Eugen Steinach and the start of gender affirming care in Germany
Exploring the Goldilocks conditions that led to the availability of a range of somatic measures for transvestites at the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin.
Eugen Steinach is perhaps one of the lesser-known figures of early sexology and the homosexual movement in Germany; he lived in Austria at the start of the 20th century and worked as a physiologist, and beginning in the 1910s, he began publishing his research on gonads and their “secretions.” Though he didn’t work explicitly with activists in Germany, his work impacted transvestites and scientists for decades.
The early Weimar Republic promised no censorship, meaning that the growing homosexual subculture in Berlin could become even more visible through publications and films available to the public. There were one point between 25 and 30 different homosexual journals in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, according to Gay Berlin. That included not only lesbian journals and magazines but even one transvestite-specific publication.
But then Magnus Hirschfeld worked on a film titled Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others), which exhibited the impact of Paragraph 175, the anti-homosexuality law, on homosexuals. The film premiered in 1919 and was met with organized protests from conservative Catholic and Protestant groups and anti-Semitic groups alike, according to Gay Berlin. In response, the young republic added a stipulation to its 1919 constitution that films could be censored if they were deemed obscene or dangerous to youth.
The Steinach Film, alternatively known as Steinachs Forschung, was released to the public in 1923 and screened in sold-out theaters in Berlin beginning in 1923, according to Others of My Kind and Gay Berlin. Eugen Steinach’s research, which was showcased in the film, focused on sex organs and their impact on the body –– Steinach implanted ovaries into male guinea pigs and rats (and testes into female guinea pigs and rats) and observed behaviors and physical traits consistent with the opposite sex, confirming not only his theories that hormones impacted sex and gender but reaffirming Magnus Hirschfeld’s theory of a biological basis of sex, according to Gay Berlin.
These ideas, now made publicly accessible, drew many to want to seek medical or somatic interventions for their (then-called) transvestism, as Alex Bakker argues in Others of My Kind. Previously, the major solutions to the barriers for transvestites included what we might today deem a social transition, including clothing and style changes or a “transvestite pass” from Magnus Hirschfeld. Now, the Steinach Film seemed to imply not only a “cure” for homosexuality but the “therapeutic potential of sex hormones” for “those who hoped to change their biological sex,” according to Gay Berlin. In the early 1920s, for some transvestites, social transitions were no longer enough.
While the first hormone therapies and gender affirmation surgeries happened before the screening of the film, the influence of Steinach’s theories was clear: Robert Beachy argues in Gay Berlin that a man treated by psychotherapist Max Marcuse had heard of Steinach’s work and wanted castration or other surgery, but Marcuse provided instead an “ovarian preparation,” which might have been an early form of hormone therapy.
The Institute of Sexual Science did serve a lot of transvestites throughout its existence, and a few years after the screening of the film and the popularization of Steinach’s research, the Institute hired gynecologist Ludwig Levy-Lenz. Levy-Lenz (and the Institute) provided genital plastic surgeries as well as ovarian and uterine removal, breast-reduction surgeries and mastectomies, facial feminization or masculinization surgeries, hair depilation, and “‘ovarian’ and ‘testicular preparations’ to be injected as a primitive form of hormone therapy,” according to Gay Berlin. Moreover, the availability of these somatic measures for transvestites was “largely in response to the ardent requests of patients,” as Beachy argues.
Steinach’s work influenced American transsexual health care, too; Harry Benjamin, a German endocrinologist who immigrated to the U.S. but returned to the Institute of Sexual Science and collaborated with Hirschfeld, wrote an introduction for the “first English-language treatment of Steinach’s theory” in 1923, according to Beachy. Benjamin was a leader in transsexual health care and science in the United States and later worked with Alfred Kinsey, an American sexologist.
The Goldilocks conditions around access to gender-affirming care in Berlin during the Weimar Republic are fascinating: at the same time as the young republic promised no censorship, scientists in two German-speaking cities researched sex hormones and the biological basis of sex and gender; then, as the film was screened for the public and Steinach’s research was made visible, transvestites were able to advocate for different forms of health care, both at and outside of the Institute for Sexual Science.
In this way, too, though Eugen Steinach was not directly involved in homosexual activism in the early 20th century, his work impacted transvestites, transsexuals, and trans* people more broadly for decades to come, and we owe much to his early sex hormone research and the influence he held on sexual science and transvestites.
Further reading:
Gay Berlin by Robert Beachy
Others of My Kind: Transatlantic Transgender Histories
German Biography: Steinach, Eugen
"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