La Forest Potter (1855-1951), an early 1930s witness to queer New York

• 
  La Forest Potter. Strange Loves: A Study in Sexual Abnormalities. Robert Dodsley Company/ National Library Press, 1933.
  

Trigger warning: Some of the quotations from Dr Potter include words and opinions relating to sex and/or race that are today considered objectionable.

1933 was not a good year for being queer. The ending of alcohol prohibition in the US (good in itself) unfortunately led to the end of the Panzy Craze, and increased police raids on queer bars and nightclubs. In Germany, Hitler’s Nazi Party took control of the government. In the Soviet Union, Stalin’s OGPU started a reversal of the decriminalization of homosexuality that had resulted from the Revolution by arresting 198 gay men, and claiming that there was a link between homosexuality and fascism.  In England and France trans men and masculine women had been shaken after Victor Barker, John Radclyffe-Hall and Violette Morris had each lost in their very different law trials.

The New York that La Forest Potter describes falls in between that found in the earlier publications, Mowry Saben/Jennie June’s three books and the psychological study of five transvestites by Bernard Talmey, and the later study Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns (1941) attributed to George Henry but based on the research of Jan Gay. 

George Chauncey’s Gay New York: Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, published 1994 mentions Potter in its notes as a source for details, but he is not in the book’s index, and there is no mention of him or his book in the text. 

The term ‘fairy’ was commonly used in this period for effeminate gays, trans feminine persons and drag performers. Chauncey’s book goes into a lot of detail on this.

Two anecdotes referring to the book’s influence

David K Johnson’s “The Kids of Fairytown: Gay Male Culture on Chicago's Near North Side in the 1930s” in Brett Beemyn’s Creating a Place for Ourselves: Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community Histories, p111 tells us:

“Although most Chicagoans had never read a medical text on homosexuality, Harold's list of the books that introduced him to gay life did include one work by a medical expert. La Forest Potter's Strange Loves: A Study in Sexual Abnormalities was an attempt to bring medical expertise on the nature, causes, and curability of homosexuality to a general audience to help eradicate ‘the problem.’ But by outlining the prevalence of homosexuality — how America had ‘Gone Pansy;' as he titled one of his chapters — he inadvertently suggested that it was normal. Potter asserted that ‘homosexuality ... is diffused not only through all the anthropological forms of mankind — savage and civilized life — but also throughout every strata of society, and among every class of population.’ ” ... “To Harold and undoubtedly many others, Potter's line of argumentation intrigued more than it dissuaded.”

Robert Darby. “The Censor as Literary Critic”. Westerly, 31,4, December 1986: 37 tells us:

“Genuine scientific texts on sexual abnormality might be allowed in serious libraries for research use by approved scholars, but popular works were a different matter. Garran read Strange Loves, by La Forest Potter MD, as professing to be "a serious study of homosexuality", but he found its general style suggesting that it was, rather, "a book to excite curiosity". American authors, he remarked, "show no squeamishness in an open discussion of this subject; but I think its discussion in this way offends against present standards of decency in Australia." Allen agreed: ‘This book is not desirable for public bookshelves, and I should not regard it as in any way a serious contribution to medical science. It is a popularisation of information regarding sexual abnormality ... It is not well written: and in places is incorrect. For instance, it repeats mere garbled gossip about Socrates; and I do not believe that the author has read a word of the Symposium.’ ” 

Who was La Forest Potter?

La Forest Potter graduated from Boston University School of Medicine in 1884 and contributed articles to Physical Culture, the food faddist magazine run by Bernard MacFadden. He was apparently interested in 'cancer cures'; at one time he was associated with a proponent of the so-called 'grape juice cure' for cancer. Strange Loves was banned in Australia in 1936. He also wrote The psychology of health and happiness, 1897; A new treatment of cancer and chronic diseases, 1929 and various other popular medical texts. He lists membership in the New York County Medical Society, Massachusetts Medical Society, Boston Gynecological Society, Associate Professor of Rhinology, Laryngology, and Otology, New York School of Clinical Medicine, and Surgeon, Malden Hospital.

Potter's other books as listed on page opposite title page

The Advertisement

This is the advertisement that ran several times in the magazine Broadway and Hollywood Movies.

The chapters of interest:

Chapter IV THE “INTERMEDIATE SEX"

“For while admittedly there are mental hermaphrodites and mental deviates in uncounted numbers, the true “third sex, if we are to be really accurate in our description, consists only of individuals who are anatomically bisexual. … These individuals are unquestionably atavistic or retrogressive in their biological status. Nevertheless, true hermaphrodism is an extremely rare phenomenon. I stress the anatomical basis of this condition at this time in order to differentiate true hermaphrodism from pseudo -hermaphrodism -- or what I might term " mental " hermaphrodism.” 

So far, not too bad. 

However, Potter then has a sub-heading, REAL WORLD PROGRESS MADE BY HETEROSEXUALS where he proclaims that the “[homosexual] abnormality should be considered anti-social, anti-racial, and anti-biologic”.

Then still in the same chapter WHEN MEN DON WOMEN'S CLOTHES, where he writes: “To the average person it would seem that all this bother is ‘much ado about nothing’. For it would be rather difficult to see what particular harm can come to the police force, or to society in general. … However, it may be because these transvestites, as they are called, suggest abnormality (whether they are abnormal or not) that they are arrested, hailed into court and fined.” 

In his next sub-heading, IS INVERSION COMMON AMONG TRANSVESTITES? Potter contrasts William Stekel who regarded trans persons as homosexuals with Magnus Hirschfeld who from a much larger sample knew otherwise. Potter attempts to reconcile this difference with the opinion of the psychoanalyst Andre Tridon who claimed that transvestites are in the majority of cases unconscious homosexuals. 

His final sub-heading in the chapter is THE SOCIAL LIFE OF THE GERMAN URNING. He writes:

 “While it may not react greatly to the prestige and glory of Berlin in the minds of many people, it is nevertheless true that this highly cultured city boasts perhaps a greater number of homosexuals than any other city in the world -- not excluding Paris, which, for several centuries, has been notorious for its sexual profligacy. Of course, it may be that this seeming preponderance of abnormals arises merely from the fact that, in Berlin, and in Germany and Austria, the urning comes out into the open, so to speak. He does not find it necessary to skulk and slink in the hinterlands of society, as he does in European and American centers generally. However, we may attribute this apparent epidemic of homosexuality to the fact that there is less hypocrisy in Germany and more real science than is to be found anywhere else on the face of the earth.” 

This of course had been previously true, but it is ironic, sad and frightening that by the time Potter’s book was published, the Nazis had become the German government, and the purge of queer culture and persons was ongoing.

Chapter VII FEMALE MEN AND MALE WOMEN

This is a rather nasty chapter where the question is should his readers 

“place these individuals either in the same category with burglars, swindlers, and automobile thieves, or else it would permit them to be recognized as men and women who are mentally and morally sick — neurotics who are no more to blame for their condition than they would be for having dyspepsia, or sciatica, or a deviated septum”. 

Potter quotes Dr. W. Beran Wolfe, Director of the New York Community Church Mental Hygiene Clinic who blames the second opinion almost exclusively on Otto Weininger’s Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character), 1903. However he goes on to discuss opposite sex characteristics such as male gynecomastia and women with beards. He misleadingly connects this to homosexuals, whom he regards as having a female psyche. He has a brief discussion of the work of Eugene Steinach and his transplanting of gonads to animals of the other sex.

Chapter XI “The Drag”

I have previously written of the Hamilton Lodge Balls, the premier drag event in New York in the 1920s and 1930s, which attracted thousands each year. Potter does not mention them by name. He writes of the Philadelphia Mummers parade, Mardi Gras in New Orleans, The Rose Pageant in Pasadena, California. He quotes from Blair Niles’ 1931 novel, Strange Brother, but he wrote too early to include The Young and Evil, 1933 by Charles Ford and Parker Tyler. Both novels include scenes at the Hamilton Lodge Balls. 

He then comes to “THE DRAG BALL”. 

“These are the famous ‘Drag Balls’, held in many of our principal cities, on the average of once a year. The men, dressed in the clothes of women, are called ‘drags’. In New York City there are at least two outstanding Drag Balls yearly - one held at Webster Hall, in Greenwich Village, the other in the Manhattan Casino, up in Harlem. Of late years this place has had ‘the run’."

 And in a purple passage using terms, that no modern writer would, he refers to 

“the motley throng that surges and sways to the blood-boiling rhythm of a Negro band. Hundreds and hundreds of Negroes also- of every shade of black and brown— from the octoroon, hardly to be distinguished from a strikingly lovely brunette Caucasian girl, to the burly blackamoor, of pure Ethiopian type are crowded, cheek by jowl, into sense -maddening proximity. For the Harlem Drag Ball is a ‘mixed’ affair, attended by whites and blacks alike.” 

THE PARADE OF THE FAIRIES. 

“Finally the dancing floor is cleared by the police for the chief event of the evening. It is the big ‘kick’ for which most of the spectators have come -the ‘parade of the fairies’, with a prize of two hundred dollars to be awarded to the ‘fairy’ who displays the loveliest and most artistic costume.” 

$200 in 1932 = $4,700 today.

Reviews and comments

In December 1934, the pioneer gay activist Henry Gerber reviewed Potter’s book in his Chanticleer newsletter (as summarized by Jonathan Katz):

... I think the history of psychology is . . . damning evidence of man’s credulity and outright stupidity. The volume under review by Dr. La Forest Potter, who boasts of being a “late member of the New York County Medical Society, Massachusetts Medical Society,” etc., etc. . . . proves to me two significant facts: 1) that the medical authorities in America, of which Dr. Potter is a shining example, are about 100 years behind the times, and 2) that most psychologists in this country are mere yes-men who blindly and obediently follow the current authorized moral code without any regard to common sense or the results of modern scientific research ….

While the title of the book would indicate that the author had in view all phenomena of sex which seem strange to him and to the ignorant public alike, Dr. Potter deals mainly with homosexuality. . . . such a title is a profitable device for the sale of books, for the morons are always looking for something new and “strange” in sex matters. In other words, the book of Dr. Potter is just another instance of the morbid sex racket, a lurid description of sex abnormalities under the moral guise of condemnation of the queer sinners dealing in such “strange” loves in order to get the filthy details by the post office censors of “obscene” literature. Krafft-Ebing was perhaps the first author to start this racket and the volume in review is evidence of the sad fact that the end of it is not yet.

In the accepted fashion of Krafft-Ebing’s pot-boiler, Dr. Potter goes through the various artificial classifications of homosexuals. He has Chapters on the Riddle of Homosexuality . . . a chapter on the history of . . . the various unsuccessful attempts of “scientists” to solve the “riddle,” .. . special chapters on Lesbians (female homosexuals), in which the author makes the sensational statement that “there isn’t a man on earth who has a Chinaman’s chance against a Lesbian, once she has thoroughly seduced a woman to her wiles” (any doctor having knowledge of gynecology ought to know the reason to be due to the fact that males are very deficient in the fine art of satisfying a woman’s sexual needs.) [etc.] ….

.. . Dr. Potter views the psychoanalytical method of dealing with homosexuals and cites cases in which homosexuals have been “cured” by psychoanalysts. . .

But the author does evidently not think so much of this “cure” of homosexuals, for he cautiously warns that homosexuals can be cured only if they want to be cured. The only way to cure a [male] homosexual of his foible is to make him love women, a very simple process indeed, but Dr. Potter does not seem to realize that heterosexual men can be cured exactly in the same fashion from their love for women, by getting them to like men. By the same method, Pop-eye, the sailor cures children who do not like spinach by making them believe that spinach is really good for them and that every normal citizen must eat it.

Byrne Fone. A Road to Stonewall, 1969:

“Dr. Potter’s cliches resonate against the common currency of homophobic texts of the period and centuries before. He deploys the familiar accusations and links homosexuality not only with the destruction of what he suggests are virtually nationally encoded gender roles but clearly implies that homosexuality and homosexuals are effectively un-American. Because of the ‘infestation’ of homosexuality, however, the pioneer and heterosexual American virtues have been weakened and now the danger is clear and increasingly present: ‘Today there are homosexual ‘joints,’ ‘queer’ clubs, pervert ‘drags’ or homosexual plays in practically every considerable American city.’ Not only general society but American youth has been tainted by homosexuals, for ‘today there is scarcely a schoolboy who doesn’t know what a ‘pansy’ is’ ”. (p233-4)

Andrea Ens, Pain, Pleasure, Punishment, 2024:

“The book’s ad promised sophisticated adult readers clinical findings that would ‘tear away the veil of mystery that hides the facts behind homosexuality’ by demonstrating ‘the abnormal ties and the unnatural desires and erotic reactions of these twilight men and women’. But while Strange Loves’ marketers emphasized its titillating narratives of perverse sexual trysts hidden in darkness, the text itself repeatedly insisted ‘abnormals’ were often not malicious, intentional criminals, but ‘neurotics who are no more to blame for their condition than they would be for having dyspepsia, or sciatica, or a deviated septum’. This blamelessness – revealed by contemporary medical and scientific advances into the origins and impacts of ‘sexual abnormality’ – meant that American medical, social, and legal treatment of non-heteronormative Americans might allow their re-entry into ‘normal’ heterosexual society’. (p26)

• Henry Gerber, “More Nonsense about Homosexuals,” Chanticleer, Vol. 1, No. 12 (Dec. 1934), 2-3. Partially reprinted in Jonathan Katz (ed) Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay men in the USA: 595-6, and in Tracy Baim’s Out and Proud in Chicago: 38-9.
• Byrne Fone. A Road to Stonewall: Male Homosexuality and Homophobia in English and American Literature, 1750-1969. Twayne Publishers, 1995: 233-4.
• Byrne Fone (ed). The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature. Columbia University Press, 1998: 669.
• Byrne Fone. Homophobia: A History. Henry Holt and Company, 2000: 386-8.
• "More Hilarious Zeitgeistiness". Autist's Corner, February 28 2009. Online. 
• Anna Lvovsky. Queer Expertise: Urban Policing and the Construction of Public Knowledge about Homosexuality, 1920–1970. PhD thesis, Harvard. May 2015: 34, 38, 39, 41, 48, 49, 53, 54, 60, 63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72 81, 84, 86, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92.
• Alysha Maree Crossan. Liberals, Ground Breakers, and Graduate Students: Reinvestigating US Sex Surveys and Research Before Kinsey, 1900-1953. PhD thesis, University of Auckland, 2022: 46, 154, 155, 156, 157.
• Andrea Ens. Pain, Pleasure, Punishment: The Affective Experience of Conversion Therapy In Twentieth-Century North America. PhD Thesis, Purdue University, May 2024: 26-7, 47-8, 50-2, 55-6,

Potter's Bibliography

Mowry Saben/Ralph Werther/Earl Lind/Jennie June (1870 - 1950) journalist, female impersonator

(This article builds on the October 2022 article in OutHistory “Who Was Jennie June?” by Channing Gerard Joseph Online.  I accept Joseph’s argument that Mowry Saben and Jennie June were the same person, and integrate the two biographies. June – in her Autobiography of an Androgyne and The Female Impersonators – slightly altered the facts of her life such as claiming to be from Connecticut rather than Massachusetts, and that she attended an “uptown” university (presumably Columbia) in New York rather than Harvard. She also altered her birth year from 1870 to 1874. This creates problems: if she says that she was 19, is this 1889 or 1894?

Pronouns? Some writers use he/she for Jennie June which is cumbersome; some use he/him as that is what June did in her own writings. I will use he/him for the Mowry Saben persona and she/her for the Jennie June persona.

AJUS= American Journal of Urology and Sexology; Auto=Autobiography of an Androgyne)

Part I: early life

Part II: publications

Part III:  comments and bibliography 

Israel Mowry Saben was raised in Uxbridge, Massachusetts in a strict Puritan family. Israel was his father and grandfather’s Christian name, and Mowry was his paternal grandmother’s maiden name. His sister three years younger was Jennie May. The father was a noted mathematician, who was disappointed that his son had no talent in that direction. However, his private education gave Mowry fluency in Latin, French and German.

At age 14 Mowry became ‘God-intoxicated’ and attended seven religious services a week in addition to college chapel. He was the leader of prayer groups, preached from the pulpit and spent two hours a day in private devotions. He then realized that he was a ‘female impersonator’ – he told this to his family physician, who did not understand the nature of such, and suggested finding a girlfriend.

In 1891 Saben attended Harvard, at first in the college and then the law school. He became a friend of the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson. He still did preach in the slums. He also became an assistant to the lawyer, Clark Bell who among other cases was representing a ‘cultured and moneyed fellator’ who was being blackmailed by a young man whom he had pleasured. Clark Bell was also the editor of the Medico-Legal Journal.

In the summer of 1892, Saben’s other persona, Jennie June, emerged for a ‘First Nocturnal Ramble’ to New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, and then to the New Bowery. She met Red Mike for the first time.

Later that year, not sure what to make of his androgynous nature, Saben consulted three New York medical professors, two of whom were Drs Prince A Morrow and Robert S Newton. In her third book, Jennie June wrote: 

"The alienist Dr. Robert S. Newton was the third physician whom I consulted but the first who had any inkling of the true nature of my malady. His frankness put an end to my chronic melancholia. I thenceforth merely suffered from it at rare intervals. I ceased the worse than useless longing and praying for a different nature than it had seemed good to the All Wise to predestinate. The alienist opened my eyes. He taught me that the androgyne’s proclivities are not the depth of depravity that every one, even the two preceding medical advisers, had previously given me to understand." 

The other, unnamed, physician 

“gave me to understand as early as 1892 that my case was a remarkable one. This pronouncement incited me still further to keep a record of what life brought me with a view to writing an autobiography some day.”

In November 1892 and April 1893, Jennie June again did a ‘Nocturnal Ramble’ to New York’s Mulberry Street and Grand. Her ‘Fairie Apprenticeship Begins‘. She lived with Red Mike who took much of her money and abused her. She found a gig performing in a night club. (See ‘The Female Impersonator”, AJUS, June 1919). She gave out that her male name was Ralph Werther (from the painter Raphael and Goethe’s famous melancholiac). Saben finally gave up preaching and all church work.

In May, towards the end of his second year Saben was expelled from Harvard, possibly after the police broke up an all-male gathering in his room (Channing Joseph on Mowry Saben), but later other explanations were given: a ‘Nervous Breakdown’ (Auto p99) or “I was expelled from the university for being an androgyne, I came within an ace of suicide although believing that none of my family even suspected my expulsion; I having explained that my New York physician had ordered me to rest my brain on account of neurasthenia, which malady the expulsion had immediately occasioned as a matter of fact”. (II: "The Boy Is Father to the Man”) or “But the faculty, through an accident, finally discovered it [female impersonation] and immediately expelled me”.(‘The Female Impersonator’, AJUS, June 1919) or “The wreck of my happy and highly successful student-career was now brought about by a physician whom I had consulted in hope of a cure for my inversion, but not one of the two gentlemen already named. He happened to number the president of the university among his friends, and whispered to him that I ought not to be continued as a student. I was immediately expelled.” (Auto p139)

“In a few weeks I was penniless and a shelterless wanderer on the streets in midwinter. I was driven for shelter to the Bowery, because there alone lodging could be obtained for fifteen cents, and a big meal of coarse and even disgusting food for ten cents.” (Autobiography, p141) Saben was living as Jennie June and the life of a low-class fairie. "The fact that I could now satisfy every day my instinctive yearnings to pass for a female and spend six evenings a week in the company of adolescent ruffians went far towards counterbalancing the many tears I had to shed when there was nothing to divert my thoughts from my condition of an outcast and an outlaw. I never coquetted on Sunday evenings, which I devoted to worship of my Creator at some mission.” (Auto p143)

Jennie also had adventures with soldiers, even visiting them at their army camps. This led to sanctions, leading June to stop using the Ralph Werther name when seeking men or approaching doctors, and using Earl Lind instead – although the books and journal articles that she published in the 1910s carried the Werther name.

One night Jennie met a group of men who took her into a groggery near Water Street in south Manhattan, and gang raped her. 

“I was at last rendered unable to be on my feet owing to spinal trouble, and to excruciating pain in the anus whenever I attempted to walk. I was compelled to enter a hospital.”

Saben returned home. His father’s antagonism had softened. 

“Of course I never gave a true account of our period of estrangement.” (Auto p158).

What happened next is discrepant between the biographies of Saben and June.

Jackson’s Oxford Journal

• In 1894 Saben is said to have gone to England and studied at Oxford. He was there during the Oscar Wilde trials, during which he was obliged to petition for bankruptcy having liabilities of £388/16/6 after his father stopped his remittances (attested in the Jackson’s Oxford Journal). Somehow he was then able to travel to Germany and study at Heidelberg University.
• June wrote (Auto p173, 168) that her male persona became an amanuensis to a millionaire septuagenarian and the two were five months in Europe.

By the end of the decade/century Saben/June was back in the US, and in 1899 finally started writing an autobiography re their experiences as an Androgyne – although it will be 20 years before it is published. 

"But in 1900, as soon as I had this autobiography ready, I submitted it to Mr. [Anthony] Comstock in order to ascertain whether it could be circulated. He was then a Post-Office Department inspector, with power to prosecute for shipping 'obscene' matter by common carrier. He read considerable of the manuscript of this book, and stated . . . that he would have 'destroyed' it but for the fact that I impressed him 'as a person not having any evil intent." (Auto, page 24.)

Werther/June arranged to be castrated (orchiectomy) giving the reason that he suffered from spermatorrhoea. Although in his introduction to the first Werther-June book, Alfred Herzog later commented: 

“My belief is, that, feeling as a woman, desiring to be a woman and wishing to seem as much as possible like a woman to his male paramours, he hated above all the testicles, those insignia of manhood, and had them removed to be more alike to that which he wished to be”.

As Saben he became an established speaker travelling across the country giving lectures on Emmerson, Whitman, Goethe, Shakespeare and Francis Bacon, Havelock Ellis, Krafft-Ebing, religion and freedom. One of these lectures, The twilight of the gods, was published in 1903. The lecture series segued into working for newspapers, both as an editorial writer and freelancing.

An approach was made to two more doctors in New York. The first was Robert Shufeldt, an ornithologist, army doctor and eugenicist. A person using the name Earl Lind, presented a manuscript to Shufeldt by the said-to-be recently deceased Ralph Werther – also known as Jennie June. Shufeldt described Werther in a July 1905 paper in the Pacific Medical Journal: 

“Ralph Werther throughout his brief life had, in all anatomical particulars, the form of a man, though bearing to some extent the impress of the opposite sex. His psychic nature always remained distinctly that of a girl, and that, too, of a very amorous and passionate girl. In fact, he was a girl with the body of a boy. Intellectual and educated to a high degree, she passed through the most remarkable life-experience imaginable, from childhood to the day of self-destruction, which occurred before 30 years of age.  During this time, the wonderfully interesting subject of this account kept a very full diary, and scores upon scores of letters, and other matters calculated to shed ample light upon the terrible cruelties and tortures he had passed through.” 

Shufeldt however did realize that Lind and Werther were the same person, and persuaded the same to pose for nude photographs.

Dr William Lee Howard also met with Jennie June, and wrote a 1905 paper about her, “Two Souls in One Body: A Realistic But Scientific Account of a True Psychological”, in The Arena, where she is referred to as Jennie/Karl.

Also that year, Werther/Saben was diagnosed with syphilis, and was seriously assaulted by a gang of boys. He considered taking them to court, but was advised not to.

Ernst Buchard's Lexikon

Part I: life

Part II: Lexikon

Part III: history of cis words

Transgender lexicons:

Virginia Prince
Rose White
Raven Usher
Chris Bartlett
Jack Molay
Raphael Carter
John Money – part 1: gender and transexual
John Money - part II: other words

Morgan Lev Edward Holleb    

Introduction

• Ernst Burchard.  Lexikon des gesamten Sexuallebens.  Adler-Verlag, 1914.

Burchard's Encyclopedia of all sexual life was published in 1914, four years after Magnus Hirschfeld's Die Transvestiten; eine Untersuchung uber den erotischen Verkleidungstrieb, and five years after Hirschfeld and psychoanalyst Karl Abraham wrote an evaluation so that trans man Karl Kohnheim under the pseudonym ‘Katharina T’ and referred to as 'Fräulein' was able to obtain the first German Transvestitenschein, Hirschfeld's German rendering of the French term permissions de travestissement.

Hirschfeld and the French sexologist Pierre Vachet were both active nudists and had first met when German and French nudist groups had joint meetings. It is most likely that it was from Vachet that Hirschfeld learned of the French practice of permissions de travestissement, which dates from November 1800 and continued through into the 20th century - and was also introduced to the French word travestissement which he rendered in German as Transvestismus, and travesti/e which he rendered as Transvestiten.

However Hirschfeld altered the meaning by making it an erotic activity. The permissions de travestissement were issued - at least nominally - for mainly vocational reasons. They were not regarded as erotischen Verkleidungstrieb (erotic urge to dress up). Nor were the German Transvestitenscheinen regarded as erotic - they were issued so that the trans person could live, work and get on with life - the frequency or lack of a sex life did not come into it.

Unfortunately Burchard's Lexikon was published only a short while before the outbreak of war, and this probably contributed to the fact that it was never translated into English.

I used DeepL to translate the terms that seem most relevant to trans history. I also edited them slightly, mainly using bold for cross-references rather than the German 's.d.' (= see also).

Note that the entry for Geschlechtsübergänge merely says 'see Zwischenstufen'. This despite Geschlechtsübergänge being the title of Hirschfeld's 1906 book on sexual intermediaries.

In 1914 the German word Geschlecht would have invariably been translated as 'sex'.  However by usage it sometimes has the meaning which we would now translate as 'gender'.  Sometimes I adjusted the translation to this effect.

While Hirschfeld titled his 1910 book Die Transvestiten, in the contents to the book he mainly uses Geschlechtsverkleidung (sex-gender dress up) the older German term, and in the text itself, he often shortened it to Verkleidung (dress up).  Buchard's Lexikon has an entry for "Verkleidungstrieb, erotischer" but no entry for "Geschlechtsverkleidung".

Verkleidung is tricky to translate.  Kleidung=clothing, garments etc, and the prefix Ver=non standard.  Verkleidung is often translated as disguise or dress-up - neither of which is appropriate for trans persons.  This is probably why modern German writers use the English loan-word 'cross-dressing' rather than Geschlechtsverkleidung or Verkleidung, 

There is no entry for "Transvestitenschein".  Burhard used the more cumbersome "polizeiliche Genehmigung".

The Lexikon is sometimes modern - for example in stressing that trans and gay are congenital - and at other times seem quite old fashioned - see the entry for Degeneration, and the assumption that transvesting is an erotic activity.  It is a good mirror of the discussions at that time amongst Hirschfeld, Buchard and their associates.

Selections from the Lexikon.

Androgynie, Mannweiblichkeit (=Androgyny, man-femininity)

Echoes of the female sex in the bodily development of men. The symptoms can be isolated, e.g. in the development of the breasts, width of the pelvis, daintiness of the hands and feet, length and softness of the hair, etc. (gynecomastia, gynecosphysia, etc.) or they can be expressed more in the general structure of the body, as depicted by classical art in the hermaphrodite. Often Androgyny is found as a concomitant of other sexual transitional forms such as homosexuality and transvestitism. The counterpart is male body development in women: Gynandry.

Cisvestitismus (=Cisvestitism)

the tendency to put on the clothes of another age group, ethnicity, or occupational class of the same sex for the purpose of sexual relaxation, analogous to transvestitism (see Verkleidungstrieb).

Damenimitatoren (=Female impersonators)

Female impersonators, persons who professionally portray females on the stage - mostly in vaudeville or in farces, but also in serious plays.  The predisposition and inclination to do so will usually coincide and be based on the abnormal drive, recognised by Hirschfeld and described as transvestitism, to adapt the external appearance and lifestyle to the ways of the other sex.  In most cases this disposition is also supported by androgynous body development, feminine posture and movements, so that the deception, even in such distinctly feminine roles as "Gretchen" or the "Maid of Orleans", is sometimes complete.

Since transvestic inclinations also occur relatively frequently as a concomitant of homosexuality - representing a feminine stigma - homosexual predisposition is also relatively frequent with Damenimitatoren. A necessary or even only predominant coincidence does not exist in every case, as transvestitism need not be linked with homosexuality.

The counterpart of the Damenimitatoren, are female Herrenimitatoren (male impersonators and performers of so-called "trouser roles".

Degeneration. Entartung (=Degeneration)

By degeneration, we mean a state of the whole personality or of particular mental or physical characteristics, which is not adapted to the demands of the struggle for existence.  Degeneration may be due to the continued deterioration of one of the parental germ plasm or to an unfavourable result of the union of the two germinal substances. It is possible that a degenerative factor inherent in one germ cell (sperm cell or egg) can be compensated for by a compensating favourable property of the other. Accordingly, a similar strain of the parents will be more prominent in the offspring than a dissimilar one. ....

Certain sexual perversities, especially if they occur as compulsive acts as a result of neuropathic, in particular epileptic or hysterical conditions, are to be regarded as degenerative phenomena. The partial or complete inversion of the sex drive (see Geschlechtstriebes), bisexuality and homosexuality, as well as transvestitism, should not in themselves be regarded as degenerative phenomena, although they seem to be relatively more frequently associated with degeneration than heterosexuality. Similarly, we must not regard physical transitional phenomena such as androgyny, hermaphroditism and pseudohermaphroditism as degenerative phenomena in themselves, but this should be done in so far as they can be explained biologically as developmental disorders and not as transitional or mixed forms. The decision in a particular case will often not be easy and will have to depend more on the individual overall picture than on the individual phenomenon.

Erreur de sexe.

Erroneous determination of sex, caused by false hermaphroditism (pseudohermaphroditism). Correction often occurs later in life, sometimes after death by dissection.

Fetischismus, (Fetischzauber,) (=Fetishism, (fetish magic,))

Sexual fixation on a partial sexual object, or a category of identical or similar objects. It can be certain body parts, certain objects carried by beloved persons, or finally only these objects themselves. The Fetish is always based on the idea of an adequate sexual object, a beloved human person; insofar as fetishistic inclinations are only linked to this, they fall within the range of the normal ("a cloth from her breast, a garter of my love lust" Goethe, Faust.). Only when the personal object pales in comparison with the partial or objective one, and the latter, detached from the former, becomes the sole aim and content of the sexual striving, is the phenomenon to be regarded as pathological. The earlier this detachment takes place, the more pronounced the fetish appears, the less a connection can be found with a drive directed towards human persons. Only the nature of the fetish indicates this. Thus one can assume that a man who loves garters is heterosexual, a man who is only attracted by hussar boots is homosexual. The desire to take possession of the fetish, if it concerns adjuncts of the body, such as braids, can lead to bodily harm, if it concerns objects, to property crimes. The Fetish, probably always arises on the ground of a psychopathic personality, particularly unstable, but on the other hand also predisposed to obsessive fixations. Its treatment can only be psychological and must aim at a careful redirection of the sexual feeling towards a person, which of course is only possible if a personal type adequate to the sexuality of the fetishist can be determined.

Geschlecht (=Gender/Sex)

A word with multiple and comprehensive meanings. Apart from the narrower sense of the physically sexual, as expressed in the terms "sexual organs" or "venereal diseases", Geschlecht denotes not only the peculiarity of sexually differentiated living beings, but also that of all things and finally of all concepts, in that the language gives them a certain Geschlecht through the article. Finally, the "sexes" and the "succession of the sexes" are understood to be the connection of all that inhabits the earth in present, past and future times.

Geschlechtsübergänge, s. Zwischenstufen (=Sex transitions, see Intermediate Stages)

Geschlechtsumwandlung (=Gender reassignment)

The later necessary correction of the sex as a result of erroneous sex determination (see Erreur de sexe),

Gynandrie (=Gynandry)

Analogous to androgyny in the male sex, the occurrence of male secondary sex characteristics, especially in body hair, formation of the skeleton and body formation in the female sex, often associated with deficient development of the sex characteristics actually belonging to the female sex (mammary glands, etc.).

Hermaphroditismus (=Hermaphroditism)

Physical hermaphroditism in the narrowest sense. True Hermaphroditism, which consists of the presence of both male and female germ tissue (testicular and ovarian tissue), has been observed - as far as is known - five times. According to more recent findings, there seems to be more frequent occurrence of testicular interstitial tissue in ovaries and vice versa; possibly the development of the psychosexual variants or intermediate stages can also be explained by partial internal secretion of the opposite sex. In addition, a complete contrast of inner and outer sexuality, as described by Magnus Hirschfeld and this author as "sperm secretion from a female urethra", is to be regarded as Hermaphroditism. Finally, half-sided hermaphroditism, the sexual difference between the two halves of the body, occurs quite frequently in certain butterfly species, has also been observed by Hertwig in a bullfinch and by the author once in humans. Pseudo-hermaphroditism is far more common.

Historische Urninge (=Historical Urnings)

The fact that urnings, homosexuals, have often played a role in history is as indisputable as the fact that the individual peculiarities based on their disposition have played a specific part in their significance. Their biographies are of the greatest importance both for the understanding of homosexuality and of history.

Homosexualität (=Homosexuality)

Same-sex. A word formed from the Greek o/no- and the Latin sexus. In contrast to heterosexuality, Homosexuality denotes the innate or natural direction of the sexual instinct towards the same sex. It is an endogenous, original disposition, which we must count among the sexual transitions, intermediate stages (Zwischenstufen), in that it is the deviation of an important sexual character, the sex drive in the sense of the opposite sex. Not only does the fact that only sexual stimuli emanating from persons of the same sex have an a priori and constant attracting effect on homosexuals speak in favour of the predetermined disposition of this deviant drive, but also especially the fact that the entire psychosexual personality of homosexuals shows characteristic peculiarities - essentially based on a fusion of male and female components - which in a number of individual nuances represent a series of biologically typical manifestations. - In addition, the homosexual man, Urning, and the homosexual woman, Urninde, show sexual characteristics of the opposite sex relatively more frequently than heterosexuals, so-called sexual incongruities, which are causally connected with the character of the phenomenon as a gender transitional phenomenon.

In terms of time and place, homosexuality has been assessed very differently by different peoples and in different epochs according to the prevailing views. While primitive peoples were and are mostly naive about it, accepting it as a given form of manifestation and making use of the special gifts and abilities of homosexuals in appropriate professions (nursing, priesthood, teaching, etc.), while in classical antiquity it was an integral part of culture and reached its highest flowering in the scientific, artistic and especially pedagogical development of the psychological values based on it, it was later included in the general decline of morality, just like conventional love-seeking. When the ascetic worldview of Christianity countered this, it naturally turned against homosexuality in principle, in accordance with its view of the sinfulness of all extra-marital sexual activity. Thus there are - scientifically, of course, completely unfounded and untenable - threats of punishment against male or same-sex intercourse, among other things, in Germany in § 175 Str.G.B.'s, in Austria in § 129b.

On the part of doctors, attempts have been made to eliminate H. by therapeutic means, or to transform it into heterosexuality. Psychological methods of treatment have been used: Waking suggestion, hypnosis, association therapy, psychoanalysis. Success with pure H. is of course impossible, since it is, according to its endogenous disposition, too firmly integrated into the psychic personality as a whole. Suggestive healing, which usually lasts only a short time, can therefore only be based on self-deception. In the case of bisexuality (see below), a strengthening of the heterosexual component is possible under certain circumstances. It is the duty of the doctor to make a rigorous diagnosis on an individual basis. The guiding principle must be to maintain the homosexual as a useful member of human society or to make him so.

In most cases it will be the duty of the doctor to warn homosexuals against normal intercourse, to which they have no inclination, and especially against entering into marriage. Apart from the tragic conflicts which such a marriage usually causes for both parties, eugenics demands that the indication of nature, which with homosexuality so clearly points away from procreation, be heeded, especially since the offspring of homosexuals do indeed show relatively frequent and severe symptoms of stress and degeneration.

Hormone (=Hormones)

The chemical products of internal secretion in their grouping for the purpose of certain effects.

Inversion, sexuelle (=Inversion, sexual)

The inversion may be complete, so that only persons of one's own sex are sexually arousing, homosexuality, or partial and fluctuating in the choice of objects between the two sexes, bisexuality.  Sexual Inversion always represents an original, endogenous characteristic of the psychosexual personality as a whole, even if it often only appears after fully developed sexual maturity, as a reaction to adequate stimuli, which are then often mistakenly regarded as essential determining factors. With the differentiation of the sexes, a restriction to the stimuli appropriate to the disposition occurs, in the case of I. therefore to same-sex stimuli. If this attitude to the individual drive direction predetermined in the disposition is inhibited for a disproportionately long time, which is not infrequently caused by sexual mimicry, and then still appears at a later age, one speaks of delayed homosexuality.

Konträrsexualität (=Contrary sexuality)

Contrary sexual sensation is the term introduced by Westphal and adopted by Krafft-Ebing for homosexuality or sex, inversion, which does justice to the essence of the phenomenon as a reversal of the direction of the drive, i.e. a variant of the sexual life of sensation.

Perversion (=Perversion)

Any variant of the drive direction (homosexuality and bisexuality) based on psychosexual hermaphroditism. As such, perversion is fundamentally different from perversities, which represent anomalies with regard to the drive and activity type.

Perversität (=Perversity)

In contrast to perversion (Sexual Inversion, Contrary Sexuality, Homosexuality), which represents a deviation or reversal of the direction of the drive due to a variation in psychosexual individuality, Perversity means an unusual approach to sexuality, which is essentially based on subjective qualities of sensation, cruelty in active or passive form (Sadism and Masochism, Curiosity or Vanity (see Watching or Exhibitionism) or is fixed to partial attributes (fetishism) or inanimate or dead objects (pygmalionism and necrophilia), or, in the normal direction of the drive, finds satisfaction only in other forms of activity than normal coitus for reproduction.

Perversity., in contrast to perversion, which is a variation in the direction of the drive, thus represents an anomaly in the type of drive and activity.

Pseudohermaphroditismus (=Pseudohermaphroditism)

Transitions respectively of the primary sex characteristic: In the male sex there is no complete regression of Müller's ducts; in the female sex of Wolff's ducts, transitional and mixed forms of the genital organs arise, which lead from hypospadias to the formed Pseudohermaphroditism, masculinus or femininus, which, because the constitution of the external genitals is more or less in contrast to the real sex determined by the gonads, leading to erreur de sexe, which, if the secondary or tertiary sex characters reveal the true sex, gives rise to sex changes. In its most extreme form, the complete incongruence between external and internal genitalia, Pseudohermaphroditism can be classed with true hermaphroditism.

Pseudohomosexualität (=Pseudohomosexuality)

Same-sex activity without an adequate predisposition. Pseudohomosexuality can take the form of male prostitution for the purpose of gain, or for nobler motives: Attachment, veneration, gratitude to a homosexual friend, or also for lack of normal intercourse - faute de miuex. The latter occurs especially where the opposite sex is absent, in so-called single-sex environments, with men on ships, in prisons, barracks, colonial troops, with women in monasteries and convents. Among adolescents, too, sexual intercourse in the form of mutual onanism is a widespread phenomenon, especially in boarding schools.

Psychoanalyse (=Psychoanalysis)

Modern method of psychic treatment developed by Freud and his students, based on the assumption that the repression of sexual drives during the developmental years results in sexual abnormalities and nervous disorders. It is assumed that those sexual impulses are suppressed, pushed into the subconscious, as it were, which run counter to the sensibilities of today's cultured man. First and foremost among these are the child's ideas of incest, then narcissism (see below) and the homosexual component which, according to Freud, is always present in human bisexuality (see Homosexuality). If it is possible to recall these repressed ideas from the subconscious into the consciousness, which is to be helped by the real and daydreams in particular, taking into account their symbolic interpretation, then a relaxation, a reaction should occur which eliminates the state of illness caused by the repression. - Although these theories - which are only superficially hinted at here - are certainly worthy of attention, and there is no question that every psychological treatment must "dig deep", the generalisation that every neurosis can be cured in this way is certainly just as daring as the conclusions which Psychoanalysis draws from the symbolism of dreams,

Psychotherapie (=Psychotherapy)

Mental treatment. In all disorders of the sexual life, Psychotherapy is of essential importance, in addition to local or general physical treatment of existing disorders, or as an independent and sole method of cure. The aim of Psychotherapy must be the attainment of a harmonious sexuality or, if this is impossible, the happiest possible adaptation of an abnormal one to the requirements of life. Its prerequisite is that the doctor obtains complete and unreserved clarity about the entire psychosexual individuality of the person to be treated, possibly by way of psychoanalysis. The relaxation associated with this in itself is an essential healing factor for the doctor. Further therapy must be strictly individualised, using the usual methods: suggestion, hypnosis, association, milieu and adaptation treatment, in order to exert an influence on the patient in the sense of the desired success.

Transvestitismus. Erotischer Verkleidungstrieb (=Transvestitism. A type of Erotic urge to dress differently)

A variant of sexual disposition identified and described by Magnus Hirschfeld, Transvestitism expresses itself in the tendency to put on the clothes of the opposite sex, usually to style their whole appearance accordingly, often also in their habits, their nature and their occupation to follow completely what is generally customary with the opposite sex. Transvestitism therefore represents the drive to shape the surface in an opposite-sex way, or to relax an opposite-sex component inherent in the psychosexual individuality by appropriate surface shaping. Only if one takes into account that clothing in the broadest sense belongs to the individuality of man, that in many respects it plays the same role as, for example, the plumage of birds or the color of butterflies, it becomes comprehensible that an apparently so external inclination can represent a dominating basic trait of the personality, which in its constancy and uncontrollability can only be compared with the variants of the drive (see homosexuality). In fact, Transvestism, for those so predisposed is a question of life, its violent suppression leads to a disturbance of the inner harmony, which causes an unfree, cranky personality or leads to despair.

This author, in joint activity with Hirschfeld, received a picture of the enormous, previously undreamed-of spread of transvestism, since the publication of the discovery of this phenomenon, more and more such predisposed persons found the courage to entrust their inclinations to the expert, in order to receive, on the basis of an appraisal of their condition, the police permission to move about in public in the clothing of the opposite sex, which - at least in Berlin - is usually granted to them, on the condition that they do not cause public annoyance by their behavior.

As a rule, transvestites are not satisfied with an occasional and temporary relaxation, which they can obtain by putting on clothes of the other sex in their domesticity; they rather feel the need to be able to show themselves in public, dressed according to their inclination, and, if possible, to live at least for some time completely in the manner of the other sex. In general, it is easier for the transvestite woman under the present circumstances to follow her inclinations at least partially than for the man, since today's women's fashion allows a close approximation to that of men, but a man dressed femininely is conspicuous under all circumstances. There are male transvestites who prefer the role of the hard-working housewife, others who prefer that of the elegant lady of the world, and still others who prefer that of the discreet bourgeois woman; female transvestites who dress as sportsmen, as plain men from the people, but also those who like to dress in uniform. Often one finds in transvestites a peculiar combination of artistic receptivity and productivity, sometimes a special creative power, especially in the musical field. In this respect Richard Wagner, whose disposition is certainly proven by "his correspondence with a cleaning lady", is a particularly striking example of Transvestism

The historic and ethnological modifications of Transvestism, which can be traced from the primitive peoples through the cultures of all times and peoples according to the respective dress customs, are also interesting.

In the preference for certain pieces of clothing and the sexually justified inclination to wear them on one's own body, connections between transvestism and fetishism come to light. In the most pronounced cases transvestism represents the only and entire need of sexuality, the satisfaction of which requires an absolute relaxation, in others it is connected with normal direction of sexual drive, in others again with homosexuality. In the latter it appears less pure and independently expressed, being more a partial and concomitant phenomenon of the femininity often present in homosexual predisposition.

In some cases, transvestism is favored by feminine body formation in the man, androgyny, virile in the woman, gynandry, but in others there is a quite striking contrast between the absolutely masculine or feminine exterior and the urge to perform just in the exterior completely the role of the other sex.

Verkleidungstrieb, erotischer (=Dress up instinct, erotic)

The erotic disguise instinct is understood to be the urge, based on sexuality, to express in external appearance, but especially in clothing, a personality that does not correspond to actuality. If this urge refers to dressing in the manner of the opposite sex, it is called transvestitism and can be explained by the presence of other-sex components on the individual’s sex/gender identity. Another form of erotic disguise is the urge to dress in the costume of another age group of the same sex, which is called cisvestism and can be explained by infantilism and auto-eroticism as causal factors. Combinations of different forms also occur: one such combination of trans- and cisvestitism is adolescent men who long to dress as little girls. Erotic disguise may completely fill the sexuality, so that in the possibility of satisfying it, other sexual inclinations do not exist and only its compulsory suppression causes sexual irritations, possibly also nervous symptoms of illness; but it can also occur in connection with sexual urge expressions of a hetero- and homosexual nature. Infantilistic cisvestitism naturally often coincides with paedophilic tendencies.

Zwischenstufen (=Intermediate stages)

By Zwischenstufen we mean all sex/gender transitional phenomena both physical and mental: The different forms of androgyny, pseudohermaphroditism and hermaphroditism in the field of physical; homosexuality and transvestitism in the field of mental hermaphroditism. The latter finds their explanation by analogy to physical transition symptoms, to which they are often concomitant.

Felix Abraham (1901 - 1937) doctor, Hirschfeld associate

Part I: life

Part II: book

Initial version: February 2016.

Felix Abraham and his older sister, Erna, were the children of a Dutch mother and a Frankfurt am Main doctor, the Jewish medical councillor (Sanitätsrat) Dr. Siegmund Abraham (1866-1929). The mother died when Felix was eleven. At school he got good grades in religion, Latin, singing and gymnastics, but in those only. Erna married an engineering entrepreneur, Erich Marx, in 1919. Felix studied medicine at Heidelberg, Frankfurt am Main and Berlin from 1920 onwards and finally obtained his doctorate in his home town in 1928 with a thesis on the mortality statistics of the first year of life. He completed his practical year at the Municipal Hospital and the Israelite Hospital in Frankfurt am Main. Whilst a student he had already published a paper in Therapie der Gegenwart on “Surgical interventions in abnormalities in sex life”.

Shortly afterwards he started working at Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, which had been re-oriented from a scientific-practical institution to one mainly for treatment, which also provided educational courses and political activities. Hirschfeld had known Felix’s father Dr. Siegmund Abraham, before he died in 1929. However Hirschfeld was soon less than happy with the son. He claimed that Abraham was "not hardworking enough" and "too passive" - yet he loved him "in his awkwardness and eagerness". Nevertheless Abraham became an independent associate of the Institut, took over from Arthur Kronberg the specialization in working with transvestites, and became head of the sexual forensic department. For this purpose, he was provided with his own consulting room and a living room and bedroom in the Institut. Adelheid Schulz (1909-2008), the housekeeper in the Institut from 1928 to 1933, reported that Abraham was listless in fulfilling his duties and was known to take drugs and be drunk on occasion.

However he was active as an expert witness in court cases, wrote expert opinions so that Toni Ebel, Charlotte Charlaque and others could obtain a Transvestitenschein. He and Hirschfeld were on the honorary committee of the transvestite association Club D'Eon, and he prescribed that trans persons should go to other transvestite bars in addition to the Club D'Eon. He, like Karl Giese, became concerned about marriage issues for trans persons, and a special marriage counselling centre for transvestites was set up in the ten-point programme of the D'Eon association. Abraham was also responsible for indictable "sexual offences" as well as infantilism, exhibitionism and flagellation. He was a close friend with the noted pianist Ellen Epstein, who had played with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra.

With Hirschfled and Charlotte Charlaque, acting as interpreter, he attended and gave a lecture at the World League for Sexual Reform in London, 8-14 September 1929. In 1930 he was quoted in Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft und Sexualpolitik: "The number of transvestites is greater than one would expect. In Berlin alone, 1000 cases have become known to us". He advocated “emergency surgery” - castration and sometimes penectomy - to forestall self-mutilation or suicide that desperate trans women might turn to.

In 1930 there was a sensational murder in Berlin. Fritz Ulbrich, a watch repairman, was an adventurous amateur erotic photographer who persuaded over 1,000 teenage girls to pose nude and in lesbian and S&M stagings. In 1929 he recruited the 15-year-old Lieschen Neumann and photographed her for many months. In 1930 she decided to steal his money. She got her boyfriend and his friend to do the deed, but Ulbrich woke up and they killed him. They were quickly apprehended and at a sensational trial in early 1931 the pregnant Lieschen was sentenced to 8 years 3 months, the second friend to 6 years 3 months and the boyfriend to be hanged. Abraham worked with the criminologist Erich Wulffen (who in his 1923 book, Das Weib als Sexualverbrecherin [Women as Sex Criminals], had depicted women as being of less intelligence and sensitivity, with an innate disposition to prostitution) to edit Ulbrich’s collection of photographs. This came out as a book later in 1931 with 150 of Ulbrich’s photographs, with some photographs depicting Ulbrich and his environment, some facsimile reproductions of his correspondence and a court drawing. The first edition was retracted by the publisher and 20 of the plates removed. Many years afterwards copies were still being confiscated by police in Germany and Austria.

Abraham’s four-year contract was not extended by Hirschfeld in the run-up to its expiry in 1933 - for whatever reasons. Hirschfeld was considering Dr Josef Weisskopf (1904-1977) from Brno/Brünn in Czechoslovakia - who organised the 1932 World League for Sexual Reform conference - as Abraham's successor. However when Hirschfeld left on his world tour in November 1930, Abraham officially became Hirschfeld's deputy.

In 1931 he wrote up a report on the first sex-change operations arranged by himself, with surgery by Ludwig Levy-Lenz and Erwin Gohrbandt. Both Dörchen Richter and Toni Ebel had recently had vaginoplasty and their operations were featured. This report was the only account of male-to-female surgery published in a medical journal in this period. In the report he says: 

“I just wanted to give a description of the procedure itself, because I believe an infinite number of patients with these same inclinations exist, who desire similar procedures, but do not know of any means and ways to achieve same. (1931, second page)”

The report concluded: 

“Both cases are part of a larger book that I am working on at this time. I have extracted these cases because they seem to me of principle value and general interest.” 

The expansion came out later that year published in Paris as Les Perversions Sexuelles translated into French by Dr Pierre Vachet. It was in effect a summary of Hirschfeld's work.

At the end of 1931, Eric Thorsell, a Swedish metalworker and later a homosexual activist, came to Berlin for study purposes and took a room at the Institut. Abraham was holding public evening events where he answered questions from the audience. Eric and Felix thus met and became friends.

In August 1932, Abraham and Toni Ebel (using the pseudonym "Wally, formerly Leo E.”) were interviewed by a journalist from Das 12 Uhr Blatt. Abraham said: 

“Of course we could not make a woman out of the man Leo E. who would be able to bring children into the world. At least cosmetically, if you want to call it that, Wally E. has become completely like a woman through the operation. Above all, she now feels herself to be one hundred percent woman, and the man who loves her can, with a little illusion and imagination, find in her the woman he wants her to be.”

Abraham attended the fifth and last World League for Sexual Reform conference in Brno 20-26 September 1932. For the first time the WLSR was allowed to meet in a state university institute, namely in a lecture hall of Masaryk University.

The 1933 film by Lothar Golte, Mysterium des Geschlechts, features two medical students who learn about "most interesting questions of sexology" and fall in love in the process. Documentary sequences show sex reassignment surgery and transplants of animal testicles and explanations about abortion and contraception. Abraham is listed as contributing to the script, presumably the sexual surgery segments (in which Dora Richter, Toni Ebel and Charlotte Charlaque can be seen) - presumably film archives from the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. The premiere was in Vienna 27 April 1933, but due to massive protests it was removed by police intervention after only a few days. In Germany, it was not even shown in public, as it was banned by the censors.

Abraham was one of only three doctors (with Ludwig Levy-Lenz and Bernhard Schapiro) still at the Institut when it was destroyed by the Nazis on 6 May 1933. By this time he was in financial difficulties and turned to his sister’s husband, Erich Marx, for help. He was also said to be taking morphine and Veronal.

He survived and continued working in Berlin as a doctor, but changed addresses several times, and was unable to continue working with transvestites. Writing in 23 September 1933, the Swedish journalist Ragnar Ahlstedt (1901-1982) gave the following mood and situation report in a letter to Eric Thorsell:

 "The Institut, as you know, is completely destroyed. Abraham, however, has opened his own practice - as long as he is allowed to run it now. He receives patients in Fasanenstraße, a cross street to Kurfürstendamm, not far from the zoo, and his home address is Budapester Straße 21. But I haven't heard from him for several weeks and therefore fear that something has happened. But it may also be that either his letters or mine have disappeared. At least his letters often have the 'bad luck'. My trip to Berlin in July was actually for him personally. I wanted to make sure that no harm had come to him and to encourage him to persevere. But the blow hit him hard too, you could tell, even if he tried to hide it in every way. Only a few days ago, however, I received a letter from mutual friends saying that he could hardly bear the strain without breaking down. And to save him from a nervous breakdown, they want him to go to France. I was asked to influence him in this direction, but I could not decide to do so, because basically it is a matter between him and his conscience. I believe that he would rather fall at his post than abandon his German patients. Surely you too know how dependent they are on him as a spiritual support. I feel so sorry for Abraham, because he is after all a person who is special in every way. Sometimes one hardly dares to think of the future."

Around this time Abraham met Pini Engle, also Jewish, who later became his wife.

In 1936 Abraham attempted to emigrate to Sweden. He knew doctors and journalists there including Ragnar Ahlstedt. He applied for a residence permit at the Swedish Supreme Social Authority in Stockholm on 12 August 1936, giving "medical work and studies" as the reason for his entry. However his application was rejected on 5 December 1936 without further explanation. Eric Thorsell wrote in his journal: 

“He tried to get work as a doctor here in Sweden, but it didn't work out. He was Jewish and almost the entire medical profession was Nazi influenced. So he had to get by with the support of his friends. His friends in Germany sent him a ten-kroner note hidden in a newspaper every time. He lived in a boarding house in Wallingatan, where I visited him a few times. Abraham's fate was tragic - he didn't manage to keep the spark of life glowing after everything fell apart for him in Germany."

In sadness, he returned to Berlin, and for a while lived with Pini’s father, Alexander Engel, a publishing bookseller.

In April 1937 Abraham moved to Florence, Italy with the intention of taking the Italian state medical examination. However the Berlin police had filed charges against him for abuse of narcotics. He took his own life in September.

His sister, Erna, her husband, the mechanical engineering entrepreneur Erich Marx, and their two children, managed to emigrate to England in November 1937.

The commemorative plaque in Florence

Alexander Engel died on 1 July 1939 in the hospital of the Israelitische Privat-Klinik e.V. in Munich.

Abraham’s friend Ellen Epstein died in a slave work camp in Latvia in 1942.

There is commemorative plaque for Abraham’s burial in the Cimitero Israelitico di Caciolle in Florence.

* not the Felix Abraham who wrote about South Africa.

• Felix Abraham. “Chirurgische Eingriffe bei Anomalien des Sexuallebens” (Surgical interventions in abnormalities in sex life) Therapie der Gegenwart, 67, 1926: 451-5.
• Felix Untersuchungen über die Veränderungen der Sterblichkeitsstatistik des ersten Lebensjahres in Frankfurt a.M. MD Thesis,1928. (Studies on the changes in mortality statistics of the first year of life in Frankfurt a.M.). Published by Druck, 1928.
• Felix Abraham. “Auf den spuren des Sexualverbrechens”.(On the trail of the sex crime) Die Aufklarung, 1,8,1929: 232-5.
• Karl Plättner, with Forwards by Magnus Hirschfeld and Felix Abraham. Eros im Zuchthaus. Sehnsuchtsschreie gequälter Menschen nach Liebe. Eine Beleuchtung der Geschlechtsnot der Gefangenen, bearbeitet auf der Grundlage von Eigenerlebnissen, Beobachtungen und Mitteilungen in achtjähriger Haft. Mopr-Verlag, 1929. English translation: Eros in prison : tormented cries of yearning for love.Redlines Press, 2020.
•  “Ein interessanter Tranvestit”. Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft und Sexualpolitik, XVI, 2, 1930: 145-6.
• Felix Abraham. “Transvestiten!”, Die Aufklärung 1930; 2: 165.
• Erich Wulffen & Felix Abraham (eds). Fritz Ulbrichs Lebender Marmor: Eine Sexualpsychologische Untersuchung Des den Mordprozess Lieschen Neumann Charakterisierenden Millieus und Seiner Psychopathologischen Typen - Photomaterial aus den nichtbeanständeten Aufnahmen des Ulbrich'schen Nachlasses (Fritz Ulbrich's Living Marble: A Sexual Psychological Investigation of the Millieu Characterising the Murder Trial of Lieschen Neumann and its Psychopathological Types - Photographic material from the uncaptioned photographs of Ulbrich's estate.).Verlag für Kulturforschung, 1931.
• Felix Abraham. “Genitalumwandlungen an zwei männlichen Transvestiten”. Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft und Sexualpolitik, 18: 223-226. 1931. English translation as “Genital Reassignment on Two Male Transvestites”. The International Journal of Trangenderism. 2, 1. Jan-Mar 1998.  Archive.
• Félix Abraham translated into French by Pierre Vachet. Les Perversions sexuelles d'après les traveauxdu docteur Magnus Hirschfeld .  Editons internationales François Aldor,
• L Rhan. “Gespräch mit einer Frau, die einmal ein Mann war” (Conversation with a woman who was once a man). Das 12 Uhr Blatt,2 August 1932.
• Lothar Golte (dir). Mysterium des Geschlechts. Scr: Lothar Golte, Felix Abraham & Professor Pehem, with Dora Richter, Toni Ebel and Charlotte Charlaque. Austria BW 1933.
• Charlotte Wolff. Magnus Hirschfeld: A Portrait of a Pioneer in Sexology.Quartet Books, 1986: 178, 426, 432, 436-7.
• Rainer Herrn. Schnittmuster des Geschlechts: Transvestitismus und Transsexualität in der frühen Sexualwissenschaft. Giessen: Psychosozial-Verlag, 2005: 115-6, 120-6, 153-6, 183, 185, 192, 195, 197-8, 203, 210, 217.
• Raimund Wolfert & Ralf Dose. “Felix Abraham”. Stolpersteine in Berlin, 12.11.2016. Online.
• Herbert Henck. Ellen Epstein (1898-1942): A Jewish artist from Silesia.  Online.

DE.Wikipedia     Institut für Sexualwissenschaft      Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft e.V.    Frankfurter Personenlexikon

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Also at the Institut were Karl Abraham and Hans Abraham. It is not known if they were related.

While Felix Abraham was the Institut doctor with special responsibilities for ‘transvestites’ for only four years, 1929-1933, he did more for trans persons than any other doctor before Harry Benjamin almost three decades later. He certainly did more than his predecessor Arthur Kronberg who as a psycho-analyst preferred the ‘talking cure’ to practical help. Abraham was more in line with Hirschfeld’s approach to allow patients to dress as they pleased and to acquire a Transvestitenschein.

There are no documents about the time and place of the Abraham-Engel marriage - it may not have taken place until the beginning of 1937. Pini Engel's life and fate are otherwise also unknown. The fact that they were married can only be deduced from a few preserved private letters and Felix Abraham's Italian death certificate, in which he is referred to as "marito di Pini Engel".

The Israelitische Privat-Klinik in Munich continued taking Jewish patients after they lost their entitlement to treatment in public hospitals after 1933.   In May 1942 Heinrich Himmler ordered the hospital to be evacuated. The patients, nurses and doctors housed in the house, including the chief physician Dr. Julius Spanier, were deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in three successive transports in June 1942.