(I wrote a less detailed version of this in April 2009. This revision
incorporates details from sexologists Talmay, Henry and Benjamin.)
Otto’s family were German. Otto was the 13
th of 14 children. The
first five died of cholera. The youngest also died young. His father died when
he was four, and from then he slept with his mother in her bed until he was 14.
He was her
Nesthäckchen, the youngest living. He was girlish in
appearance and his dressmaker sister used him as a dress model. He often wore
girls’ shoes and dresses as a child.
A first experience with a woman at age 18 resulted in a gonorrhea infection.
He emigrated to the US at age 19 (1895?).
A casual gift of theatre tickets to a young woman led to him being approved
by her mother, and to marriage. They had two daughters and a son. Otto wore
female clothing at all opportunities and wore female underwear under his male
clothing at other times. He built up a wardrobe of 70-100 dresses. All the
family knew of his dressing. He went to many masquerade balls in female dress.
The younger daughter called him her papa-lady. He kept his hair long, but pinned
up. He did not go to a barber for over twenty-five years, despite his wife’s
urging. Nevertheless he became a successful businessman.
Back in Berlin Otto applied to the police for a permit to transvest, but
without success. He transvested in public anyway. Magnus Hirschfeld said that he
was an inverted lesbian, and he joined a Berlin lesbian club that tolerated
transvestites.
He was a member of Hirschfeld’s
Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres
Komitee (Scientific-Humanitarian Committee), and corresponded with
Hirschfeld. In May 1906 Spengler gave a lecture on sexual intermediates to the
German Scientific Society in New York – this is the earliest known lecture on
the subject in New York.
In 1912 Otto was propositioned by a friend who found him in female clothing.
He did not get any satisfaction from the encounter, but found it interesting.
An account of Spengler and a few other transvestites was the first such to be
presented to doctors in the US. This was in a lecture by the sexologist Bernard
Talmey to the
New York Society of Medical Jurisprudence in December 1913,
and published the next year in the
New York Medical Journal. Spengler is
not named, but simply referred to as ‘Mr S” and “first patient”.
In 1916 the five-year-old daughter of Otto’s neighbor was sent out to buy
milk and was raped and murdered. The janitress tattled to the police about
Spengler’s dress habits and he became the prime suspect. A search found
blood-stained clothing (from his wife’s most recent period) and for four weeks
he was under constant supervision. He had an alibi from a servant, and the
police offered the servant $2,000 to change her story, but she remained loyal.
It was established that the blood was menstrual, and the investigation was
discontinued. The crime was never solved.
Spengler had corresponded for many years with the Oswego, New York
transvestite doctor,
Mary
Walker, and attempted to secure her collection of pictures and letters when
she died in 1919.
He had become a medical patient of
Harry Benjamin who in 1928, at Spengler’s request , prescribed the newly developed
progynon (later known as
estradiol), an estrogenic
hormone, and x-ray sterilization of the testicles. This was Benjamin’s first
transgender case.
Shortly afterwards, Otto’s wife and son left him. The son had become the
youngest press agent on Broadway, but died of tuberculosis at age 21.
Spengler suffered a financial loss in the Depression, but continued with a
mail-order business and press-cutting service. He boasted that he had sold to
the Prince of Wales, and to the Soviet Government.
In 1931 when Magnus Hirschfeld visited New York, Otto was noted in the
audience and was pleased to be referred to as a typical transvestite. Spengler
himself quoted Talmey’s article in a letter about himself to the
New York
Evening Post in 1933.
Spengler is one of the transvestites profiled in George W Henry’s
Sex
Variants, 1941, where he is given the pseudonym Rudolph von H. Shortly after
that Otto was in a street accident, and was taken unconscious to hospital. When
his underwear was discovered, the examining physician wrote into the hospital
record: “patient is obviously a degenerate".
When George Henry (or one of his assistants) interviewed Otto, he was 64,
blind in one eye because of a cataract and glaucoma, and living alone in a small
dingy apartment cluttered with figures and portraits of women and with forms to
display dresses. There is no record of his passing.
*Not the German political philosopher.
- Otto Spengler. Monatsberichte des Wissenschaftlich-humanitären
Komitees, 5, 1906. Reprinted in 151. Jonathan Katz. Gay American History:
Lesbians And Gay Men In The U.S.A. A Discus Book, 1978: 575.
- Bernard Simon Talmey. "Transvestism. A contribution to the study of the
psychology of sex", New York Medical Journal, 21 Feb 1914, pp.362-368.
Incorporated into his Love, a Treatise on the Science of Sex-Attraction: For
the Use of Physicians and Students of Medical Jurisprudence. New York:
Practitioners' Pub. Co, 1915: 298-307. Partially reprinted in Jonathan Katz.
Gay/Lesbian Almanac. Harper & Row. 1983: 344-8.
- Otto Spengler. Letter to the Editor. New York Evening Post, February
15 1933.
- George W. Henry. Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns. New
York: Paul B. Hoeber 1948: 487-98.
- Harry Benjamin. The Transsexual Phenomenon. Warner Books Edition
1977/PDF: 51/23,29.
- Harry Benjamin. “Introduction”. In Richard Green & John Money.
Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press,
1969: 1-2.
- Leah Cahan Schaefer & Connie Christine Wheeler. “Harry Benjamin's first
ten cases (1938-1953): a clinical historical note”. Archives of Sexual
Behavior 24:1 Feb 1995: 3. Online at www.helen-hill.com/pdf/hbfirst10cases.pdf.
- Jennifer Terry. An American Obsession: Science, Medecine, and
Homosexuality in Modern Society. University of Chicago Press, 1999: 111-2,
259-260,
- Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the
United States. Cambridge, Ma, London: Harvard University Press, 2002: 46,
298n105.
- Pierre-Henri Castel. La métamorphose impensable: essai sur le
transsexualisme et l'identité personnelle.Gallimard, 2003: 51, 54, 465,
466, 472.
-----------------
There seems to be no record of Spengler’s birth year. I am using the 1948
edition of George W Henry Sex Variants. However the first edition was 1941. In
the undated interview with ‘Rudolph von H’, it is stated that he ‘is
now
sixty-four years old’. For the book to be published in 1941, the interview
cannot be later than 1940. Therefore I have presumed a birth year of 1876.
Various books on homosexuality, more than listed, mention Spengler’s May 1906
lecture in Chicago, and some treat him as a gay-rights pioneer (despite the lack
of homosexuality in his life), but do not at all mention his transvestity. Of
particular note is Terry’s book which writes about Spengler’s lecture in one
chapter, and then about Rudolph von H in another, but does not mention that it
is the same person.
Spengler would seem to be the first recorded trans person to take artificial
hormones.
Did Spengler have a female name for himself? At a guess, yes. However it is
not recorded by Talmey, Henry or Benjamin.
Benjamin discusses Spengler within the section The Fetishistic Transvestite.
Except for Progynon, Otto seems to have stayed as such until old age. Like many
trans persons in the early 20
th century, the question arises: if
modern technology were then available, would he have progressed into womanhood?
That could be argued either way, but despite being the first patient to receive
external estrogen, he never started living as female, unlike say
Danielle
O’L also in New York in the 1930s.
Castel says that Benjamin first met Spengler in 1938, Wheeler & Schaefer
say that they met in the 1920s, but that HB became his doctor only in 1938; in
Sex Variants, Spengler says that he was then 52, which would seem to be
1928. Benjamin in Green & Money, 1969, says the ‘early 1920s’. As Progynon
was developed by
Adolf
Butenandt and his future wife, and was first on the market in 1928, 1928 or
1929 is the most likely date for Spengler’s treatment by Benjamin.
Harry Benjamin, 1965: 51, knows of Talmey’s discussion of Spengler, but does
not seem to know of Henry’s.
Wheeler & Schaefer say that Spengler married at age 26, but Spengler
interviewed by Henry says 19.
Wheeler & Schaefer say: “Magnus Hirschfeld informed Otto that he, Otto,
was in fact also the inspiration for his famous work published in 1910,
Transvestism (English translation, 1991)”. They give no page reference.
I have looked in both the 1991 translation and the German original and fail to
confirm this.
Wheeler & Schaefer say: ” Otto's transvestism was described by Talmay in
his medical book entitled Love as a "sexo-aesthetic inversion of a pure artistic
imitation, occurring in highly artistic, honorable, moral, inconspicuous,
nonoffensive individuals who would never commit wrong when masquerading".
Actually, speaking not of Spengler in particular but transvestism in general,
Talmay says that it “is a sexo-esthetic inversion of pure artistic imitation.
Hence it occurs mostly in artists and in men of letters, i.e., in persons
endowed with a highly developed artistic taste. Such persons are, as a rule,
disgusted at the sight of the organs of the sex to which the individual by
anatomical configuration belongs, while such sights offer to the homosexual
individual additional charm and piquancy.”
Books in which one would expect to find at least a mention of Otto Spengler,
but is disappointed:
- Charlotte Wolff. Magnus Hirschfeld: A Portrait of a Pioneer in
Sexology. 1986
- George Chauncey. Gay New York. 1994
The original version of this article was 18 April 2009. A few weeks later, a
blogger by the moniker of Tianewu
stole
my text and posted it as her own work.
Janine
Roberts (1942 – 2016) journalist, author, TV producer, wicca priestess, bane
of diamond companies, campaigner for aboriginal rights. WorldCat
IMDB
