Institut für Sexualwissenschaft

I learned something fascinating earlier this week – from 1919 -1933 in Germany, there was an Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for the Science of Sexuality), a pioneer in transgender and gay research. Among the nonprofit foundation’s employees were psychiatrists, endocrinologists, and other medical professionals who worked in research, counseling, public education, and gender affirming surgeries.

In addition to housing a large research library, the institution included medical and psychological departments, and marriage and sex counseling services. About 20,000 people from around Europe and beyond visited each year - services were free for those who couldn’t afford them. A “pioneer worldwide in the call for civil rights and social acceptance for homosexual and transgender people,” the Institute for the Science of Sexuality also advocated for women’s emancipation, sex education, contraception, and the treatment of sexually transmitted diseases.

I was surprised to learn that some of the first sex reassignment surgeries took place in the 1930s. Some of those first surgeries were at the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin where co-founder Magnus Hirschfeld, a German Jewish physician, coined the term “transsexualism.” The institution became a haven for transgender people. Hirschfeld offered them employment and sanctuary from abuse, and performed surgeries.

In 1933 the Deutsche Studentenschaft (German Student Union) destroyed the place as part of the Nazi government’s censorship program, and burned thousands of books and journals on sexuality they took from the institute’s libraries and archives. They kept records such as address lists that they found there, however; and this later helped Hitler round up, arrest, imprison and murder “suspected homosexuals” and people who did not conform to the Nazis’ definition of gender roles.

During the Night of the Long Knives in 1934 Hitler ordered the murder of gay men in the ranks of the SA wing of the Nazis. Round-ups of LGBTQ men throughout Germany followed, and thousands ended up in slave-labor or death camps.

I learned another thing this week – the Trump Administration is proposing DNA testing to determine gender. A memo from the Department of Health and Human Services to federal agencies proposed defining “sex” as “immutable,” and defined by one’s “birth certificate, as originally issued.”Also proposed: barring legal protections on the basis of transgender identity under Title IX. If codified, this would apply to the departments of Labor, Justice, Education and Health and Human services, allowing workplace, school and health services discrimination against trans people.

*Published in the MVN as a column by Quest Lakes in Oct. 2018.