Magnus Hirschfeld was born in 1868 as the son of a Jewish doctor in Kolberg, East Prussia. He studied medicine in Breslau and eventually came to Berlin, where he obtained his doctorate in medicine in 1892.

From 1896, he published his first work “Sappho and Socrates or how does the love of men and women for people of their own sex explain itself?” under a pseudonym. In it, he also describes the suicide of a young man who takes his own life for fear of persecution and disgrace due to Paragraph 175, which criminalized sexual acts between men. In May 1897, he used this story as the impetus to found the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, the world’s first organization for the rights of homosexuals. Among the founding members in his Charlottenburg apartment were Hirschfeld’s publisher Max Spohr, the writer Franz Joseph von Bülow and the lawyer Eduard Oberg. They chose the motto “through science to justice” in order to ensure that scientific research would lead to a reassessment of homosexuality as well as to its recognition and corresponding changes in the law.

In his first medical publication, Hirschfeld explains his “theory of intermediate stages”: he shows sexuality in a spectrum with many stages from heterosexual to homosexual, but already introduces a second dimension with identity, also with stages between gender-conforming on the one hand and non-gender-conforming on the other. A wide range of predispositions and an enormous diversity of human sexuality and identity. A plea for the diversity of people and a highly topical and modern view of today’s 21st century, which can be considered the first foundation of today’s queer theory.

From 1899 to 1923, Hirschfeld published 23 volumes of the “yearbook of intermediate sexual stages” with his latest scientific findings.

Hirschfeld recognized the importance and necessity of shaping public opinion. When Paragraph 175 was included in the new penal code of the German Reich in 1871, the Minister of the Interior justified this decision with consideration for the “people’s sense of justice”. In 1903, Hirschfeld set up a propaganda commission at the WHK to educate the public and disprove false stereotypes about homosexuality. The leaflet literature provided important support for the WHK’s petition to repeal Paragraph 175. 18,000 copies of the WHK’s most popular title, “What should the people know about the third sex?”, were printed in 1901 and its total circulation reached 50,000 over the next decade.

More than 2,000 representatives from politics, science, culture and business also signed the WhK petition, such as the painters Walter Leistikow, Max Liebermann and Käthe Kollwitz and the writers Rainer Maria Rilke, Hermann Hesse, Heinrich and Thomas Mann as well as Stefan Zweig and the scientist Albert Einstein.

The young Social Democrats also supported the WhK. Its chairman, August Bebel, signed the petition and introduced it unsuccessfully as a bill in the Reichstag several times between 1898 and 1904. In 1929, the WhK achieved a major success. The Criminal Law Committee of the German Reichstag decided to no longer criminalize homosexuality in the planned new penal code. However, as a result of the economic crisis and emergency ordinance cabinets, a vote in the Reichstag did not take place.

In 1919, Hirschfeld founded the world’s first institution for sexual research, his Institute for Sexual Science, which quickly gained worldwide recognition. For the institute, Hirschfeld bought the house at Beethovenstraße 3 in Berlin’s Alsenviertel district, just west of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, opposite today’s Magnus-Hirschfeld-Ufer. There is also a memorial plaque.

Regular lectures, courses and treatment of sexually transmitted diseases, counseling on sexual problems of heterosexual and queer people were just as much a part of the institute’s field of activity as international networking. The institute was an archive, training and research center, museum and refuge for people in sexual distress. It soon became so well known internationally that the sexual punishment laws of the Soviet Union, Norway and Czechoslovakia were relaxed on the basis of his research findings.

In 1919, Hirschfeld co-wrote and starred in the first gay film in film history, “Different from the Others” by Richard Oswald. The film is about a gay musician who is blackmailed by a hustler. In it, Hirschfeld more or less plays himself, a doctor who teaches that homosexuality is not a disease. His 18-year old life companion Karl Giese also appears in the film. The surviving parts of the film can be found on Vimeo.

Hirschfeld also campaigned for trans people. In his third publication, “ The Transvestites – An Investigation into the Erotic Disguise Instinct” from 1910, he introduced this new word “transvestite”. Hirschfeld later wrote expert opinions and confirmed, in the so-called transvestite certificate, that a person born male felt like a woman and vice versa. The police recognized this, which led to permission for the person to wear clothes of the opposite sex in public. What was understood by the word “transvestite” at the time would today be expressed in a more differentiated way with the terms trans* person, drag queen, drag king, cross-dressing, non-binary and gender-nonconforming, among others.

Hirschfeld’s institute operated on Lili Elbe in 1930. The story of his patient is known today from the film “The Danish Girl”, a lesbian painter from Denmark who was one of the first people to undergo gender reassignment surgery in Berlin and Dresden. Unfortunately, she died of complications after the 4th operation in Dresden.

Hirschfeld was often the target of National Socialist smear campaigns, especially in the “Stürmer”, and his lectures were increasingly disrupted by thugs. On the advice of friends, Hirschfeld did not return from his trip around the world at the end of 1930. He first lived in Zurich and Ascona in Switzerland, then in Paris.

During his exile in Paris, Magnus Hirschfeld and his partners Li Shiu Tong and Karl Giese attempted to re-found the Institute for Sexual Science. However, this attempt failed. Hirschfeld died in exile in Nice in 1935. His grave bears the motto of the WhK in Latin: “per scientam ad iustitiam”, “through science to justice”.

After his death, his last book “Racism” was published in 1938. Again, he is clearly ahead of his time and states that race is a social concept invented by man that cannot be medically proven and encourages false prejudices. He points to the pseudo-scientific roots of racial theory and thus posthumously opposes colonialism and the ideology of Hitler and the National Socialists. As if he had suspected what the worst would happen in the following years.