Beyond Binaries: Magnus Hirschfeld's Doctrine of Sexual Intermediaries
Taking a closer look at one of the famous sexologist's most famous concepts
I spoke with social scientist and queer Berlin tour guide Jeff Mannes earlier this week, planning for an interview for my research project, and while discussing his work, we both emphasized the importance in both of our work of making this historical knowledge accessible to the general public. We talked about how we can pull lessons from this queer history, and they told me that during their tours they often highlight Magnus Hirschfeld’s doctrine of sexual intermediaries –– something that’s stood out to me during my own research.
As the name implies, the doctrine emphasized the “intermediaries”: those who stood between male and female. Gender at the time was wrapped up in conceptions of sex and sexuality (into one term, Geschlecht), so it’s difficult to phrase this in modern identity categories, but Hirschfeld believed that every person laid somewhere on a spectrum between “100% man” and “100% woman”, each person containing different ratios of both.
Ralf Dose emphasizes that this was not a theory but rather a classification system; the root idea was that all human characteristics –– from physical to psychological, including sex drive as well as traits like organs, chromosomes, social presentation –– were either masculine or feminine, and each person had a different ratio of each (as described on pages 68-69 of Magnus Hirschfeld).
Hirschfeld saw different stages of Geschlecht, including labeling homosexuality a “third sex” and recognizing both hermaphrodites (who we might today call intersex, as this term is outdated) and transvestites (who we might today call transgender or trans*) as natural and normal. He believed, though, that there existed infinite variations of human between man/woman.
In fact, Hirschfeld took and displayed photographs of people who he believed to be “sexual intermediaries” –– Rainer Herrn, Annette Timm, Alex Bakker, and Michael Thomas Taylor discuss these visual narratives in Others of My Kind.
Today, we know even more about the non-binary nature of gender, sex, and sexuality –– even the categories that Hirschfeld considered the ends of the spectrum are not the only options. Labels like “male” and “female” do not capture the infinite possibilities of sex, and we know that “man” and “woman” are not our only options for gender anymore.
I would also challenge the root binary (masculine/feminine) in Hirschfeld’s doctrine; many of the characteristics that could fit into this binary are today actually beyond that form of characterization. How would Hirschfeld classify XXY chromosomes or other intersex traits? Does this characterization have room for asexualities? Where did Hirschfeld draw the line for external sex characteristics –– what is considered a penis versus a vulva at birth to classify a baby as female or male, for example, a dynamic satirized by the Intersex Society of North America in the below “Phall-O-Meter”?
As I’ve shared before, Hirschfeld did believe in eugenics and benefited heavily from colonialism in his work. He was also, at times, racist, and believed that only a doctor could determine whether a person was a transvestite. It is vital that we remember this context for his work and not erase this part of him and his beliefs.
But it is helpful to recognize this doctrine for a number of reasons. Jeff shared that he tells groups about this idea specifically to show that people have thought about gender as a spectrum for more than a century. I want to share this history with LGBTQ+ young people in the U.S. and Germany to show that queer people and theories have existed for far longer than we have, hopefully sharing a bit of hope knowing that people have felt this way for over a hundred years.
And finally, during a time when people try to argue (in the U.S. and globally) that transness or queerness is a “fad” or a “trend”, this doctrine is a helpful reminder that we have always been here.
Further reading:
Berlin Guide (Jeff Mannes’ website)
The Magnus Hirschfeld Stiftung’s biography
Institute for Sexual Science (1919-1933) Online Exhibition by the Magnus-Hirschfeld Society
Others of My Kind: Transatlantic Transgender Histories
Magnus Hirschfeld. The Origins of the Gay Liberation Movement
"History isn't something you look back at and say it was inevitable, it happens because people make decisions that are sometimes very impulsive and of the moment, but those moments are cumulative realities." - Marsha P. Johnson