It’s been a hundred years since Magnus Hirschfeld published The Transvestites. The earliest bibliographic entries Ray Blanchard tracked down are these:
Die Transvestiten – Eine Untersuchung über den erotischen Verkleidungstrieb [Transvestites – A Study of the Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress], Pulvermacher, Berlin, 1910.
Co-authored with Max Tilke: Die Transvestiten – Der erotische Verkleidungstrieb [Transvestites – The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress], Illustrierter Teil, Pulvermacher, Berlin, 1912.
How cool is that? I couldn’t help but think that Virginia Prince died only last year, at the age of 96. Imagine, she was born only a few years after that book was published, when the idea of anyone being “out” about crossdressing was – to borrow from Hirschfeld’s language – verboten.
It’s hard to imagine what might have been, if the Nazis had not destroyed Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sex.