Episode 1: Magnus Hirschfeld & Transgender Science

Episode One!
Finally!
This episode lays the ground work for an entire series about amazing transgender people in history! We look at the history of transgender science and specifically at Magnus Hirschfeld.

Video

Podcast Link

Script

A common word that I’ve seen recently in the news is Transgenderism.
The implications are that being transgender is something like a philosophy or a religion and that it is a recent one at that.
As a transgender woman, I knew that the first part of that implication isn’t accurate.
I am a transgender woman the same way that I am a human, it is something that I AM, not something that I believe.
Long before I knew that being transgender was even a possibility, that there were people who were born with their mental identity and their physical characteristics mismatches, I knew that something was off.
The way I always phrased it in my head was that I was terribly bad at being a man.
Virtually all of my friends were girls, my interests weren’t stereotypically masculine, I didn’t possess the innate manliness I saw in examples all around me.
I just knew that I was bad at it.
I’m not saying that all men are burly grunting brutes, I’m just saying that there was something they had that I didn’t.
Over time I learned to emulate it, to play the part, even probably overplaying the part.
When I came out as transgender, it surprised people, very few people saw it coming at all.
They didn’t see the long journey that led to that moment, and it didn’t help that I had shaved my head a few days prior to Finally admitting it to myself.

At any rate, I know just by being a transgender woman that being transgender has nothing to do with any philosophy or creed.
Currently in 2024, the conservative side of the political spectrum definitely wants to make it seem like it is, just like they want it to seem like being transgender is some new thing.
While I know that I’m not a part of what I’ve heard called a TikTok trend, it did make me curious to see how far back I could find evidence of transgender people in history.
After almost half a year of digging, turns out it’s really far back.

This will be an entire series that works it’s way from the beginning to now.
Before we jump in the time portal though, we have a little work to do.
First, if being transgender is not what Dan Carlin would call a philosophical contagion tearing its way through the world, then what is it?
In this episode we’re going to be digging into the current science of being transgender.
I say current because it is an area that is definitely under researched. Intentionally so.

The first person who started taking transgender people seriously in a scientific way was a man named Magnus Hirschfeld.
Magnus ran the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin (that’s the translation, the German word for it is as long as my arm).
Magnus was both Jewish and gay when each of those individually was a very dangerous thing to be.
You guessed it, episode one and we’re already going to be neck deep in Nazis.
Magnus was a doctor by trade and was incredibly moved when one of his patients committed suicide in 1896 because he couldn’t stop feeling attracted to other men.
This, along with some other experiences led him to study gender and sexuality in an attempt to legitimize people who weren’t heterosexual and cisgender.
Throughout the end of the 19th century and the beginnings of the 20th, Magnus Hirschfeld essentially outed himself by leading political lobbying to decriminalize homosexuality in Germany.
The closest he got to success was in the 1920s.
Between his lobbying and the Institute for Sexual Research, he had a fairly large target on his back when the Nazi’s began to come to power.
There is an image that I think most of us have seen of Nazi’s burning books. In a great many of those pictures, the books and papers being burned are from the Magnus’s Institute.
Magnus himself was beaten and harassed until he fled Germany to France in 1935, dying soon after.

Since that time, transgender studies have been few and far between and have often been undertaken with the purpose of ‘fixing’ transgender people.
Those that weren’t trying to fix us were trying to lump us into categories that were within their understanding.
To the religious, we were part of a strange fetish.
Those who weren’t trying shame us were trying to erase us as confused gay men and women or crossdressers that took it too far.
The antagonism of parts of the medical community led to many transgender people using riskier sources of medication and guessing at the dosages.
It is only recently that the medical community has begun to see being transgender as something other than a pathology to be cured.

We can see this in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual also commonly referred to as the DSM and it’s releases.
The first two DSM versions were released in 1952 and 1967 respectively, and didn’t mention transgender people at all.
It was only in the late 1950’s that John William Money began esposing the idea that sex and gender were not the same thing.
The DSM-3 was released in 1980 and included a Transexual category that listed people who are non-binary as pathological and also included a troubling category called tranvestic fetishism.
The DSM-4 was released in 1994 and replaced the transexual category with Gender Identity Disorder.
This version continued calling assigned gender at birth with natal male or female.
This version stopped classifying non-binary as a pathology.
Finally, we have the current DSM-5 that gave us the terminology currently in use, gender identity disorder and assigned male or female at birth.

With the lack of studies, especially the lack of studies trying to prove something, we are forced to look to history for data.
For data on repressed populations that seem to explode in size, we can look to a study done by I.C. McManus in 2009 called The History and Geography of Human Handedness.
In it McManus states that ‘It is probably that about 8-10% of the population has been left handed for at least the past 200,000 years or so.
Detailed data only began to become available for those born in the nineteenth century, and there is growing evidence that the rate of left-handedness fell precipitously during the Victorian period, reaching a nadir of about 3% in about 1895 or so, and then rising quite quickly until an asymptote is reached for those born after about 1945-1950, with 11-12% of men and 9-10% of women typically being left handed in Western countries.’
In addressing the low number of left handed people in the Victorian era, McManus points to direct social pressure as the culprit.
The social pressure that he is referencing is the repression of left-handedness in many schools.
People who were left handed were forced to use their right hands or be punished.
It is only in the middle of the 20th century that the stigma around left handedness was withdrawn to the point that we were able to see the actual population size of left handed people.
To quote McManus again, ‘direct social pressure of this sort only alters the phenotype, not the genotype.
Which means that the direct social pressure alters how we perceive the population, not the actual size of the population.
McManus also details another kind of social pressure, indirect social pressure, which does not alter the phenotype, but made left handed-ness stigmatized, ostracized, and taboo.
This can make left handed people less likely to reproduce, and therefore temporarily lower the population size.

We can extend this observation to the transgender population.
The transgender population has been repressed through direct and indirect social pressures for centuries, with the severity of that pressure dependent on the culture in which the transgender person is born.
It is only within the last 30 years or so that science has begun to understand transgender people outside of a Judeo-Christian morality, and there was definitely a lag time between science understanding that and the understanding of the population at large.
So when we look at the population of transgender people, and it seems like there are more of us, we are simply observing this same phenomena being acted out with a different population in a different time.

This isn’t about people responding to a TikTok trend, or a lowering of morality in our society, or some kind of philosophy that has taken hold of Gen Z.
This is about people finally beginning to feel safe enough to exist without lies or masks.
It is about some transgender people doing the math on living happier and more fulfilling lives vs the risk of direct or indirect societal pressure and deciding that it was worth it.
It is a sign of the progress of our society that this population has grown.

None of this is to say that there haven’t been prominent transgender people and populations throughout history.
There have been, as far back as we are able to see in the historical record.
In episode 2 of this series, we will be starting at the very beginning with the writings of Enheduanna and the cult of Inanna.

Sources

https://daily.jstor.org/a-history-of-transphobia-in-the-medical-establishment/
https://www.researchgate.net/pofile/Salvador-Vidal-Ortiz/publication/229968698_Transgender_and_Transsexual_Studies_Sociology%27s_Influence_and_Future_Steps/links/5a3a72b3aca2728e698a9abe/Transgender-and-Transsexual-Studies-Sociologys-Influence-and-Future-Steps.pdf
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22844818/
The History and Geography of Human Handedness by I.C. McManus
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Magnus-Hirschfeld
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23988352
https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/historian-unearths-evidence-one-america-s-earliest-gay-rights-activists-n1026921