Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution

by Susan Stryker

In Austria, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs anonymously published a series of booklets in 1864–1865 under the collective title Researches on the Riddle of “Man-Manly” Love; in them he developed a biological theory to account for people such as himself, whom he called “Urnings,” and whom he described with the Latin phrase anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa (meaning “a female soul enclosed within a male body”). It was in correspondence with Ulrichs that the German-born Hungarian citizen Karl Maria Kertbeny first coined the term homosexual in 1869, which he also intended to connote same-sex love, minus the element of gender inversion to be found in the term “Urning.” Both men considered the respective conditions they described to be physical and inborn, and thus proper objects of medical inquiry. Ulrichs and Kertbeny also thought that because transgender/homosexual feelings had a biological basis, laws against their expression should be reformed in the name of a rational social order that reflected scientific truth. Their efforts represent early instances of social activism based on the idea that people we would now probably label gay or transgender were not by definition sinners or criminals but simply different kinds of people who were equally entitled to full participation in society. The logic of their arguments still informs many transgender and gay social justice efforts; more often than not, however, biological theories about gender variance and homosexuality are used to arg...