Hirschfeld was well aware that creating a third sexual category meant the addition of a further "fiction" to the equally fictional categories of man and woman. A close reading of his texts shows that his fictional postulation of the "third sex" never led Hirschfeld to revoke the fundamental insight granted by his doctrine of sexual intermediaries, which asserted the intersexual condition of all human beings.

Sponsor Message.

As Hirschfeld wrote in a text published in 1905, strictly speaking, there are no men and women, but only human beings who are "to a large extent male or to a large extent female." In his view, then, the difference between the "sexes" is not qualitative, but merely quantitative, concerning only the ratio of male and female components in an individual.

With the reference to the "third sex" liable to misunderstandings, Hirschfeld stressed that the term was not meant as "something complete and closed in itself," but as an "indispensable makeshift" introduced in the discussion of sexual difference in order to overcome the "extremely superficial scheme of classification in man and woman."

Hirschfeld's concept of the "third sex" also functioned as a provisional identificatory category for those deprived of their sexual rights in a society organized according to the patterns of sexual binarism. Thus, in spite of its fictionality and tentativeness, "third sex" connects Hirschfeld's basic theoretical insights with his libertarian activism on behalf of the oppressed.

John Henry Mackay's Critique

Hirschfeld's contentions regarding the third sex did not remain uncontested. Indeed, the issue became a major matter of dispute between the two main factions within the sexual emancipation movement in Germany, the group centered around Hirschfeld's Scientific-humanitarian Committee and another group, Die Gemeinschaft der Eigenen [The Community of the Self-Owners], a pederastic-oriented organization with right-wing nationalistic proclivities.

Although John Henry Mackay himself sustained liberal views on politics and never became an official member of "Die Eigenen," he exerted on the group a considerable influence because of his philosophical anarchism, and his collection of homoerotic texts, Die Buecher der namenlosen Liebe [The Books of the Nameless Love], which Mackay published under the pseudonym of "Sagitta" between 1906 and 1926.

Characteristically, Mackay/Sagitta derided in Fenny Skaller, the third of the Books of Nameless Love, the new sexual type described by some "physicians" as "a new sex, a third sex in-between the other two." Although Hirschfeld is not mentioned explicitly in the passage, it is clear that he, being a physician and the most prominent activist on behalf of the "third sex," was the primary target of Mackay's critique.

From Mackay's perspective, the pursuits of the "physicians" were part of an ongoing cultural process designed to deny the specificity of pederastic "nameless love" by creating a third category that is distinct from "male" and "female," but that does not allow for internal differentiation. Mackay was particularly keen on distinguishing the "nameless love" from effeminate forms of homosexuality that he associated with Hirschfeld and his circle.

Sigmund Freud and the Third Sex

One of Sigmund Freud's basic contentions with regard to sexuality is that the phenomenon of homosexuality does not warrant the assumption of a sex distinct from that of males and females. In an addendum of 1915 to Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie [Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality] (1905), Freud stated that psychoanalytical research opposes categorically the attempt to consider homosexuals as a separate group of people on account of their specific sexual disposition.

Five years earlier, in Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci ["Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood"] (1910), Freud had observed critically that homosexual men were pleased to be portrayed by "their theoretical spokespersons" as "a separate sexual variety, as sexual intermediaries, as a 'third sex.'" In a very similar formulation in 1916, Freud mentioned that male and female homosexuals are depicted by their "scientific spokespersons" as a "special variety of the human species, [as] a 'third sex.'"

Despite the plural form, when Freud mentions the theoretical or scientific spokespersons of homosexuals, he means first and foremost Magnus Hirschfeld, the most prominent spokesman of the homosexual rights movement at the time. With his critique, however, Freud reveals a fundamental misapprehension of the actual tenets at stake in Hirschfeld's claims. Besides ignoring the fact that Hirschfeld used the term only in non-scientific contexts, Freud also ignores Hirschfeld's tentativeness regarding the "third sex," as well as the actual import of his fundamental teachings.

Nineteenth-century Decadent literature either describes aspects of decadent life and society or reflects the decadent literary aesthetic.

From its beginning, the nineteenth century in England had a purposeful homosexual literature of considerable bulk, both male and female, though it was fettered by oppression.

The earliest etiologies--or theories of causation--of homosexuality date from European antiquity, but the search for a universal etiology has intensified as homosexual behavior has come under the scrutiny of science.

In the nineteenth century gay and lesbian sexuality becomes a significant subject in French literature.

With major periodic setbacks, over the last two centuries German-speaking authors have gradually developed a gay and lesbian positive literature.

While Germany, until recently, never officially accepted or welcomed members of the glbtq community, German culture and homosexuality have a long and significant history.

Intersexuality (formerly referred to as hermaphroditism) is a congenital anomaly in which an individual's external genitalia or internal reproductive systems fall outside the norms for either male or female bodies.

One of the masters of French nineteenth-century fiction, Balzac provocatively includes both lesbian and gay male characters in his novels.

Baudelaire was among the first French poets to include lesbians as subjects.

Although evidence of his own homosexual leanings is inconclusive, in his lifetime Sir Richard Burton was regarded with suspicion because of his knowledge and understanding of same-sex sexual activity.

Edward Carpenter, a champion of both women's and homosexuals' liberation, was one of the great socialist visionaries of England at the turn of the twentieth century.

Henry Havelock Ellis--British psychologist and writer--was one of the first modern thinkers to challenge Victorian taboos against the frank and objective discussion of sex.

The founder of psychoanalysis and the discoverer of the unconscious, Sigmund Freud initiated a fundamental transformation in the self-understanding of Western men and women, including especially the role of sexuality.

German-born Magnus Hirschfeld deserves recognition as a significant theorist of sexuality and the most prominent advocate of homosexual emancipation of his time.

The Scottish-German John Henry Mackay, who wrote in German, dedicated himself to the cause of gaining sympathetic recognition of man-boy love.

Among Greek writers on homosexual themes, Plato is preeminent not only as a major philosopher but also as the greatest master of Greek prose.

John Addington Symonds was the most daring innovator in the history of nineteenth-century British homosexual writing and consciousness.

Nineteenth-Century German activist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs was both the first modern theorist of homosexuality and the first homosexual to "come out" publicly.

Oscar Wilde is important both as an accomplished writer and as a symbolic figure who exemplified a way of being homosexual at a pivotal moment in the emergence of gay consciousness.