In Hirschfeld’s phrase, all people were ‘bisexual’, not in the sense of being attracted to both sexes, but in the sense of being both sexes. Male and female, Hirschfeld wrote, were ‘abstractions, invented extremes’. Homosexuals and ‘transvestites’ – Hirschfeld’s word for anyone from part-time cross-dressers to people with a strong, unremitting identification with the opposite sex – were simply intermediate types, unusually far from those notional end-points.
