1897

In Germany, Magnus Hirschfeld and associates establish the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, which demanded equal rights for homosexuals and demanded repeal of Paragraph 175 of German legal code on sodomy (Sengoopta, 448). Hirschfeld seized on the developmental hypothesis of homosexuality (contra older degeneration theory) while denying that the developmental error in homosexuality led to the feminization of the psyche alone; he held that the homosexual’s body too “was, rather, a harmonious fusion of the two [i.e., of masculinity and femininity]. . . . Hirschfeld, in short, regarded homosexuality as a morphological but nongenital form of hermaphroditism” (452). Hirschfeld breathed new life into Ulrichs’s idea of sexual intermediacy, which became popular with activists, while its scientific tone and language “facilitated its quick dissemination (although not necessarily universal acceptance in medical circles” (454). Yet, “his [Hirschfeld’s] conceptualization of homosexuality remained essentially pathological – as did that of virtually every contemporary medical writer on sexuality. For Hirschfeld, the world was full of sexually intermediate organisms, but they had come into being owing to anomalous biological processes that needed to be understood” (454-455, emph . in original). . . . “If Hirschfeld was to be believed, then, homosexuality was, at the same time, a form of variation of the human species, a pathological entity, and a protector of the species against degeneration [;] [it developed as a “prophylactic” against degeneration in families sliding toward a degenerative sequence]. These fundamental inconsistencies came into harsh focus when one strand of Hirschfeld’s thought – that male homosexuals were pathologically feminized – compelled him to support the ‘treatment’ of a condition that he claimed was a mere variety of nature and that – he also held – should be left untreated for eugenic reasons” (455).