Is the scientific approach to activism inevitable?
Analyzing problems and opposition to and the impact of the biological framework while looking for alternative pathways within science in Germany.
I’ve had lots of conversations over the past month and a half that indicate that the biological approach to activism is no longer viable, but this framework is prevalent throughout the past 150 years of homosexual activism in Germany. What are some of the problems with a biological approach, and why might it no longer be effective?
One gut reaction I always have to a biological approach, like Günter Dörner’s prenatal hormone research in the ‘90s, is asking why we need to know the origins of queerness; these theories can easily be nudged down a slippery slope to eradicating queerness. Dörner’s research, as Adrian de Silva argues in Negotiating the Borders of the Gender Regime, tied transsexuality to “prenatal hormone imbalances … during a particular phase in the differentiation of the human brain” (de Silva 155) and not only labeled transness as a deficiency or disorder but also framed these findings as a potential avenue for prevention and treatment of transsexuality (de Silva 156). These ideas are not only cisnormative and heteronormative but also eugenic in nature.
This is not the first time that Dörner theorized about using hormone levels to prevent queerness; in a 1983 letter to the editor in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, responding to an official statement by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sexualforschung, Dörner wrote that it would be possible to prevent homosexuality with the correction of “abnormal sex hormone levels” (Dörner 577). In the statement, which was published in 1982, the DGfS had criticized the homophobia underpinning Dörner’s work (Sigusch et al. 448).
But activists and members of community organizations with whom I’ve spoken in the past month argue that the medical or scientific path to liberation can be sinister in other ways, including medical paternalism, as we’ve seen in terms of both intersex activism and legal gender recognition in Germany.
Yet at other times, like early homosexual activism of the late 1890s through the 1920s, this scientific approach seems to have worked: Karl Heinrich Ulrichs began campaigning using medical science in the 1860s and inspired (and was inspired by) psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing (Beachy 23-24). Ulrichs was among the first in the German-speaking world to argue that homosexuality was normal and natural, and thus should not be criminalized –– a biological argument.
Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld maintained this line of thought, using a biological determinist philosophy (as Beachy claims on page 101 of Gay Berlin) to argue that because homosexuality was just another congenital variation of human sexuality (and was neither a pathology nor immoral), it shouldn’t be criminalized. And Hirschfeld’s work was almost successful –– as I wrote last week, the German parliament was considering a legal reform to decriminalize homosexuality before the global markets crashed in 1929 and a political door opened for radical parties (the National Socialists) to further their platform.
And so much of the material from homosexual movements of the end of the Wilhemine Republic and the Weimar Era (Dr. Hirschfeld’s time) focuses on the scientific approach, perhaps because it was so successful and, at the time, relatively progressive.
But this kind of framework is limited, arguing only that it is because groups are similar to the majority (normal or “just like you”) that they should be accepted –– implying a binary that includes “abnormal” groups that shouldn’t necessarily be accepted or given the same rights. And the theories of the 1900s don’t fit a lot of today’s ideas, including concepts of sexual fluidity and identities that weren’t recognize under Hirschfeld’s or Ulrichs’ ideas.
Even groups in Dr. Hirschfeld’s time challenged this approach; Robert Beachy argues in Gay Berlin that the anarchist ideals of sexual self-expression and individualism, which were “nurtured by the Wilhemine counterculture” (Beachy 99) were not always compatible with Hirschfeld’s biological approach (Beachy 101). Beachy also highlights, though, that a number of anarchists (including an artists’ commune just outside of Berlin in the 1890s) did support Hirschfeld’s work (Beachy 99-101). Others, including Adolf Brand and his masculinist theories, grew disenchanted with “the classifications of the medical profession” and founded ideologically competing organizations (Beachy 101).
The majority of my research project through the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation looks at how the adoption of this scientific approach has shaped homosexual activism and how that has impacted queer people’s lives in Germany in a couple of time periods since the 1890s. I’m not convinced that this specific biological determinist argument is the most effective precisely because it reinforces a binary view of humanity and creates this inherent “abnormal” category, and I have previously written here about ways that over-privileging medical science has bred medical paternalism in legal and social settings.
But that is not to say that science or medicine has no place in activism; this is the other aspect of what I’m investigating through my research, and I hope to spark a discussion about possible pathways toward liberation that go beyond the biological framework. Looking back at this history allows us not only to see the impact of frameworks used in the past but also to envision alternative avenues for advocacy and liberation.
Further reading:
Negotiating the Borders of the Gender Regime by Adrian de Silva
Letter to the editor – Dörner
Official statement by the german society for sex research (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sexualforschung e.V.) on the research of Prof. Dr. Günter Dörner on the subject of homosexuality
Gay Berlin by Robert Beachy
"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