By guest writer Luke Levine, Head of Community Life @ KeshetUK
There are lives that do not simply sit within history. They shape it quietly, persistently, and often at great personal cost.
Magnus Hirschfeld was one of those lives.
Born in 1868 into a Jewish family in what was then Germany, Hirschfeld trained as a physician at a time when homosexuality was criminalised under Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code and widely classified as moral deviance or mental illness. As both a doctor and a gay man, he understood the weight of that stigma. He also understood something else: that medicine could either reinforce prejudice or challenge it. He chose the latter.
In 1897, Hirschfeld co-founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, often regarded as the first organised movement advocating for homosexual rights. But his activism was inseparable from his medical work. He recognised that if science defined homosexuality as pathological, the law would follow. If, however, it was understood as an innate and natural variation of human experience, the foundation of criminalisation would begin to erode.
Hirschfeld’s work extended beyond research and clinical care into sustained legal reform. In 1897, the same year he founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, he organised a petition signed by thousands of prominent figures calling for the repeal of Paragraph 175, the law criminalising sexual relations between men. Although the petition failed, he did not abandon the effort. After the First World War, he renewed the campaign, supporting draft legislation and working to persuade parliamentarians to remove the law from the statute books. Progress was slow and politically fragile, and the rise of the Nazis in 1933 brought those efforts to an abrupt end. Paragraph 175 remained in force in various forms for decades and was not fully removed from German law until 1994. Hirschfeld’s persistence illustrates that his commitment to justice was not symbolic but sustained, grounded in both scientific evidence and a determination to change the legal structures that harmed LGBT+ people.
Hirschfeld helped establish the study of human sexuality as a serious field of scientific inquiry. Through extensive questionnaires and case studies, he demonstrated that same-sex attraction and gender diversity existed across cultures and societies. His theory of ‘sexual intermediaries’ challenged rigid binaries, proposing that sex, gender, and sexuality exist along spectrums. More than a century later, that insight feels remarkably contemporary.
In 1919, he founded the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science) in Berlin. It was both a research institute and a place of refuge. The Institute offered sexual health services, counselling, contraception advice, and some of the earliest forms of gender-affirming medical care. Transgender patients received psychological support, hormone treatment, and, in some cases, staged surgeries that were unprecedented at the time.
Hirschfeld also worked with Berlin authorities to issue medical certificates that protected transgender people from arrest for wearing clothing aligned with their gender identity. He used the authority of medicine not to control or exclude, but to protect.
As a Jewish intellectual advocating for sexual minorities in early twentieth-century Germany, Hirschfeld was a visible target. Antisemitic and nationalist groups attacked him relentlessly, labelling him “the most dangerous Jew in Germany.” His Jewish identity and his work for sexual minorities were deliberately conflated in propaganda, portraying both as threats to the nation.
In May 1933, Nazi students ransacked and destroyed the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. Its library, archives, and clinical records were burned in the now-infamous book burnings. Decades of research were lost in a single night.
The destruction was not only symbolic. The Institute had housed some of the world’s earliest documentation of transgender lives and gender-affirming medical procedures. Surgical records, hormone treatment data, case studies, and patient histories were destroyed. For emerging fields such as trans healthcare, this represented a profound rupture. What had been a growing body of research and clinical knowledge was violently interrupted.
By chance, Hirschfeld was abroad at the time his work was destroyed. He never returned to Germany and died in exile in 1935.
The loss of the Institute set back LGBT+ medical research for decades. In Germany, the field was dismantled entirely under Nazi rule. Internationally, later clinicians had to rebuild areas of research without access to the foundations Hirschfeld had begun to establish. The continuity of knowledge was broken.
Today, when we speak about sexual orientation as innate rather than pathological, when we recognise gender diversity as part of the human spectrum, and when gender-affirming healthcare is discussed within mainstream medical ethics, we are standing, in part, on foundations Hirschfeld helped lay.
For Jewish communities, Hirschfeld’s story carries a particular poignancy. He was a Jewish doctor who believed that science must serve human dignity. At a time when both Jews and LGBT+ people were scapegoated, criminalised, and dehumanised, he insisted on evidence, compassion, and protection. He understood that scholarship without moral courage is insufficient.
His life also reminds us of the fragility of progress. Knowledge can be destroyed. Institutions can be dismantled. Research can be silenced. But ideas grounded in truth and humanity have a way of surviving beyond the regimes that attempt to extinguish them.
Magnus Hirschfeld’s legacy is not only medical, but also ethical. He demonstrated that medicine can be a force for inclusion rather than exclusion, and that defending marginalised communities is not separate from scientific integrity, but part of it.
His Institute was burned. His archives destroyed. His work interrupted. But his vision, that diversity in sexuality and gender is part of the richness of humanity, continues to shape the world. In remembering him, we honour not only a pioneer of medical science, but a Jewish life committed to dignity, knowledge, and justice.
