Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution

by Susan Stryker

Richard von Krafft-Ebing, supplied a great many terms in the several editions of his influential medical compendium, Psychopathia Sexualis, first published in 1886. These included “antipathic sexual instinct” (disliking what one should find erotic based on one’s sex or gender), “eviration” (a deep change of character in which a male’s feelings and inclinations become those of a woman), “defemination” (a deep change of character in which a female’s feelings and inclinations become those of a man), and “metamorphosis sexualis paranoica” (the psychotic delusion that one’s body was transforming into another sex). Krafft-Ebing also wrote about “insanity among the Scythians” (an ancient nomadic people from the Eurasian steppes who sometimes practiced ritual genital modification as part of their religious observations) and mujerados, “male women” noted by the Spanish conquistadors during the colonization of the Americas, whom he believed had become feminized through excessive masturbation, leading to atrophy of the penis and testicles.