Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld - Nominee

“Soon the day will come when science will win victory over error, justice a victory over injustice, and human love a victory over human hatred and ignorance.”

– Magnus Hirschfeld

Pioneering sexologist Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld was born into an Ashkenazi Jewish family in Poland in 1868. After Hirschfeld received his medical degree, he traveled to Chicago to document the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition for a German newspaper. While in Chicago, Hirschfeld discovered that the queer subculture of that city was like the one in Berlin and other cities. When Hirschfeld returned to Germany, he began seeing gay patients and found that several of them had scars from failed suicide attempts. One of these patients, a gay lieutenant, died by suicide in 1896 and this seminal and tragic event is what changed the course of Hirschfeld’s professional life. Hirschfeld moved his practice from Magdeburg to Berlin in 1896 where he published his first pamphlet under the pseudonym Th. Ramien that stated being queer is biological and innate and should not be criminalized. In 1897, Hirschfeld co-founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee with three other men. This was the world’s first-ever LGBTQ+ rights organization in the world. Their goal was to do research in defense of queer people and work to repeal the Paragraph 175 law that criminalized gay men in Germany, of which they were unsuccessful. Their motto was “Justice through science.” Hirschfeld also joined the feminist organization Bund für Mutterschutz and argued that queer rights and women’s rights were linked. They did stop the expansion of Paragraph 175 to include lesbians from becoming law. In 1919, Hirschfeld opened the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science) in Berlin (where he and his longtime romantic partner, the German archivist and museum curator, Karl Giese lived on the second floor, however he never came out publicly) in the nascent days of the post-World War I more liberal Weimar Republic of Germany where he housed his immense archives and library on sexuality. The Institute also contained a Museum of Sex, provided educational services and medical consultations, and was the first recorded location where gender affirming surgeries took place, including Dora Richter. Hirschfeld had coined the term transvestite in 1910 to describe those who are now referred to as transgender people. One of the people inspired by Hirschfeld’s work was Chicagoan Henry Gerber who was stationed in Berlin during World War I and as a result he created the short-lived Society for Human Rights in Chicago in 1924. To further the work of the Institute, Hirschfeld traveled the world doing speaking engagements. While Hirschfeld was away in U.S., Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party came to power in Germany and they immediately moved to destroy his Institute. On May 6, 1933, Nazi’s attacked and looted the Institute and four nights later his 20,000 books and journals, and 5,000 images, were destroyed in a book burning rally. Hirschfeld and his romantic partners Giese and Hong Kong medical student, sexologist, and LGBTQ activist Li Shiu Tong were forced to move to France to escape persecution. He died on May 14, 1935, his 67th birthday, in Nice, France and was cremated. His legacy lives on today in the work that other activists are doing to further LGBTQ+ equality.