Theory of sexual intermediaries
성적 중간 단계론
Magnus Hirschfeld’s doctrine that every man and woman is a unique mixture of male and female traits and that homosexuality is one such inborn variation. Explaining homosexuals as a “third sex” between man and woman, it gave the campaign against Paragraph 175 its theoretical basis.
In depth
Hirschfeld first sketched it in his first sexological work, Sappho and Socrates (1896). It refined, with newer research methods, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’s theory of a “third sex”, which had been backed in the late nineteenth century by data on embryonic development; in Geschlechtsübergänge (1905) he tried to establish laws for the frequency of sexual “deviations”. For him intermediaries were inborn, unchangeable mixed types visible in body, character and desire, and such mixtures, which he sorted into 81 basic types, were the rule. In 1914 he defined sexual intermediaries as “men with female and women with male traits”. Arguing that what is inborn cannot be punished, he spread the theory through lectures and pamphlets, and it became the line of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee. Adolf Brand and the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen rejected it for tying homosexuality to femininity, and Hans Blüher countered that only virile homosexuality was normal while the effeminate “third sex” was pathological. Opposition to its biologism within the committee continued, and after Hirschfeld resigned in 1929 the committee turned to psychology and sociology. Long reduced to a theory of homosexuality, it has also been reread as a “plea for human diversity” that refused to pathologise bodies and minds deviating from social gender norms.