The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [34]
The fight waged by Hirschfeld and his allies produced greater tolerance for homosexuality and gender variance during the period of liberalism in Germany between the wars, but it also nourished a violent countermovement that viewed the liberal approach as morally bankrupt. The Nazis, like most social conservatives, insisted on firm boundaries between the sexes and compulsory heterosexuality Hirschfeld’s theory of sexual intermediaries and his advocacy of gay and gender-variant individuals were perceived as an assault on the natural order and a violation (akin to rape) of German society. For that reason, all memory of his work was erased. Sexology as Hirschfeld conceived it—as a science that would liberate rather than imprison desire and identity—had been dealt a blow from which it would take decades to recover. Hirschfeld himself died in exile in France in 1935.
Psychological explanations for homosexuality and gender variance prevailed after the Second World War and the Nazi persecution of homosexuals, when Hirschfeld’s view that homosexuality and gender variance were biologically based “became very suspect,” neuroscien-tist Simon LeVay told me in a 2001 interview. “The German academic community became totally absorbed in socialization theory. They rejected all biological explanations for human diversity. And the idea came about that Hirschfeld was somehow responsible for the Nazi persecution of gay people, that by portraying gay people as a natural kind, as being born that way, he put them in the same category as racial groups and opened the door to the idea of exterminating them. I’ve even read stuff saying that he actually collaborated in efforts to have gay people arrested. I don’t think that any of that is true. But somehow the most positive thing you can read about him in the postwar German literature is that, yeah, he was trying to do something for gay people, but he did it in a very misguided way. And that he was wrong.”
Among scientists, Magnus Hirschfeld’s belief that homosexuality, cross-dressing, and all other forms of gender variance were “widespread and important phenomena” and “natural” variations, not perversions or pathologies, was largely abandoned. The postwar era was notable not only for its fertility, but also for its rigid reinforcement of sex roles. The theory of sexual intermediaries didn’t resonate in an era devoted to reinforcing the distinctions between the sexes. Masculinity and femininity were no longer viewed as liquid entities, capable of being combined in varying proportions; instead they were once again solid and opaque. The middle ground between the sexes became as impenetrable a border as the wire-topped wall dividing the formerly liminal city of Berlin.
CONVERSATION WITH SUSAN STRYKER, PH.D.
Susan Stryker earned her Ph.D. in history at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1992 and held a postdoctoral research fellowship at Stanford University from 1998 to 2000. She has been executive director of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco since 1999 and is currently working on a documentary film about the transgender riot in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District in 1966, and on a memoir for Oxford University Press. In 1992, Stryker cofounded Transgender Nation, an activist group. We spoke at her office at the San Francisco GLBT Historical Society.
Q: Who was the first transsexual?”
That depends on what you mean by “transsexual.” In all cultures, throughout all periods of history, there have been people who fall outside of what we think of as normal, heterosexual masculine male manhood and feminine female womanhood. The binary is really a historical construct; physical bodies are much more diverse than that. Gender systems historically are much more complex than that. When we say, Who was the first transsexual? do