Magnus Hirschfeld, born on this day in 1868, was a German physician, sexologist, and feminist whose books were burned by the Nazis. His work was among the earliest advocacy for homosexual and transgender rights in the modern period, according to historian Dustin Goltz.

Hirschfeld was born to a Jewish family in Kolberg, Poland on May 14th, 1868. After completing his studies, Hirschfeld lived in the United States for eight months.

While in Chicago, Hirschfeld, himself a homosexual, noted a strong similarity between the gay subculture between that city and Berlin, leading him to a theory of universality of homosexuality in the human condition.

Hirschfeld became interested in gay rights because many of his gay patients took their own lives. He was struck by the number of his gay patients who had "Suizidalnarben" (scars left by suicide attempts), and often found himself trying to give his patients a reason to live.

During the Harden-Eulenburg affair of 1906-09, a prominent sex scandal in Imperial Germany, Hirschfeld testified "homosexuality was part of the plan of nature and creation just like normal love", causing a national scandal.

Hirschfeld developed a system which categorized 64 possible types of sexual intermediary, including those he described under the term "transvestite", which he coined in 1910, and those he described under the term "transsexuals", a term he coined in 1923. Hirschfeld and the Institute for Sexual Sciences issued a number of transvestite passes to trans people in order to prevent them from being harassed by the police.

Hirschfeld co-wrote and acted in the 1919 film "Anders als die Andern" (English: "Different From the Others"), in which Conrad Veidt played one of the first homosexual characters ever written for cinema. The film had a specific gay rights law reform agenda; after Veidt's character is blackmailed by a male prostitute, he eventually comes out rather than continuing to make the blackmail payments. His career is destroyed and he is driven to suicide.

Less than four months after the Nazis took power in 1933, Hirschfeld's Institute was sacked. On the morning of May 6th, a group of university students who belonged to the National Socialist Student League stormed the institution, shouting "Burn Hirschfeld!" and began to beat up its staff and smash up the premises.

The state seized the Institution's library and held a book burning event four days later. Berlin police arrived at the institution and announced that it was closed forever. Hirschfeld, out of the country at the time, became a political exile and never returned to Germany.

In 1896, one of Hirschfeld's patients, a young army officer struggling with his homosexuality, killed himself. In his suicide note, the officer stated: "The thought that you [Hirschfeld] could contribute a future when the German fatherland will think of us in more just terms sweetens the hour of my death."

"This Soviet World" by Anna Louise Strong(1936) :soviet-heart:

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