Die Transvestiten: Eine Untersuchung über den Erotischen Verkleidungstrieb

1910 book by Magnus Hirschfeld From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Die Transvestiten: Eine Untersuchung über den Erotischen Verkleidungstrieb is a classic 1910 book on crossdressing and transvestism that was written by German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld.^[1]^[2]^[3] An illustrated companion second volume to the book was published by Hirschfeld and Max Tilke in 1912.^[4]^[5]^[6] In addition, a second edition of Die Transvestiten was published by Hirschfeld in 1925.^[7] Subsequent to its publication, the book was translated into English with the title Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress by Michael Lombardi-Nash in 1991.^[8]^[3]

AuthorMagnus Hirschfeld

OriginaltitleDie Transvestiten: Eine Untersuchung über den Erotischen Verkleidungstrieb

WorkingtitleTransvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress

TranslatorMichael Lombardi-Nash

Quick facts Author, Original title ...

Die Transvestiten: Eine Untersuchung über den Erotischen Verkleidungstrieb

Author	Magnus Hirschfeld
Original title	Die Transvestiten: Eine Untersuchung über den Erotischen Verkleidungstrieb
Working title	Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress
Translator	Michael Lombardi-Nash
Language	German; English
Subject	Transvestism, crossdressing, transgenderism
Genre	Sexology
Publisher	Medicinischer Verlag, Alfred Pulvermacher & Co.
Publication date	1910
Publication place	Berlin, Germany
Pages	562
ISBN	978-0366808076
OCLC	14774739

Background

Hirschfeld was himself gay and an occasional crossdresser, known by other Berlin crossdressers as "Aunt Magnesia".^[9]^[8] It has been said that Die Transvestiten was the most significant and authoritative text on transvestism of its time.^[10] While the book is about crossdressing, it also clearly includes some people with cross-gender feelings who would likely be referred to as transgender today.^[1]^[9]^[8] The book has often been overlooked in the English-speaking academia.^[10]

Die Transvestiten includes first-person narratives of crossdressing, Hirschfeld's commentaries on these cases, and theorizing based on the observations.^[1] Of the narratives, there were 17 in total, with 16 of them natal male and one of them natal female.^[1] In the book, Hirschfeld wished to distinguish transvestism and transgenderism from other forms of sexual and/or gender variance, like homosexuality and paraphilias like fetishism and sadomasochism.^[1]^[8] Hirschfeld coined the term transvestism in the book.^[1]

Legacy

The original data for the cases in the book was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933 when they burned down Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science) in Berlin.^[1]

Hirschfeld was an early supporter for trans people, and his colleague Harry Benjamin became a key advocate for the trans community during the mid-1900s. Benjamin carried forward the arguments made in Die Transvestiten, which centered upon arguing for transgenderism as its own concept, different from homosexuality, fetishism, or psychopathology.^[11]

Selections from the book form the second chapter of The Transgender Studies Reader, a 2006 book edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle.^[11] The collection was seminal in the field of transgender studies and won the 2007 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Literature.^[12]^[13] The reader compares Hirschfeld's writing to other early clinical literature on transgender themes, including that of Richard von Krafft-Ebbing, Karl von Westphal, Max Marcuse, and Havelock Ellis.^[14]

References

[1]
Hill, Darryl B. (2005). "Sexuality and Gender in Hirschfeld's Die Transvestiten : A Case of the "Elusive Evidence of the Ordinary"". Journal of the History of Sexuality. 14 (3): 316–332. doi:10.1353/sex.2006.0023. ISSN 1535-3605.
[2]
Hirschfeld, Magnus (1910). Die Transvestiten: Eine Untersuchung über den erotischen Verkleidungstrieb [Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress] (in German). Berlin: Medicinischer Verlag Alfred Pulvermacher & Co. OCLC 14774739. OL 26208471M.
[3]
Hirschfeld, Magnus (1991) [1910]. Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress. Translated by Lombardi-Nash, Michael A. Buffalo: Prometheus Books. ISBN 9780879756659. LCCN 90024827. OCLC 22812111. OL 1866706M.
[4]
Lang, Birgit; Sutton, Katie (2022). "An Ethics of Attentiveness: Photographic Portraits and Deviant Dwelling in German Queer and Trans Archives". Monatshefte. 114 (3): 363–383. doi:10.3368/m.114.3.363. ISSN 0026-9271. The third mode was more anthropological; a prime example are the many photographs in the 1912 illustrated companion volume to Hirschfeld's 1910 study Die Transvestiten: Eine Untersuchung u¨ber den erotischen Verkleidungstrieb. [...] Hirschfeld, Magnus, and Max Tilke. Der erotische Verkleidungstrieb (Die Transvestiten): Illustrierter Teil. Berlin: Alfred Pulvermacher, 1912
[5]
Linge, Ina (1 November 2022). "Queer Ecology in Loïe Fuller's Modernist Dance and Magnus Hirschfeld's Die Transvestiten". Environmental Humanities. 14 (3): 618–640. doi:10.1215/22011919-9962937. ISSN 2201-1919. PMC 7613976. PMID 36544892. This is visualized in the accompanying illustrated volume [to Hirschfeld's Die Transvestiten], published in 1912, where images focus almost exclusively on clothes as costumes.90 [...] On the one hand, this confirms Hirschfeld's desire to discover the "laws on nature," which was also the title of his monograph Naturgesetze der Liebe, published the same year that the second volume of Die Transvestiten was published, in 1912.
[6]
Hirschfeld, M.; Tilke, M. (1912). Der Erotische Verkleidungstrieb: Die Transvestiten. Die Transvestiten / Hirschfeld (in German). Verlag "Wahrheit" F. Spohr. Retrieved 11 June 2024.
[7]
Hirschfeld, M. (1925). Die Transvestiten: eine Untersuchung über den erotischen Verkleidungstrieb : mit umfangreichem casuistischen und historischen Material [Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress : with extensive casuistic and historical material] (in German) (2 ed.). "Wahrheit" F. Spohr. Retrieved 17 June 2024.
[8]
Gherovici, P. (2011). Psychoanalysis Needs a Sex Change. Gay and Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review, 7(1), 3–18. https://criticaltheoryworkshop.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/gherovici_psychoanalysis_needs_a_sex_change-1.pdf "The term transvestite was coined by Magnus Hirschfeld in 1910 to describe those who occasionally wear clothes of the ‘other’ sex. Hirschfeld, a passionate sex reformer and an activist, struggled for the legalisation of homosexuality. He was also an occasional cross-dresser himself and a central political figure in Germany’s incipient field of sexology. Hirschfeld developed a theory of sexual intermediaries, contending that the existence of two opposite sexes was an oversimplification and that one could observe many varieties of intermediates. A pioneer advocate for transgender people, he argued that transgenderism could not be reduced either to homosexuality, fetishism, or to any form of pathology. Hirshfeld’s classic book Die Transvestiten. Eine Untersuchung über den erotischen Verkleidungstrieb mit umfangreichem casuistischen und historischen material (1910) was translated only eighty years later, in 1991, as Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress."
[9]
Vicente, Marta V (20 October 2021). "The Medicalization of the Transsexual: Patient-Physician Narratives in the First Half of the Twentieth Century". Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. 76 (4): 392–416. doi:10.1093/jhmas/jrab037. ISSN 0022-5045. PMID 34553224.
[10]
Bullough, Vern L. (2003). "Magnus Hirschfeld, an often overlooked pioneer". Sexuality and Culture. 7 (1): 62–72. doi:10.1007/s12119-003-1008-4. ISSN 1095-5143. Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) was one of the more influential pioneers in the study of human sexuality. Looking back, he can be seen as part of a triumvirate of path breaking physician sexologists in the early twentieth century, the other two being Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). For most of the last half of the twentieth century, however, Hirschfeld was more or less ignored in the English speaking world, despite the fact that two of his works, Die Transvestiten (1910) and Die Homosexualitgit des Mannes und des Weibes (1914), were the most significant and authoritative works written on the subjects before Kinsey and his data and are still of importance to the current generation of researchers. It has only been within the past fifteen years that these two works have finally been translated into English and are must reads for anyone doing research into almost any area of sex and gender.
[11]
Hirschfeld, Magnus (2006). "Selections from The Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress". In Stryker, Susan; Whittle, Stephen (eds.). The Transgender Studies Reader. London, New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. p. 28. ISBN 978-0-415-94708-4.
[12]
Kunzel, Regina (2014-05-01). "The Flourishing of Transgender Studies". TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. 1 (1–2): 286. doi:10.1215/23289252-2399461. ISSN 2328-9252.
[13]
"19th Annual Lambda Literary Awards". Lambda Literary. 2006-04-30. Archived from the original on January 25, 2022. Retrieved 2022-01-12.
[14]
Stryker, Susan (2006). "(De)Subjugated Knowledges". In Stryker, Susan; Whittle, Stephen (eds.). The Transgender Studies Reader. London, New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. p. 13. ISBN 978-0-415-94708-4.

Die Transvestiten: Eine Untersuchung über den Erotischen Verkleidungstrieb

Background

Contents

Legacy

See also

References

Related Articles