Institut für Sexualwissenschaft
As Anna reminds us, Weimar Germany did have a sexuality institute which the Nazis did destroy. Wikipedia:
The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was an early private sexology research institute in Germany from 1919 to 1933. The name is variously translated as Institute of Sex Research, Institute of Sexology, Institute for Sexology or Institute for the Science of Sexuality. The Institute was a non-profit foundation situated in Tiergarten, Berlin. It was headed by Magnus Hirschfeld, who since 1897 had run the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee (‘Scientific-Humanitarian Committee’), which campaigned on progressive and rational grounds for LGBT rights and tolerance.
But it didn’t call it that, one because that’s not German and two because there was no such label then. “LGBT rights” is a contemporary shorthand; it doesn’t pre-date the Nazis.
The Nazi book burnings in Berlin included the archives of the Institute. After the Nazis gained control of Germany in the 1930s, the institute and its libraries were destroyed as part of a Nazi government censorship program by youth brigades, who burned its books and documents in the street.
The Nazis were very keen on keeping men Manly and women Womanly. They weren’t what you’d call subtle thinkers.
At the institute, Magnus Hirschfeld championed the doctrine of sexual intermediacy. This proposed form of classification said that every human trait existed on a scale from masculine to feminine. Masculine traits were characterized as dominant and active while feminine traits were passive and perceptive. The classification was further divided into the subgroups of sex organs, physical characteristics, sex drive or sexuality, and psychological characteristics. Hirschfeld’s belief was that all human beings possess both masculine and feminine traits regardless of their sex. In fact, he believed that no one was fully masculine or fully feminine but rather a blend of the two.
So then why call them “feminine” and “masculine” at all? If we all have some of each why not come up with some less confusing way to talk about the subject?
A man with a female sex drive, for example, would be homosexual, whereas someone with male sex organs and mostly female psychological characteristics would likely be transgender.[7]
A man with a female sex drive would be homosexual? I don’t think that’s right. I think they mean orientation or attraction, not drive.
At any rate, it existed and the Nazis did trash it but it wasn’t the loving parent of today’s ideologues.
That Wiki repeatedly conflates transsexual and trans gender. Quite apart from transgender not being coined until 1965 at the earliest (maybe 1969)*, Hirschfeld specifically used the phrase transsexual and experimented with both surgical and hormone treatments to enable people to transition. I can’t predict which way he would have bounced in today’s debate. He clearly saw homosexuality as something to be fixed (transplanting straight testicles into gay men for gods sake!), so I suspect his over-arching view was one of compassion and understanding, but that people needed to be ‘fixed’. Either by making gay men straight, or those who really wanted to be women into having something as close to a women’s body as possible.
* https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/debunking-origin-behind-word-transgender-32446
‘Sex drive’ (Geschlechtstrieb) is the term Hirschfeld uses repeatedly in Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes (1914): see https://archive.org/details/DieHomosexualittDesMannesUndDesWeibes1914/page/n5/mode/2up. If I understand correctly (I don’t really read German, so I’m using Michael Lombardi-Nash’s translation to guide me) Hirschfeld believed that what he called the ‘sex drive’, meaning the ‘drive’ towards one or the other or both sexes, was instinctual and physical and developed in the womb. (See for instance Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes, p. 352.)