The Forgotten History of the World's First Trans Clinic

To mark LGBT+ History Month and its theme of medicine, we explore the life and work of doctor Magnus Hirschfeld, a researcher of sexuality and gender in the early twentieth century.

The early 20th-century German trans-rights activist who transformed the world’s view of gender and sexuality

By contrast, Hirschfeld’s approach was all-inclusive. In his view, all “sexual intermediaries” – whether L, G, B, T, Q, or I in today’s parlance – were worth recognizing and protecting. He once calculated that there were 43,046,721 possible variants of human sexuality. That was simply another way of saying that the human species was infinitely diverse.

“Love,” he said, “is as varied as people are.”

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Hirschfeld, who was Jewish, was on tour lecturing on sexual science. From abroad, he watched newsreels of his Institute for Sexual Science set aflame by Nazi storm troopers. Thousands of unique medical records, publications, photos and artifacts were destroyed.