Life isn't binary, and neither is history: early sexologists and eugenic influences
When we look at the past, we have to focus more on just the good accomplished by a certain figure: we also have to see the social context of their work and their views.
As debates around trans* health care progress in the U.S., I’ve seen many trans* activists and people discussing Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, one of the earliest sexologists in Germany and a vocal supporter of gender-expansive people, at the time called transvestites. Dr. Hirschfeld himself held a theory of sexual intermediaries, believing that no person was 100% female or 100% male and instead holding different ratios of characteristics belonging to both sexes; in his era, sex and gender and sexuality were all bundled into one thing (sex) and this theory was incredibly progressive both then and now.
Dr. Hirschfeld began his work as a physician and became drawn to the newly-termed homosexual when he discovered how many men were pushed to suicide by restrictive laws and blackmail. He founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, an organization with a primary goal of repealing Paragraph 175, which was the statute that criminalized homosexuality. He later also founded the Institute for Sexual Science, perhaps his most famous organization, which provided not only educational efforts (like a library and lectures) but also treatment for homosexuals and transvestites, including counseling and some of the first procedures that we might today term gender affirmation surgeries. There is no doubt that Dr. Hirschfeld accomplished quite a bit for homosexuals and transvestites, and he did a lot of great work.
Most of Dr. Hirschfeld’s work was destroyed by the Nazis and their adjacent groups beginning in 1933, and much of his work was fundamentally opposed to Nazi ideologies: Dr. Hirschfeld saw homosexuality as normal and natural, for example, while Nazis saw it as immoral and unnatural.
Yet Dr. Hirschfeld –– and many of his peers, including the woman sexologists who worked at the time –– also held eugenic beliefs, and the beginnings of sexology were deeply intertwined with race hygiene and eugenics. Sexology drew heavily on theories of degeneration, Darwinism, and eugenics, according to Sexual Politics and Feminist Science, and colonialism also played a heavy role as “the bodies and cultural practices of colonized peoples were exploited as empirical resources” (Leng 17).
Of course, not every scientist or sexologist held the same views, and the field was varied. But many woman sexologists, like women’s suffragists in the U.S., used racial arguments to further their own opinions on women’s rights (Leng 103), weaponizing racial hierarchies and exploiting racist views on Black women and women of color to gain further rights for themselves. What’s more, theories of homosexuality that saw it as inborn or congenital did have eugenic implications, as they do today –– at the time, some sexologists argued that homosexuals’ offspring would be genetically weaker or sickly (Leng 123).
Heike Bauer also wrote an excellent book on colonial violence and queer culture, looking at the influences of colonialism on Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld and his peers. The Hirschfeld Archives looks at not only the power connected to archival practices (which I wrote about last week) but also the way that Hirschfeld’s work was founded on eugenics and racial hygiene (Bauer 8) and the way that he likely benefited from colonialism and racism, especially with both institutions’ investments in science at the time (Bauer 17).
In fact, Bauer highlights that Dr. Hirschfeld actually argued that homosexuals would benefit racial hygiene practices because they could not marry or procreate and that if homosexuals were forced into marriage, their children would be mentally deficient (Bauer 23). At the time, conceptions of race in Germany were slightly different than how we might define race in Germany or the U.S. today and included ideas about mental fitness and physical disability, but Bauer notes that Dr. Hirschfeld was also noticeably quiet on issues of racism and abolition at the Chicago World’s Fair, which he attended and where he spoke actively on the normalization of homosexuality (Bauer 20-21).
Years back, my therapist recommended the book Life Isn’t Binary by Meg-John Barker and Alex Iantaffi to look at my own internalized binaries, not just in terms of gender and sexuality but in terms of my views of myself as worthy/unworthy or good/bad depending on my behavior. I think the idea that we can break binaries beyond gender identity and sexuality both challenged and changed my views in general, and I think the tension that comes with multiplicity and rejecting the binary can be a fascinating study.
None of this is to say that we should outright reject theories or overlook the often great work done by figures like Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld or Johanna Elberskirchen, but I do think that it is both useful and important to read their theories and works through the lens of their social-historical context and through the lens of their other views. I am concerned when folks look at and share these figures’ work uncritically and without context, especially with the historical context of sexology’s ties to eugenics, and in these cases particularly, I do think it’s important to examine as many of a figure’s views as possible before putting them up on a pedestal.
Further reading:
The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture by Heike Bauer
Life Isn't Binary: On Being Both, Beyond, and In-Between by Alex Iantaffi and Meg-John Barker
Sexual Politics and Feminist Science: Women Sexologists in Germany, 1900–1933 by Kirsten Leng
Unreliable narrators and archival silences: Stasi records and the Magnus Hirschfeld archives (last week’s post on archival power)
Magnus Hirschfeld. The Origins of the Gay Liberation Movement by Ralf Dose
Berlin’s Third Sex by Magnus Hirschfeld
"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