Gender Research Timeline - LGBTQ & the Bible

A Research Timeline on Gender

In 1869, Karl Friedrich Otto Westphal (German psychiatrist) was the first person to describe a phenomenon he called conträre sexual empfinding. Translated literally, it means “contrary sexual feeling”, but referred to what we now call gender dysphoria (the mental distress a Transgender person experiences).

In 1869, Karl-Maria Kertbeny (Hungarian journalist, translator, memoirist, and human rights campaigner) was the first person to describe the concept of a “female trapped in a male body”.

In 1870, Karl Friedrich Otto Westphal (German psychiatrist) coined the term “sexual inversion,” believed to be an inborn reversal of gender traits. A time when homosexuality was a criminal offense in most jurisdictions, the emergence of the theory of sexual inversion marked a turn in the conceptualization of same-sex sexual behavior from vice to congenital disposition.

In 1882, Lili Elbe was the first known Transgender person who underwent the world’s first documented sex reassignment surgery. Elbe was a Danish painter who was assigned male at birth, experienced what is now called gender dysphoria.

In 1897, Havelock Ellis (English Physician), argued that “sexual inversion” was a natural variation of the human sexual instinct, and that it should be treated as a natural phenomenon, not a disease or a sin. He also cited studies that found that children can experience a wide range of sexual aptitude.

In 1907 The word ‘transsexual‘ is used to mean between or applicable to both men and women (modern usage of this and related words develops later, see 1931 onwards.

In 1910, Magnus Hirschfeld (German physician and sexologist), pioneering early research on gender-affirming care and coining the term “transvestism”. The term originally was applied to cross-dressing associated with nonheterosexual behaviour. He published his findings that sexual orientation was innate and not a deliberate choice, and he believed that scientific understanding of sexuality would promote tolerance of sexual minorities. He conducted extensive research on homosexuality, gender identity, and transgender. He believed that scientific research could help reduce prejudice and promote acceptance. In 1919, Hirschfeld founded the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, Germany, the world’s first institution to research and treat transgender people.

In 1913 Havelock Ellis (English sexologist known for his writings on homosexuality) coins the term “sexo-aesthetic inversion” to refer to a phenomenon “by which, a person’s tastes and impulses are so altered, that if a man, he emphasizes and even exaggerates the feminine characteristics in his own person”. He would later use the term “eonism”, named for the aforementioned Chevalier d’Éon, to refer to this phenomenon.

In 1916, Herbert Marcuse described a type of psychosexual inversion which led toward sex change.

In 1920, Christian Hamburger, Danish endocrinologist, publishes one of the earliest reports on hormone therapy in transgender women, effective pharmaceutical female sex-hormonal medications having been available since the 1920s and 1930s.

In 1933, Hitler took power in Germany and revoked people being able to permit to dress as a woman in public. Germany had been tolerant in recognizing the rights of trans people before then. The Nazi Regime targeted the Trans community. They ransacked the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin and burned most of its 12,000 books. Gay men had no place in the Nazi vision as they did not enable growth of the Aryan population. Hitler criminalized Transgender people (especially those that went from male to female) and sent them to concentration camps for hard labor, torture, castrated, experimented upon or executed.

In 1935, Sigmund Freud (Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis) theories on gender development are generally considered problematic in the context of transgender studies today, as he viewed gender identity as largely determined by one’s biological sex and pathologized deviations from this norm, potentially leading to the interpretation of transgender experiences as a mental illness. Freud said that “everyone wanted a penis”, assuming that men were the “default human”.

In 1947, Alfred Charles Kinsey (American sexologist, biologist), founded what is now known as the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, which has conducted research on transgender service members in the US military. Alfred Kinsey, an American sexologist, founded the Institute for Sex Research in 1947. Kinsey’s work has influenced social and cultural values in the United States and internationally. The institute’s research has been controversial, both at the time of publication and today.

In 1949, Inspired by Magnus Hirschfeld‘s 1923 term seelischer Transsexualismus (psychic transsexualism), the term transsexual was introduced to English by David Oliver Cauldwell and popularized by Harry Benjamin in 1966, around the same time transgender was coined and began to be popularized. Since the 1990s, transsexual has generally been used to refer to the subset of transgender people who desire to transition permanently to the gender with which they identify and who seek medical assistance (for example, sex reassignment surgery) with this.

In 1965, Dr. John F. Oliven (psychiatrist at Columbia University) first coined the term transgenderism is coined by in his reference work Sexual Hygiene and Pathology, stating that the term which had previously been used, transsexualism, “is misleading because sexuality is not a major factor in primary transvestism”. The term transgender was then popularized with varying definitions by transgender, transsexual, and transvestite people, including Christine Jorgensen and Virginia Prince, who used transgenderal.

In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association, the first time a gender-related diagnosis appeared in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), where it was listed as “Transsexualism” within the “psychosexual disorders” category; this marked the first time the APA formally acknowledged a diagnosis related to transgender individuals in their studies.

In 1981, the first reports appeared about a new immunodeficiency disease happening, mostly in homosexual men and transgender women. A year later, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control adopted the name Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). They found it was a virus originated from chimpanzees in West Africa, which was transmitted through unprotected sexual contact, non-sterile needles, and childbirth. In 1986, the name Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) was adopted by consensus. HIV spread through Africa and to other parts of the world over decades.