GLR January-February 2026

Institute. Two months before his death on his birthday (May 14, 1935), Hirschfeld revised his will, leaving his estate jointly to Li and Giese to further Hirschfeld’s sexological research. How ever, the Institute and its collections had been torched by the Nazis in 1933. Giese had joined Hirschfeld in exile in Paris in 1934 but would be arrested for “public indecency” in a Parisian bathhouse. He was expelled from France after three months in prison. He died by suicide in Brno after the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia. Li almost disappeared after Hirschfeld’s death. Ralf Dose (director of the Magnus Hirschfeld Society) and Marhoefer are largely responsible for rediscovering the traces of Li’s life. He had returned to medical studies at the University of Zurich two months before Hirschfeld died. Li tried to sustain Hirschfeld’s legacy, but the Nazis had destroyed the Institute. He attended Harvard in the early 1940s but never completed a degree. He seems to have been adrift with his grief. Moving to Washington, D.C., then back to Zurich for fifteen years, then to his native Hong Kong, Li finally settled in Vancouver in 1974. He would have been forgotten after his death in 1993 were it not for utter serendipity: a neighbor retrieved some of his belongings and manuscripts from a dumpster beside his apartment building. Eight years later they made it into the hands of Dose and now reside at the Hirschfeld Society in Berlin. Marhoefer is perhaps the first scholar to explore these frag mentary manuscripts. She argues that Li continued informal sexological research during his world travels and expounded some of his own theories in his writings. Li seems to have dis

sented from Hirschfeld’s premise that sexual orientation was congenital. Instead Li wrote: “A homosexual is not born but made” (echoing Simone de Beauvoir’s idea of women’s roles as socially constructed). It was strong bonding to people of the same sex that molded children’s homosexuality (perhaps a pro jection of his own youthful attachment to Hirschfeld). He also estimated a much higher prevalence of bisexuality, homosexu ality, and transness than did his mentor. Marhoefer argues that Li formulated a more fluid theory of gender/sexuality than Hirschfeld’s own. However, she makes clear that these writings from late in his life are a disjointed (perhaps demented) mix of fiction and reportage. Li even endorsed rumors that the Nazis burned the Institute archives to destroy evidence of Nazi ho mosexuals who had received medical care there. § R EADERS INTERESTED in a middle path into the life of Hirschfeld can turn to Brandy Schillace’s The Intermediaries . Her voice is a balance of journalistic and scholarly. She interweaves Hirschfeld’s biography with that of one of his trans patients, Dora Richter (1892–1966), or Dorchen, as Hirschfeld affec tionately called her. Schillace’s archival achievement is to piece together the life story of this early trans person who first re ceived sympathetic medical care under Hirschfeld. He also took her in at the Institute as a maid during its last decade. Born Rudolf Richter in 1892 in a small Czech-German village in Bo hemia, she lived a hardscrabble life. She struggled with con forming to a male role and wished to alter her body to feminize it. She worked various jobs trying to support her family, at times passing as a young woman. She was only attracted to men and managed to have several boyfriends while leading a double life. At the time, the only word she knew to describe herself was “hermaphrodite.” Given Schillace’s secondary focus on Dora, her history in terweaves the discovery of the “sex hormones” and their early clinical application. Dora was fortunate to have lived during the Weimar period, when there was early research on gender, sex uality, and the biology of “sexual intermediates.” When Dora was first examined at the Institute in 1923, she was diagnosed as a “transvestite ... homosexual man”—a sexual intermediary with distinctly feminine features on the binary sexual spectrum. Although the term “transsexual” had yet to be coined, the med ical technologies to help trans people like Dora were emerging. Dora had the first of three gender-affirming genital surgeries at the Institute in 1923. In 1930 she had a vaginoplasty. She was able to fulfill her life’s dream of womanly embodiment thanks to one of the few clinics in the world that could help her. Gen der-affirming care was controversial at the time, as it has be come again despite a century of medical advancements and clinical experience with transgender health. Hirschfeld’s personal life, wide-ranging studies, and com plex political engagements remain foundational knowledge not just for LGBT readers. Hirschfeld’s history draws us into the web of ever-controversial issues on gender, sexuality, racial sci ence, white supremacy, colonialism, and authoritarian funda mentalism. With these three volumes, readers have an opportunity not only to learn about the early foundations of LGBT identities, but also to consider our place in ongoing po litical struggles.

Why not recall the hot rain of this morning’s shower, or remaining nude in our bedroom, hours into a summer’s day, staring at our books—the cat doesn’t care if we are naked on top of the sheets, the cat doesn’t care if we make love, unbuttoned, delighted, oppressed, or sleepy enough to not yet feel any emotion at all, just the animal pleasure in being mostly animal—I would be an animal, a hare, say, or diminutive European deer, because of how much I want to hear Love Song Containing a Diminutive European Deer

the sound I make with your mouth at my throat

R OBERT M C D ONALD

TheG & LR

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