The Radical Sexual Biology of Magnus Hirschfeld

In recent years, thanks to scholarship from Wolff, Mancini, Bauer, and others, the sexologist and gay rights activist Magnus Hirschfeld has returned from obscurity to claim a place at the forefront of European LGBT history. But, with the major exception of Sengoopta’s work, Hirschfeld is less prominent in recent histories of twentieth-century science. This uneven development in Hirschfeld’s historiographical presence is unfortunate, as it implies that his science was somehow secondary to his activism, rather than intimately intertwined with it. In this paper I will offer a partial corrective to this trend by arguing that Hirschfeld’s work can be best understood as an attempt to create a radical conception of sex in which all existing people are considered to be sexually intermediate (between male and female) in one form or another. This theory simultaneously normalized the bodies of sexual minorities (such as homosexuals and transvestites) and complicated the bodies of heterosexuals. As I will argue, Hirschfeld was guided by two occasionally opposed intellectual aims: toward categorization, and toward individualization. In putting forward his theory, he sought simultaneously to explain the existence of any given sexual variation within a system of biological masculinity and femininity; and also to emphasize the unique nature of every person’s sexual configuration. It was because of this uneasy alliance of aims that Hirschfeld’s theory could become a potent political tool. In Foucauldian terms, Hirschfeld used his theory to create sexual knowledge, and thus bio-power, which he then leveraged for the purposes of sexual liberation.