The Forgotten History Of The World's First Trans Clinic The I | Just a Dude 😎
The Forgotten History Of The World's First Trans Clinic
The Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin would be a century old if it hadn’t fallen victim to Nazi ideology
The infamous Paragraph 175 in the German criminal code made homosexuality illegal; a man so accused could be stripped of his ranks and titles and thrown in jail
Hirschfeld understood the soldier’s plight—he was himself both homosexual and Jewish
Many of his predecessors and colleagues believed that homosexuality was pathological, using new theories from psychology to suggest it was a sign of mental ill health. Hirschfeld, in contrast, argued that a person may be born with characteristics that did not fit into heterosexual or binary categories and supported the idea that a “third sex” (or Geschlecht) existed naturally. Hirschfeld proposed the term “sexual intermediaries” for nonconforming individuals. Included under this umbrella were what he considered “situational” and “constitutional” homosexuals—a recognition that there is often a spectrum of bisexual practice—as well as what he termed “transvestites”
The institute would ultimately house an immense library on sexuality, gathered over many years and including rare books and diagrams and protocols for male-to-female (MTF) surgical transition. They performed male-to-female surgery called Genitalumwandlung—literally, “transformation of genitals.” This occurred in stages: castration, penectomy and vaginoplasty. (The institute treated only trans women at this time; female-to-male phalloplasty would not be practiced until the late 1940s.) Patients would also be prescribed hormone therapy, allowing them to grow natural breasts and softer features.
When the Nazis came for the institute on May 6, 1933, Hirschfeld was out of the country. Troops swarmed the building, carrying off a bronze bust of Hirschfeld and all his precious books, which they piled in the street. Soon a towerlike bonfire engulfed more than 20,000 books
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