summary, 1897: Hirschfeld Forms Committee

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1897: Hirschfeld Forms Committee

On May 14, 1897, German physician and sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee to oppose the oppression of men and women he called "sexual intermediates." The movement's journal, the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen defined homosexuals as a third sex situated between male and female.

The masculine type	The intermediate (or Urning) type	The feminine type
The committee was influential in German and led the battle against paragraph 175. The committee and the movement it led were destroyed when nazis looted its facilities and burned the committee's books and materials in a huge nighttime bonfire on May 6, 1933. Hirschfeld's congenital theory of the Third Sex was influential during his lifetime, but was eclipsed by Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory.

Photo Credits: The photos originally appeared in the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen, 1903 and are used courtesy of the Archiv für Sexualwissenschaft, Berlin.