The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [35]
It’s really hard to say who the first person would be. When you start looking at transsexual history, it’s like somebody had a hysterectomy, but they did it because they didn’t like having a uterus because they thought of themselves psychologically as a man. Is that the first transsexual surgery? There was this person in New York in the early twentieth century named Earl Lenz who thought of himself/herself as a feminine soul trapped in a masculine body, and this person had their testicles removed, supposedly because they were having horrible problems with nocturnal emissions. And the doctors were like, “Oh, nocturnal emissions, bad news. Let’s remove those testicles.” Was that person a transsexual? He surgically modified his body so that his body more closely reflected his psychological sense of self. Was he a transsexual? I don’t know.
Certainly by the early 1920s in Germany, at the Hirschfeld institute there were people that we could call at least proto-transsexuals. They were people who did what modern-day transsexuals do, which is to say, “If I do this thing to my body, if I change my genitals this way so that they more resemble the genitals of people who have a different social status than me, and if I take these hormones and redistribute my body fat and body hair, and present evidence of these medical procedures to civil authorities of some kind, then I can change my social designation as being a man or a woman, and I can then live in accordance with general social expectations of what a man or a woman is supposed to be.” That was in place by the twenties or early thirties. The first well-documented case was in 1930 at the Hirschfeld institute. Felix Abraham, a young doctor at the Hirschfeld institute, published a paper on two transvestites who underwent genital surgery. That paper was written up in 1930 or ‘31. In the case of Lili Elbe, the book about her surgery was published in ‘33, though the events happened a couple of years earlier.
Q: It seems significant that these people transitioned in Germany. The research and treatment at the Hirschfeld Institute were so significant, both scientifically and socially, and yet most people, even many transgendered people, have never heard of him or the institute. Why not?
I think there are two reasons we haven’t given Hirschfeld his due. One is that so much of his work was destroyed by the Nazis, and, secondly, he was also sort of a promiscuous publisher. He didn’t care much about publishing in the most reputable journals. Then, too, some of his ideas about the endocrinological or somatic roots of sexual and gender diversity have really fallen out of favor—I think rightly so. However, even though he came out of a different conceptual or intellectual framework than is currently fashionable, or accurate—I mean I think he was wrong about a lot of things—I think his political approach to the topic was good. He did try to root cultural differences about sexuality and gender in the body and he did that as a way of attempting to naturalize these differences and say, “People can’t help it. There are many different kinds of people, there aren’t just two.” He recognized that there are a whole lot of sexual intermediaries, and that more or less everybody is a sexual intermediary.
Hirschfeld taught that these are natural variations and that law and social customs should be brought into accord in a rational way with this naturally existing diversity of human kinds. I think that his motivations were really noble, and he did tremendous political work on gay rights, transvestite rights, abortion rights. He was a very conscientious, well-meaning, thoughtful man. And he was a modernist, a sexual modernist, who was bringing up these taboo topics, and who recognized that these things that were supposed to be so illicit are just a part of human life.