Ever since taking office, President Trump has made it clear that attacking trans rights is among his top priorities. So far he’s already signed executive orders declaring that biological sex is determined at conception (which isn’t a thing, but OK), hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to people under the age of 19 will have federal funding withheld, passport gender markers cannot be changed, incarcerated transgender women should be moved into men’s prisons and trans women and girls cannot play women’s sports. As cruel as these policies are, it doesn’t end there.
Government agencies like the CDC and have started erasing entire webpages of LGTBQ+ healthcare resources and the National Parks Service has scrubbed mentions of trans and queer folks from their site for the national monument at the Stonewall Inn. This follows a memo from the Trump White House to end “programs that use taxpayer money to promote gender ideology” and remove said gender ideology from their online resources. It’s a move that many online, like Jewish activist Matt Bernstein, are likening to the destruction of the Institute for Sexual Science, a pioneering gender and sexuality research and treatment center, by the Nazis in 1933.
Let’s talk about the Institute’s founder, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld.
Magnus Hirschfeld was born on May 14, 1868 in the German city Kolberg (in what is present-day Poland) to an Ashkenazi Jewish family. Like his father Hermann, Hirschfeld became a doctor, receiving a medical degree in 1892. While initially practicing natural medicine, he began studying human sexuality in an effort to de-stigmatize queerness in German culture and end legal discrimination against queer people. (Paragraph 175 of the German penal code criminalized homosexuality between men from 1871 until 1994.) As cited in Heike Bauer’s 2017 book, “The Hirschfeld Archives,” this shift in focus came about out of an empathy for his gay patients who often attempted or successfully died by suicide. Though Dr. Hirschfeld never publicly spoke about his sexuality, he himself was a gay man, which almost certainly inspired his study of and advocacy for the queer community.
He began writing books and pamphlets which surveyed homosexual love and desire, and promoted the idea that many gender identities exist. His work sought to show that queerness occurred in every culture and challenged the common thinking of the time that queerness was a perversion that required medical intervention, rather arguing it was innate. “Hirschfeld insisted that a person’s sexuality did not determine their character or personality any more than being born left-handed or right-handed did,” the Holocaust Encyclopedia states. In 1897, he helped found the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, a group which advocated the decriminalization of homosexuality in Germany. Their motto was “Justice through science,” a phrase that Dr. Hirschfeld would use throughout his life, which incidentally evokes the common Hebrew phrase “tzedek, tzedek tirdof,” or, “justice, justice you shall pursue.”
During the Weimar Republic, a time when culture was more open in Germany, Dr. Hirschfeld became a more prominent figure and a recognized expert in the field of sexology. In 1919 he opened the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. This center was the first of its kind, offering medical care ranging from routine gynecological exams to STD treatment to some of the earliest gender affirming surgeries. According to Florence Tamagne in the 2007 essay “Liberation on the Move: The Golden Age of Homosexual Movements,” in its first year, the Institute held 18,000 consultations for 3,500 patients. The institute also offered professional training, research opportunities and public sex education, and acted as somewhat of a queer community center with lectures, screenings and art organized Dr. Hirschfeld and other staff. The library and archive at the Institute for Sexual Science contained groundbreaking research on queer sexuality, gender expression and intersex identity.
At the same time, however, Dr. Hirschfeld’s prominence in the field was dangerous. He faced attacks from right-wing Germans and particularly from the burgeoning Nazi party, who thought he was a prime example of “degenerate Jewish sexuality.” On October 4, 1920, he was physically attacked and nearly killed in Munich and was later apparently shot at in Vienna. In February 1929, a caricature of him appeared on the front page of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer, attacking Dr. Hirschfeld for his work and his Jewish ancestry.
In 1930, as it was increasingly dangerous for Dr. Hirschfeld to be in Germany, he left the country on a global lecture tour. He left the Institute in the charge of his partner Karl Giese. When he returned to Europe in 1932, it was still unsafe to enter Germany. Dr. Hirschfeld remained in exile for the rest of his life.
A year later, on May 6, 1933, a group of Nazi students and the SA, a Nazi paramilitary organization, attacked the Institute, breaking into the building, attacking staff, looting and apparently yelling, “Burn Hirschfeld!” Four days later, the Institute’s remaining library and archive was burned in the street. This included research, clinical files, art and artifacts. They were burned alongside books written by Jewish authors and anyone else the Nazis deemed degenerate. It’s hard to know how many books and documents from the Institute were destroyed. But according to Richard J. Evans in “The Coming of the Third Reich,” it could be between 12,000 and 20,000. Another estimate from “The Holocaust: An Encyclopedia and Document Collection” by Paul R. Bartrop and Michael Dickerman has the count up to 25,000 books. The police then permanently closed the Institute.
Dr. Hirschfeld died on May 14, 1935. By that time, the Nazi government had revoked his German citizenship and seven years later his sister Recha would die in the Theresienstadt Ghetto. But even in his time in exile, he never stopped researching, writing and trying to open a version of the Institute of Sexual Sciences in France. Though Dr. Hirschfeld was not religiously or culturally Jewish, his pursuit of justice for queer, trans and intersex people through science is absolutely a Jewish value. His tombstone in Nice is engraved with the Latin words, “Per Scientiam ad Justitiam,” or, “through science to justice.”
Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld was only beginning the work of advocating for trans and queer rights when he started his career in the late 19th century. And given the vigorous discrimination and erasure the LGBTQ+ community is now facing from the American government, the past does feel eerily close at hand. Even as the Institute of Sexual Sciences was once burned down because of the intersecting hatreds of antisemitism, transphobia and homophobia, and fascism, Pirkei Avot reminds us, “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.”
The memory of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, a man with an irrevocable place in queer and Jewish history, will never fail to remind of us that.
