For some reason the article isn’t linking normally but this is amazing! I do not like that the author does not mention Hirschfeld being Jewish early enough in the article, but it’s awesome this has been restored!
For those who do not know Hirschfeld was a gay doctor who ran the first trans clinic in the world in Germany. He helped so many transition and was a great advocate for LGBT rights.
This film is great and Hirschfeld is worth talking about. He was also someone who had a complicated relationship regarding race - his lover was Asian, but he was racist towards Black folks. He was part of the German eugenics movement which led to the incarceration and sterilisaion of thousands - recommending “feebleminded” people for sterilisation - and ultimately the same logic was used to justify Aktion-T4, the Nazi murder of disabled people which was the Nazi testing ground for The Final Solution. Like many historical figures, he was a complex character - I’m not trying to cancel him here - but folks should know, his constant lionisation makes disabled people uncomfortable.
The following screenshots are taken from Chapter 9 of
Racism and the Making of Gay Rights: A Sexologist, His Student, and the Empire of Queer Love, by Laurie Marhoefer. entitled
MAGNUS HIRSCHFELD’S QUEER EUGENICS.
(Please note, I’m sorry these images are undescribed, my disability makes it a shittonne of work to transcribe and I couldn’t just copy and paste.)
[image ID from original post : Article headline screenshot. “Lost during Nazi rule in Germany, one of the world’s first pro- gay films has finally been restored for modern viewers / Filmmaker and scientist Magnus Hirschfeld’s "Laws of Love” promoted his controversial views about sex / By Isaac Würmann September 24, 2021 9:27 am EDT.“ A picture of a man holding another man’s face is included with the caption, "A still from Magnus Hirschfeld’s "Laws of Love.”“ /End ID.]
[image transcript from reblog: Magnus Hirschfeld’s enthusiasm for eugenics was not a minor, fleeting thing. It was at the heart of his vision of a better world. It was not for nothing that one of the associations he helped to found was called the Medical Society for Sexology and Eugenics (Ärztliche Gesellschaft für Sexualwissenschaft und Eugenik), or that the international congresses of the World League for Sexual Reform regularly hosted discussions of eugenics, or that the WLSR officially supported it. On his tour of the world, he talked about eugenics in his lectures. Over the course of a long career, Hirschfeld found little time for his own research. He did, however, find time to research the eugenics of transvestitism, homosexuality, and other "intersexual” conditions, 12 Eugenics, the science of human heredity, belonged to the field of sexology. As eugenics advanced as a science of its own, it would probably “form the epicenter of sexology,” in his words, 13 For almost forty years, scholars who have grappled with Hirschfeld’s thought and legacy have had to puzzle out what to make of his eugenics. Historians have fought long and hard over whether it is important or not. 14 Around the turn of the twenty-first century, a consensus opinion emerged: it held that it was not all that important. 15 A key to this consensus was the fact that, as Andreas Seeck put it in a 2004 essay, “Hirschfeld did not connect eugenics with racism."16 Another oft-repeated point was that among the many, many supporters of eugenics, Hirschfeld stood out as a left-of-center advocate of voluntarism. He promoted education; he was not, for the most part, an advocate of compulsory sterilization. This second idea is now so entrenched that two leading Hirschfeld scholars have gone so far recently as to assert that Hirschfeld was only in favor of voluntary eugenics, 18 The purpose of this chapter is to argue that we ought to revisit that consensus. 12 Not only is it based in errors, but it misses just how central eugenics was to Hirschfeld’s thinking, how important it was to his antiracism and to his struggle for homosexual liberation.
Hirschfeld thought eugenics worked in favor of gay rights. He sought a queer eugenics, that is, a eugenics that would justify some queer erotics, even as it sought to suppress other queer erotics. "Eugenics… is a science of invaluable worth,” Hirschfeld wrote, and it was at the heart of the fight for freedom, 20 Rather than unscientific racial prejudices, eugenics ought to be used to distinguish fit from unfit humans, for the good of humanity. When it came time to write a dedication for his memoir of his world journey, Hirschfeld dedicated it not to his traveling companion Li but to eugenics, 21 We remember Hirschfeld as a force for justice, but his vision of justice was stamped by the biological determinism of the late nineteenth century. Enlightenment thinkers such as Rousseau and the French revolutionaries all championed equality. As worthy as that goal was, it was based in bad science. “The premise that individuals are equal in nature and in capacities was proven wrong in the nineteenth century by natural science.” Hirschfeld was for equality and freedom, insofar as it was possible to achieve them given natural human inequality. He still wanted equal rights and democracy, with a small qualification: all adult women and men ought to have the vote, with the exception of “the mentally stultified.” 45 It is true that the eugenic programs Hirschfeld really liked were voluntary programs. He also believed in public education. If people learned about eugenics, he thought, they would apply it to themselves, for example by choosing not to have children if a counselor explained that they carried bad hereditary material. He did lots of public outreach about eugenics himself, in his lectures and publications. He supported a Weimar Republic effort led by left-of-center, sex-reform-minded people to set up hundreds of marriage counseling clinics all over Germany; some of the clinics did eugenic counseling. One was housed in the Institute for Sexual Science. Hirschfeld thought the clinics were a very good start. In a paper for the 1929 WLSR meeting in London, he described an idea for a matchmaking service that would operate by mail, matching men and women based on sexual, physical, and mental factors, as well as eugenic criteria. The decision about whether or not to marry would of course be up to the people in question. 46
Hirschfeld was very skeptical about forcing people to go along with eugenics. In Sexology III, he goes through a long list of proposed eugenic programs and gives his thoughts on them. He spends a lot of ink there mulling marriage bans or sex bans. Though he did not like the idea of banning certain eugenically unfit people from marrying or having sex, he made a few exceptions. The children of very young parents tended to have hereditary defects, thus he favored banning sex for young people-under eighteen for men and under sixteen for women. 47 He wanted bans on the unions of close relatives, for eugenic reasons. He also wanted restrictions on people who had infectious illnesses that damaged hereditary material (he does not specify which, but he was possibly thinking of syphilis). But any other marriage or sex ban was scientifically unfounded. He seemed open to laws requiring certificates of health prior to marriage, so long as the choice to marry or not remained voluntary. 49 He did not, however, have a principled objection to compulsory eugenics or, specifically, to forced sterilization. His concern was that the science was just not there yet, in most cases, though not in all cases. There were a few cases in which it was obvious that sterilization would stop the transmission of hereditarydefects: cases like that of the “feebleminded” women discussed above and cases involving alcoholism, which Hirschfeld and many others believed caused heritable damage. Sterilization was nothing more than the application of a principle that every gardener followed - one had to pull out the weeds. Yet it was not time to jump on board with an ambitious plan for mass sterilization. Human reproduction was a lot more complicated than animal reproduction; scientists did not understand human hereditary all that well yet. Large compulsory sterilization programs like those in the United States, or even more ambitious plans to sterilize hundreds of thousands of people, were impractical, he thought.20 When the Nazis passed a eugenic sterilization law in 1933, Hirschfeld, then in exile, raised essentially the same objections to it-it was too ambitious, too vaguely crafted, too tainted by racism, and too reliant on junk science. Norway’s law was much better, he wrote. As was true for other left-of-center reformers, the problem with the German sterilization law was in the execution, not in the very fact of forced eugenic sterilization per se 52
Given that one of the major apologies for Hirschfeld is that he was not a racist sterilization zealot like Popenoe, let’s take a look at how they differed. Not only did Popenoe favor a very ambitious program of eugenic sterilization; he was also a fanatical white supremacist. “The Negro race differs greatly from the white race, mentally as well as physically, and… in many respects it may be said to be inferior, when tested by the requirements of modern civilization and progress,” he and his coauthor, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, wrote in their influential 1918 textbook on eugenics, 62 In California, eugenicists like Popenoe and Gosney went after Mexican Americans in particular. The textbook repeats, in detail, the major tropes of scientific racism, such as that Black people were gregarious but hapless, with powerful, poorly inhibited “sexual impulses” but a lack of “that aggressive competitiveness which has been responsible for so much of the achievement of the Nordic race.” 64 The book inveighs against interracial marriage - many American states banned such marriages prior to 1967-as well as interracial sex and the immigration of South and East Asians. Popenoe’s book also disparaged Jews. 65 If Hirschfeld, who hated exactly this sort of racism, objected when they met, Popenoe had an answer. Germans might speak out for racial equality, but this was only because they lacked “race experience.” 66 They changed their tunes when they went to their own colonies (stripped from them after the First World War) or to the southern United States and saw societies where Black people were a large slice of the population. 7 Despite their differences, Popenoe and Hirschfeld shared common ground. Both doubted the intellectual abilities of women: Popenoe’s textbook frankly informed students that women were by nature the intellectual inferiors of men. Both wanted to sterilize the “feebleminded.” Hirschfeld, however, thought there were a lot less “feebleminded” people in need of sterilization. They were so few, in fact, that the government need not get involved. He seems to have wanted to leave the decision about whether to sterilize a “feebleminded” woman without her consent up to her doctor. He wrote, “This is in no way to deny that there are cases of feeblemindedness in which there is indeed a pressing indication in favor of sterilization. But on the whole, these are extremely exceptional cases, and moreover they can be appropriately treated without a sterilization law.” 62 Simply give physicians like himself free rein; that was what was needed. A large part of the sterilization abuse in the United States and elsewhere has, historically, been carried out quietly and informally by doctors acting on their own
In what ways was Hirschfeld’s eugenics queer? First, in the sense that it victimized queer people. In what to us seems an odd, disturbing twist of logic (though it was no twist of logic to Hirschfeld and many of his contemporaries), some of the people Hirschfeld saw a reason to sterilize were queer people, by my definition of “queer.” That is, they were people who got into trouble because they had non-normative, consensual, adult sex. He wanted to sterilize those people not only for strictly eugenic reasons, with an eye on future generations. He wanted to sterilize them in part to stop their queer behavior in the here and now. This depended on a fuzzy understanding of what sterilization (or castration) did to a person’s sex drive, an imperfect understanding that was widespread at the time. For example, the Swiss literature on eugenics around 1910 held that sterilization put a stop to masturbation; one sees such confusion in the Dutch literature as well. 80 The American state of Oregon had men castrated to stop their same-sex erotic behavior. 81 Another key idea here was that disability and queerness were inextricably linked: one’s sexual misbehaviors could be signs of one’s eugenic unfitness. “Feebleminded” people could not control their urges, for example. Sterilization could stop masturbation. In 1925, school and medical officials in Germany had a nine-year-old boy sterilized to stop him from masturbating at school and encouraging his fellow pupils to masturbate. 82 The official who oversaw the boy’s sterilization was Heinrich Boeters, a doctor who made a name for himself in Germany in the 1920s as the single loudest proponent of passing a national eugenic sterilization law modeled on laws in the United States. Boeters, on his own initiative, sterilized 150 people - most or all without consent - and announced the sterilizations after the fact. This caused a public outcry and Boeters lost his job. Prior to the Nazi takeover, eugenic sterilization was deeply controversial in Germany, though by the late Weimar period a modest sterilization law was probably in the offing. Hirschfeld thought Boeters was far too ambitious. He however defended him. He thought Boeters had done Germany a service by raising the issue, […] /End ID.]
The numbers interspersed are the footnote numbers. I can’t check this with a screenreader right now, so please let me know if I should remove them for clarity.
reblogging for @livingmeatloaf’s sterling transcription, because this shit is important. Thank you so much!
