How Transgender Historians Gave Magnus Hirschfeld the Marsha P. Johnson Treatment

What about the eugenics, the Nazi doctor who pioneered ‘sex change,’ and the files on Hirschfeld’s prominent Nazi patients?

Magnus Hirschfeld and p. 12 from Harry Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon (1966), where Benjamin first mentions “too many data on prominent Nazis, former patients of Hirschfeld.”

Hirschfeld and his pupils saw many of these persons [transvestites, mostly cross-dressing men] in his Institute of Sexual Science in Berlin, Germany. This memorable Institute with its famous and rich museum and its clinic and lecture hall (Haeckel Saal) was destroyed by the Nazis rather early in their march to power (1933). (This destruction occurred soon after the first and only issue of Sexus, an international sexological magazine, was published by Hirschfeld while he was away from Germany.) The Institute’s confidential files were said to have contained too many data on prominent Nazis, former patients of Hirschfeld, to allow the constant threat of discovery to persist. (pp. 11-12)

- Harry Benjamin, The Transsexual Phenomenon: A Scientific Report on Transsexualism and Sex Conversion in the Human Male and F…