexual intermediaries she found there, though grateful for the support and healing she found within its walls. In the fictionalized biography Man into Woman, the author, Niels Hoyer, describes the torment that drove his friend “Andreas” (in real life the Danish painter Einar Wegener) to seek out Hirschfeld in Berlin in the spring of 1930. Wegener had been cross-dressing for years, and Lili, the female self, was growing stronger and more insistent in her demands for fulfillment. “Andreas” had visited doctor after doctor, searching fruitlessly for medical assistance, until he met the Dresden gynecologist who sent him to Hirschfeld. “Some of the doctors to whom he went thought him neurotic, some thought him homosexual; but he himself denied the truth of both these diagnoses,” writes the British sexologist Norman Haire in the introduction to Man into Woman. The Dresden gynecologist “Kreutz,” on the other hand,
agreed that Andreas [Einar] was probably an intermediate sexual type, furnished, by some sport of nature, with both male and female gonads. He explained that there were probably rudimentary ovaries in Andreas’ abdomen, but that these were unable to develop properly because of the inhibiting influence of the testicles which Andreas also possessed. He proposed that Andreas should go to Berlin, where certain investigations were to be undertaken. If these investigations confirmed his suppositions he promised to remove Andreas’ male organs and transplant into him ovaries from a young woman, which would, as the work of the Steinach school had shown, activate the rudimentary ovaries lying dormant in Andreas’ abdomen.
Wegener traveled to Berlin to be diagnosed definitively by Hirschfeld. His first visit to the clinic was not auspicious. “ ‘Why have I been sent here?’ he wondered. ‘What do I have to do here?’ He felt intensely uncomfortable. In this large room a group of abnormal persons seemed to be holding a meeting—women who appeared to be dressed up as men, and men of whom one could scarcely believe that they were men. The manner in which they were conversing disgusted him; their movements, their voices, the way in which they were attired, produced a feeling of nausea.”
Wegener’s meeting with Hirschfeld (called “Hardenfeld” in the book) was even more disturbing. “By means of a thousand penetrating questions, this man explored the patient’s emotional life for hours.