4.4: Magnus Hirschfeld, Havelock Ellis, and the Birth of Sexual Science

Archives of Desire: Early studies on Sexuality

Both in Germany and in England, sexologists used widespread eugenics beliefs of their day that the body revealed behavioral tendencies. Reformers hoped that ascribing innate, unchangeable status to sexuality would secure rights, but eugenics was an imperialist science that justified racial, class, and sexual hierarchies.^[76]

Magnus Hirschfeld, a German physician who experienced same-sex attraction, asserted that anatomy indicated sexual desires: “Hermaphroditic features significantly make the diagnosis of homosexuality easier.”^[77] Hirschfeld advocated for homosexual rights from 1896 through 1935, arguing in The Homosexuality of Men and Women (1914) that homosexuals’ “urnish” nature contributed creativity and philanthropy to society and gave homosexuals “equal understanding to both sexes.”^[78] In addition to publishing books, Hirschfeld started the Scientific Humanitarian Committee in Germany in 1897. The committee’s goals were “(1) to win legislative bodies to the position of abolishing the antigay paragraph of the German penal code, Paragraph 175; (2) enlightening public opinion on homosexuality; (3) ‘interesting the homosexual himself in the struggle for his rights.’”^[79] Hirschfeld amassed an archive of same-sex research and literature that the Nazi state destroyed in 1933.

Hirschfeld’s British contemporaries Havelock Ellis (figure 4.9) and John Addington Symonds published Sexual Inversion in 1897. It was based on their interpretation of cross-cultural examples of same-sex attraction and varied sexual expression. This English medical textbook claimed inversion was an involuntary physiological abnormality usually “due to the accidental absence of the natural objects of sexual attraction” or, more rarely, was inborn.^[80] Ellis’s case studies highlighted perceived abnormalities in subjects’ bodies, especially females. According to Ellis, whether acquired or inborn, inversion should not be criminalized, because it could not be helped. Symonds was at the forefront of homosexual rights activism in England, where, until 1866, homosexuality was punishable by death. In Symonds’s life and through 1967, British law still criminalized homosexual behavior.

Figure 4.9. Havelock Ellis. (Public domain, Smithsonian Institution.)

In the following generation of activists, Edward Carpenter used anthropology to appeal to exceptionalism, seeing intimacy between men as a way to overcome society’s class differences.^[81] Carpenter advocated on behalf of homosexuals like himself and for women’s rights, vegetarianism, and socialism. The idea of camaraderie (as he read the meaning of the American poet Walt Whitman) was central to his work and activism. In 1914, Carpenter published Intermediate Types among Primitive Folk, where he used “intermediate” to describe nonheteronormative genders and sexualities among peoples in tribal and ancient societies. By challenging terms like invert or uranian, he argued that nonheteronormative genders and sexualities were natural benefits to individuals and society.^[82]

Although the notion that homosexual men were effeminate and lesbian women were masculine was an enduring stereotype that sexology promoted, some sexologists started to untangle gender from sexuality. Hirschfeld asserted that homosexuals had cross-gender traits, but he was the first to study cross-dressing men and women and found that most of them were heterosexual. As a result, his 1910 The Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress understood cross-dressing for sexual pleasure as separate from homosexuality.^[83] Noting that a difference between gender expression and sexual desire was an important contribution to the field. Iwan Bloch (figure 4.10), another German psychiatrist-sexologist who advocated for the repeal of Paragraph 175, challenged the popular idea that homosexuality was related to the presence of opposite-sex characteristics and was one of the first scholars to attack the popular notion of sexual degeneracy found in the work of Krafft-Ebing.^[84] His anthropological and historical evidence of same-sex behavior existing around the world argued that it should be understood as naturally occurring difference.

After more than a century, the ideas of Ulrichs, Kertbeny, Krafft-Ebing, Ellis and Symonds, Carpenter, Hirschfeld, and Bloch continue to influence how gender and sexuality are interpreted. Sexology described homosexuality in myriad ways: (1) an innate condition theorists interpreted as degenerate or benign, (2) a learned behavior resulting from sexual excess, trauma, or no access to the preferred sex object, (3) something that should not or should be criminalized, and (4) an individual liberty or a social problem. The ideas and terminology that sexologists developed continue to provide the contradictory framework through which arguments about sexuality are made.

Figure 4.10. Iwan Bloch. (Public domain.)

Psychoanalysis: Distorted Understandings of Human Sexuality and Desire

Psychoanalysts distinguished themselves from other sexologists because they understood becoming gendered and developing sexuality as developmental human processes that required mental, emotional labor rather than as simply happening naturally to the body. The most famous proponent of psychoanalysis was Sigmund Freud, whose 1905 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality responded to prior sexologists.^[85] His classification system for inverts identified “absolute inverts” as individuals who had a sexual interest in their own sex exclusively, “amphigenic inverts” as individuals with a sexual interest in women and men, and “contingent inverts” as individuals who preferred the opposite sex but who would have sex with someone of the same sex on the basis of availability.^[86] Freud rejected the idea that homosexuality was an immoral condition or that sexuality was innate. He considered people to be innately desiring beings whose desire was shaped by society’s proscriptions about what sexualities were acceptable and preferred. Nonetheless, he also considered the highest form of sexual development to be reproductive heterosexuality featuring active males and passive females.

According to Freud, all but the most sexually repressed people incorporated perversions into their sexual routines. He defined perversions as acts outside reproduction such as touching and kissing. Freud created a multistage explanation for how people achieved adult heterosexuality or got diverted into other forms of desire. He claimed that all infants start with unfocused sexuality. Young children focused their desire on their mother. An Oedipal crisis, which ended infatuation with the mother, was the next stage to move children toward forming the gender roles and opposite-gender desire that was normative in Freud’s time. Freud attributed a girl’s rejection of her mother in favor of her father to the girl realizing she “lacked” a penis and being drawn to her father who had one. A boy moved from actively desiring his mother to passively identifying with his father because of castration anxiety. A boy’s realization that not everyone had a penis prompted anxiety that he could lose his. The boy’s recognition of adult male status and possessiveness led to fear that the father would castrate him if he acted on desire for the mother but also anticipation that the boy would gain that adult male status later in life.^[87] This early Oedipal crisis generally would be repressed and unable to enter into conscious thought, as girls converted their penis envy into desire to have a baby and boys grew into men who desired sex with women. Confining repressed feelings to the unconscious, however, would leave people in denial of their own motives and reasons for their actions, making it hard for them to understand why they were heterosexual or interested in “perversions.” Freud’s theory of the unconscious also made it difficult to prove his claims, but Freudianism became wildly popular in the mid-twentieth-century United States.^[88]

Legacies: Activism, and the Fight Against Stigma

Sexology and the law were two key social institutions that produced the category of “the homosexual” as a form of social identity. Gradually, as people accessed sexology texts and terms from the 1860s through the 1940s, they internalized this new form of identity, which then became a key component of their sense of self. When self-identified homosexual men and women internalized sexual orientation as part of identity they often had to grapple with how sexology and psychoanalysis explicitly or implicitly positioned homosexuality as somehow inferior to reproductive heterosexuality.

Both sexology and psychoanalysis presented stereotypes about gender expression, immaturity, and excess that circulated in society. By the 1940s, psychologists in Europe, the United States, and the imperially influenced world used Freudian psychoanalysis to rationalize treatments that conformed women to passive homemaking roles and the medicalization of homosexuality as a disorder (until 1973 in the United States). Feminists and then gay liberationists began to attack the incestuous overtones of Freudian theory and its disparaging references to women as anatomically and emotionally inferior. The French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 The Second Sex, the American feminist journalist Betty Friedan’s 1963 The Feminine Mystique (figure 4.11), and American feminist books from 1970 like Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics and Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex all sought to debunk Freud in the name of women’s liberation.^[89] Gay liberationists built on this feminist foundation to draw the homosexual rights activism that had emerged in the late 1800s away from rhetorical reliance on a sexology or psychoanalysis framework while still working to challenge the criminalization of same-sex love.

Figure 4.11. Betty Friedan. (Public domain, Fred Palumbo.)

Check Your Knowledge

Contributed by Has Arakelyan, Rio Hondo College

Multiple-Choice Questions

1. Which belief did sexologists in Germany and England often link sexuality to?
A) Democracy
B) Eugenics
C) Romanticism
D) Industrialization

2. Magnus Hirschfeld was best known for:
A) advocating for vegetarianism.
B) writing Sexual Inversion.
C) founding the Scientific Humanitarian Committee.
D) Supporting Freud’s psychoanalysis.

3. What was the main goal of Hirschfeld’s Scientific Humanitarian Committee?
A) to promote socialism
B) to support psychoanalysis
C) encourage vegetarianism
D) repeal Paragraph 175 and educate/enlighten public opinion

4. Which English sexologists published Sexual Inversion in 1897?
A) Ellis and Symonds
B) Freud and Bloch
C) Carpenter and Hirschfeld
D) Krafft-Ebing and Ulrichs

5. Edward Carpenter used anthropology to argue that intimacy between men could:
A) reinforce class hierarchies.
B) promote eugenics.
C) Overcome class differences
D) Support psychoanalysis

6. Hirschfeld’s 1910 work The Transvestites was significant because it:
A) linked cross-dressing directly to homosexuality.
B) distinguished cross-dressing from homosexuality.
C) promoted eugenics.
D) advocated for Freud’s theories.

7. Iwan Bloch challenged which popular idea?
A) That homosexuality was linked to opposite-sex traits
B) That Freud’s psychoanalysis was valid
C) That vegetarianism was necessary
D) That homosexuality was always innate

8. Freud’s psychoanalysis differed from sexology because it:
A) focused on anatomy.
B) saw sexuality as a developmental process shaped by society.
C) promoted eugenics.
D) advocated socialism.

9. Which feminist thinkers and writers directly challenged Freud’s portrayal of women as inferior?
A) Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone
B) Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich
C) Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin, Angela Davis, bell hooks
D) Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Taylor, Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth

10. Which feminist and liberationist works directly challenged Freud’s theories and their impact on women?
A) The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital
B) Civil Disobedience and Walden
C) The Second Sex, The Feminine Mystique, Sexual Politics, and The Dialectic of Sex
D) On Liberty and The Subjection of Women

Discussion Questions

1. How did the use of eugenics by early sexologists both advance and limit the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights?
2. In what ways did Magnus Hirschfeld’s activism and scholarship challenge prevailing stereotypes, and how did his work influence later movements?
3. How did Freud’s psychoanalytic approach to sexuality differ from sexologists like Ellis and Carpenter, and what contradictions did it introduce?
4. What role did anthropology and cross-cultural examples play in reshaping ideas about sexuality and gender in this period?
5. How do the contradictory frameworks established by sexologists and psychoanalysts continue to shape modern debates about sexuality, gender, and rights?

Multiple-Choice Questions - Answers

1. B) Eugenics
2. C) founding the Scientific Humanitarian Committee.
3. D) repeal Paragraph 175 and educate/enlighten public opinion
4. A) Ellis and Symonds
5. C) Overcome class differences
6. B) distinguished cross-dressing from homosexuality.
7. A) That homosexuality was linked to opposite-sex traits
8. B) saw sexuality as a developmental process shaped by society.
9. A) Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone
10.C) The Second Sex, The Feminine Mystique, Sexual Politics, and The Dialectic of Sex