Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution

by Susan Stryker

Transsexual: This term is sometimes traced to the early-twentieth-century German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who wrote of seelischer transsexualismus, or “spiritual transsexualism,” by which he meant having feelings or emotions or aesthetic sensibilities usually attributed to the binary gender other than the one assigned at birth. For Hirschfeld, what came to be called transsexualism or transsexuality later in the twentieth century was encompassed within his definition of transvestitism (see below). A 1949 article in Sexology magazine by Dr. David O. Caldwell, titled “Psychopathia Transexualis,” described a person assigned female at birth who thought of himself as a man, but the word transsexual was not popularized until Dr. Harry Benjamin starting using it in the 1950s, in the aftermath of the spectacular publicity given to the 1952 surgical “sex change” of Christine Jorgensen.