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Sexuality and Gender in Hirschfeld's Die Transvestiten : A Case of the "Elusive Evidence of the Ordinary"

2005; University of Texas Press; Volume: 14; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sex.2006.0023

1535-3605

Darryl B. Hill,

Sexuality and Gender in Hirschfeld's Die Transvestiten:A Case of the “Elusive Evidence of the Ordinary” Darryl B. Hill (bio) Magnus Hirschfeld was, without question, a key player in the development of taxonomies of sexual identities. Most significantly, he is credited with naming two categories that continue to this day: transvestite and transsexual.1 His work on transvestites, Die Transvestiten (The Transvestites), published in 1910, includes first-person narratives of crossdressers, Hirschfeld's commentaries on these case histories, and theoretical generalizations based on his analysis. Although the primary data for these cases was destroyed by Nazis in 1933, the book remains, rich with detail, offering crucial aspects of his respondents' experiences. Yet even a cursory examination of these lives shows how our current understanding of "transvestite" (often narrowly considered as someone who crossdresses for sexual excitement) is different from Hirschfeld's. Moreover, Hirschfeld often ignored or simply failed to understand what his participants were telling him. Even when his informants were clear about an issue, he discounted crucial aspects of their stories. These aporias and sleights of hand with his case studies reveal crucial disagreements and tensions between Hirschfeld and his subjects. Focusing on these contentious matters, while privileging the accounts offered by his respondents, leads to a more complicated picture of sexuality and gender in late-nineteenth-century Germany. Rewriting Histories of Sexuality Hirschfeld wrote during a transitional period in the conceptualization of sexuality. This was a time of psychiatric and medical intervention into [End Page 316] sexuality, when many of today's sexual identity categories were initially being constructed. Sexologists were clearly making things up as they went along, guided by theories, clinical observations, and existing wisdom. Nowhere was this truer than in Germany in the late 1800s to the early 1900s. Foucault in his history of sexuality observes that there was a veritable explosion of sexuality discourse in legal, religious, and medical circles at the end of the nineteenth century.2 Vern Bullough notes that especially during the nineteenth century, as homosexuals and crossdressers increasingly moved to large urban centers, physicians were called upon by police for guidance on how to deal with these "sexual deviants."3 Paradoxically, during this time sex was a very private activity, rarely discussed outside of nonacademic contexts. This proliferation of "perverse sexualities" was met with a corresponding rise in the social control of sexuality, which was increasingly medical and psychiatric. Thus, it is often asserted that the medical community developed the nomenclature for the classification of sexual "perversities." The medical community set out the standards by which to assess sexual behaviors, but these classifications probably influenced people's behavior as they conformed to medical expectations or refused them.4 There is little doubt that medical discourse contributed to sexual nomenclature. The dominance of this idea is partly due to the abundant availability of medical discourse of the day, which, of course, supports this thesis. If one was the first in print to document a sexual variation, the variation was "created" (or, at least, discovered). However, historians of sexuality have begun to show that although medical discourses played a role in defining sexual identities, there were no doubt other forces at work. For example, George Chauncey points out that the transition in the conceptualization of homosexuality in America was likely due to many coalescing forces.5 Feminist challenges to Victorian sexual ideology, changing social conditions, and an emerging "homosexual consciousness" were probably all involved. Victorian sexual ideology, for example, saw men as sexually "active" and women as sexually "passive." Anyone who transgressed this rule was considered a "sexual invert." Homosexual relations, because they disrupted Victorian sex roles, were seen as pathological. Later researchers and theorists began to challenge this sex/gender system by either conceptualizing sexual inversion in purely sexual terms, such as Ellis who believed that transvestism [End Page 317] was largely a heterosexual phenomena, or by differentiating sexual objects from aims, as did Freud.6 Nevertheless, early sexual categories were fluid and the result of many factors. The popular press probably contributed to the construction of sexual taxonomies, especially Hirschfeld's "transvestite." Hirschfeld's study of transvestites documents with fastidious detail news reports, published letters, and popular publications describing...