Magnus Hirschfeld

So you just have to teach people from a young age exactly what needs to be done.

It was a devastating blow to the life's work of Magnus Hirschfeld, the Institute's founder.

Hirschfeld, who was Jewish and gay, was a pioneer for rights and liberation in Berlin's thriving LGBT community.

He founded the Institute in 1919 after beginning his career as an activist in 1896 with his pamphlet Sappho and Socrates about a gay man who took his own life after he felt he was being coerced into straight marriage.

And there are several of these cases.

Lilly Elba, who is the Danish painter from 1931, also gets treatment through Magnus Hirschfeld.

There are several of these people who all demonstrate how important or the pioneering role of individuals in driving or accelerating the developments within medicine.

So that's also why this argument that you sometimes see, especially among so-called gender critical scholars or medicalization critics that kind of like, medicine has kind of like exert some kind of power over trans people or that being trans is kind of like something that medicine, it's like a medicalization process is really, I'm really misunderstanding because it's actually the other way around where it's been much more, I mean, obviously it's a very restrictive story.

certainly doesn't hurt any of that i don't think that's the i don't think the population control for example is the main motivator this is an idea that we have a gender identity that's different than our sex this is an idea that was really coined in the 1960s before any of these agendas a man named robert stoller a professor at ucla first used the term gender identity and he had these sexologists who even back then were starting to experiment with people.

Even in the pre-Nazi era, this went on in Berlin by a man named Magnus Hirschfeld, where they performed the first sex reassignment surgeries on men.

The second man they ever did these surgeries on died.

They tried to implant a uterus into him.

Footnote.

One ought also to mention some later writers, like Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld and Dr. von Romer, whose work, though avowedly favorable to the earning movement, is in a high degree scientific and reliable in character.

End footnote.

The result of these investigations has been that a very altered complexion has been given to the subject, for whereas at first it was merely assumed that the phenomena were of morbid character, and that the leaning of the love sentiment toward one of the same sex was always associated with degeneracy or disease, it is very noticeable that step by step with the accumulation of reliable information this assumption has been abandoned the point of view has changed and the change has been most marked in the latest writers such as a moll and havelock ellis It is not possible here to go into anything like a detailed account of the works of these various authors, their theories, and the immense number of interesting cases and observations which they have contributed.

That ignored sexual freedom would be incomplete, sorry.

In Germany, Magnus Hirschfeld's early campaigns for homosexual and trans rights overlapped with anarchist currents of anti-authoritarianism.

Across Europe, radicals who rejected state and church authority often also rejected compulsory heterosexuality, even if their writings used coded language to avoid censorship.

The Stonewall Uprising of 1969 is often remembered as as the birth of modern LGBTQ plus movements.