It is my contention that this threat of revolutionary change in our sexual mores and customs has been ushered in by a singular act of considerable consequence: the removal of homosexuality from the category of aberrancy by the American Psychiatric Association.
— Dr. Charles Socarides
The Left took a long time to find that it had a ‘gay’ agenda. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had ridiculed the acceptance of homosexuality. Writing to Marx, Engels referred to a network of pederasts among politicians, and in so doing widened the disgust to include sodomites in general:
The Urning791 you sent me is a very curious thing. These are extremely unnatural revelations. The paederasts are beginning to count themselves, and discover that they are a power in the state. Only organisation was lacking, but according to this source it apparently already exists in secret. And since they have such important men in all the old parties and even in the new ones, from Rosing to Schweitzer, they cannot fail to triumph. Guerre aux cons, paix aux trous-de-cul792 will now be the slogan. It is a bit of luck that we, personally, are too old to have to fear that, when this party wins, we shall have to pay physical tribute to the victors. But the younger generation! Incidentally it is only in Germany that a fellow like this can possibly come forward, convert this smut into a theory, and offer the invitation: introite793 etc. Unfortunately, he has not yet got up the courage to acknowledge publicly that he is ‘that way’, and must still operate coram publico ‘from the front’, if not ‘going in from the front’ as he once said by mistake. But just wait until the new North German Penal Code recognises the droits du cul794 then he will operate quite differently. Then things will go badly enough for poor frontside people like us, with our childish penchant for females.795
While commenting on the importance of women in a revolutionary movement Marx made a quip that would today be regarded by feminists as the ‘objectification of women’, and if Herr Doktor had been teaching at a university, he would certainly have been subjected to feminist histrionics and termination of employment:
Everyone who knows anything of history also knows that great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress may be measured precisely by the social position of the fair sex (plain ones included).796
Had Marx been confronted with transgender and a multitude of other derivatives, he would have found the whole idea amusing, but perhaps with not so much mirth had he seen them taking over the ‘workers’ movement’ until few of the proletariat remained. However, the raison d’etre of Critical Theory had become the revision of Marxism and its synthesis with a revision of Freudianism to arrive at a new revolutionary theory.
Freud was ambivalent towards homosexuality, but did consider it to be a maladjustment to childhood circumstances, caused by ‘an arrest in sexual development’, which should not, however, be a source of distress or shame.797 Freud regarded homosexuality as a ‘perversion’, insofar as it was outside the norm of sexual behaviour, the norm being predicated on the drive to reproduce. Freud’s views would be today considered ‘reactionary’ and ‘authoritarian’ and are not the type to be cited by the apologists of ‘homosexuality’ as part of a fluid range of sexual experience, such as Kinsey concluded. Freud wrote from a moral perspective:
What are known as the perverse forms of intercourse … in which other parts of the body take over the role of the genitals, have undoubtedly increased in social importance. These activities cannot, however, be regarded as being as harmless as analogous extensions [of the sexual drive] in love relationships. They are ethically objectionable, for they degrade the relationships of love between two human beings from a serious matter to a convenient game, attended by no risk and no spiritual participation.798
It is notable that over a hundred years ago Freud was referring to homosexuality as an issue that had ‘increased in social importance’, that from a social viewpoint homosexuality is not ‘harmless’, and that it degrades the relationships ‘from a serious matter to a convenient game’. This casual sexuality is what the Critical Theorists, along with sexologists such as Kinsey and anthropologists such as Mead, were trying to popularise against what they regarded as the repressive strictures of Western society. Tracing the root of homosexuality from within the family, Feud wrote that,
In all our male homosexual cases the subjects had had a very intense erotic attachment to a female person, as a rule their mother. … This attachment was evoked or encouraged by too much tenderness on the part of the mother herself, and further reinforced by the small part played by the father during their childhood. Indeed, it almost seems as though the presence of a strong father would ensure that the son made the correct decision in his choice of object, namely someone of the opposite sex.799
It is notable that Freud’s conclusions are antithetical to those of the Critical Theorists insofar as he states that the patriarchal family is the type conducive to normality.
Freud considered that there was a narcissistic component in homosexuality. Given that the modern epoch is focused on the individual as an isolated being urged to deconstruct and reconstruct the self on the basis of a fad, a whim, or a trend, such sexual-narcissism amounts to perhaps the ultimate expression of self-obsession. Freud wrote of the narcissistic component:
We have discovered, especially clearly in people whose libidinal development has suffered some disturbance, such as perverts and homosexuals, that in their later choice of love-objects they have taken as a model not their mother but their own selves. They are plainly seeking themselves as a love-object, and are exhibiting a type of object-choice which must be termed ‘narcissistic’. In this observation we have the strongest of the reasons which have led us to adopt the hypothesis of narcissism.800
The groundwork for ‘gender fluidity’ had been prepared with theories on sexual variations by a new generation of psychiatrists and anthropologists, particularly in the aftermath of World War I. Margaret Mead had described casual and temporary homosexual relations among adolescents in Samoa, calling this ‘play’ and a matter of indifference to Samoans.801 Indeed, as we have seen, Mead, who had a relationship with her mentor Ruth Benedict, recommended the West adopt a casual attitude towards family and marriage devoid of deep feeling, claiming this is the lesson to be had from ‘primitive society’, and would avoid neurosis.
Marcuse wrote of the ‘fusion of political rebellion and sexual-moral rebellion which is an important factor in the opposition in America’.802 While ‘gender fluidity’ has become a recent fad, this was premised in 1948 by ‘The Kinsey Scale’, a survey undertaken by Alfred Kinsey’s sexology institute. At that time, however, there was only a scale that ran from exclusively heterosexual (0) through to exclusively homosexual (6).803
‘Gender reassignment’ was pioneered by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, himself homosexual, whose sexology emerged, like Wilhelm Reich’s, in the moral, social and economic collapse of Germany following World War I. Weimar Germany became the centre for social experimentation. ‘Sexual science’ had its antecedents in the Scientific Humanitarian Committee founded in 1897,804 and the Institute for Sexual Science founded in 1919. Both organisations were headed by Hirschfeld, who edited The Year-Book for Sexual Intermediate Stages. Hirschfeld organised the First Congress of Sexual Reform in 1921, from which emerged the World League for Sexual Reform.805
Initially Hirschfeld considered homosexuals as the ‘third sex’. However, he developed the theory of sexual intermediaries, which held that there are many naturally occurring sexual variations, including hermaphroditism, homosexuality, and transvestism. Hirschfeld is regarded as having coined transvestite. He published a book entitled The Transvestites in 1910.
The first complete male-to-female sexual reassignment operation was undertaken in 1931 on Hirschfeld’s recommendation, by two of his co-workers at the institute, Dr. Levy-Lenz, and Dr. Felix Abraham. The patient, Rudolph Richter, adopting the female first name Dora, had been castrated at his request in 1922, and lived and worked at Hirschfeld’s institute for more than 10 years as a housemaid.806
Hirschfeld was a ‘socialist’807 but he and Wilhelm Reich were in opposition. Reich was not as ‘liberal’ as Hirschfeld, in that Reich did not consider all forms of sexuality equally valid. Among the three founders of the Hirschfeld Institute was Arthur Kronfeld, also described as a ‘socialist’, a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, who with his wife committed suicide in the USSR in 1941808 (perhaps encouraged to do so by the Soviet authorities?).
Despite Reich’s rejection by the party, Hirschfeld had important support from Willi Münzenberg, a millionaire newspaper, book and magazine publisher and influential Communist.809 Münzenberg joined the Communist Party in 1919, was elected to the Central Committee in 1924, served as a Communist Deputy in the Reichstag, as General Secretary of the Comintern Front, Workers’ International Relief, and was a pivotal influence in the League Against Imperialism. The Hirschfeld Institute states that Münzenberg was ‘an influential proprietor and publisher of several newspapers … for which institute staff members wrote articles. He thus gave them access to the Left-wing press’. Münzenberg lived with his wife Babette Gross at Hirschfeld’s Institute, where his flat was used for secret meetings of the Comintern.810
Hirschfeld’s books today have familiar themes: The Homosexual Question as Judged by Our Contemporaries; What Ought the Public Know about the Third Sex; Sexual Transitions; The Erotic Impulse to Wear Other Dress; The Homosexuality of Man and Woman; Sexology; A History of the Morals of the World War. With the rise of Hitler in 1933, Hirschfeld found ready fame outside Germany. His books were published in the USA, France, and England in 1935.
Hirschfeld is widely honoured, and has a notable influence on transgender politics. In 2011, the German government, through the Ministry of Justice, established the Federal Foundation Magnus Hirschfeld (Bundesstiftung Magnus Hirschfeld; BMH). The objectives are
to promote educational and research projects and to counter social discrimination against lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transsexuals, transgenders, intersexuals and queers (abbreviation: LGBTTIQ) in Germany. The Foundation wants to promote the acceptance of people with a non-heterosexual orientation in society as a whole; the same applies to people who do not define themselves exclusively as men or women.811
The Foundation states that it ‘builds on the legacy of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science networking [for] joint research activities with scientists and universities in Germany and abroad’. The purpose of the Foundation is to integrate gender fluidity into the economy and society by social engineering techniques to promote ‘the beneficial nature of recognizing diversity for economic, political, social and cultural contexts. …’812
The Establishment with its corporate sponsors is attempting to construct a broad front combining transgenderism with ethnic, social, generational and religious discontent; called ‘intersectionality’. This is the united front of a ‘New Left’ that Marcuse urged in the 1960s, again being cultivated by the ‘Establishment’. The Foundation states of this:
Intersectionality Research into the interaction of identity-generating categories like especially gender / gender identity, sexual orientation, social, ethnic and religious affiliation, age and disability and the processes of stereotyping and ideological fading in and out of such categories.813
The aim is stated as promoting ‘identity-generating’ mechanisms. Thus the individual can be deconstructed and reconstructed, premised on what the Foundation terms the ‘ideological fading in and out of such categories’. You are enabled to ‘ideologically fade in and out’ of your gender, race, nationality, and perhaps best of all, presumably your age and disability. Perhaps this means that additional to gender reassignment, race reassignment via hair and skin re-colouring will be enabled, plus age reassignment through more convincing methods of Botox, and disability by means of organ and robotic limb transplants, as part of the process of transhumanism. With dual gender and race reassignments, White males could end self-guilt regarding both patriarchy and ‘White privilege’.
You can be precisely what you want to be at any given time, or more probably what you are told you want to be by human relations ‘mediators’ and ‘facilitators’, psychiatrists, counsellors; media, advertising, and entertainment industries. There can be no sense of permanence and duration, but rather a perpetual state of fluidity. In the name of ‘identity’, any type of organic identity is destroyed, until everyone becomes as nebulous as to slot into an amorphous mass ‘humanity’ according to the requirements of social engineering and social control.
The indoctrination programme formulated by the Hirschfeld Foundation includes youth, teachers, ‘opinion leaders’, social workers, inducted into the universal cult through training seminars, ‘mediation of best practise models’, ‘school education projects’, and the ‘diversity departments’ of companies and professional associations. The Foundation outlines its outreach:
Encouraging media coverage of the Foundation’s work, production or commissioning of its own media (e.g. new media, live streams), communication of the results of the Foundation’s work through funding and publication of monographs, anthologies, manuals, overviews, art projects — especially regarding funded educational work and educational networking, research and science networking, of knowledge about the situation of LGBTTI mainly since the middle of the nineteen hundreds to the present day, joint events with universities, educational and research institutions, joint events with companies and associations (e.g. LGBTTI company networks, diversity departments, training managers), promoting access to archives and the results of educational work, science and research, promotion and curation of exhibitions, actions with partners, e.g. in schools, universities, adult education institutions, companies, associations, scientific and social networks and discussion forums, information and education campaigns, and memorial days…814
The heralding of Hirschfeld as the proud father of the ‘gay’ movement is enabled by the obsessional self-guilt of Germans in regard to the Third Reich. The Hirschfeld Institute was closed down shortly after the assumption of the National Socialists to government, and Hirschfeld’s books were among those consigned to the symbolic bonfires. Like the Critical Theorists, Hirschfeld gained recognition outside Germany after 1933. His anti-Nazi credentials as Jewish, socialist and homosexual place him in a pantheon of post-war sainthood.
In the USA, the medical operations and promotion of transgenderism were continued by Dr. Harry Benjamin, who had studied at the Hirschfeld Institute.815 Among Benjamin’s associates in the USA were Alfred Kinsey, and the ‘family planning’ pioneer Margaret Sanger.
In 1957, Benjamin co-founded the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality. In 1966, he published The Transsexual Phenomenon, based on his work with clients. He argued for the differentiation between transsexuals, transvestites and homosexuals. In The Transsexual Phenomenon, Benjamin also challenged the dominant view that transsexuality could be treated psychologically, stating that this repressed rather than eliminated the drive. Benjamin advocated that transsexuals be given surgery and hormones for the sex they wished to become; the now dominant belief that there is a separation between body and mind that results in transsexuality. During the 1970s, Benjamin formed what became the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA), composed of therapists and psychologists. In 2007 HBIGDA became the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH).816
Hirschfeld is today honoured by Establishment-sponsored events. Germany officially designated 2018–2019 the years to commemorate Hirschfeld, 2018 being the 150th anniversary of his birth, and 2019 the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Institute of Sexual Science. On 12 July 2018 a postage stamp was issued in his honour.
The House of World Cultures (Haus der Kulturen der Welt; HKW) stands on part of the former site of Hirschfeld’s institute, a factor that the HKW emphasises. The HKW focus is on cultural globalisation, drawing on intersectionality to connect its aims to those of Hirschfeld. HKW has named a room in his honour, and,
HKW also makes Hirschfeld’s geographical and historical heritage visible in its projects by taking up various activist ideas and approaches of the sexologist. In its program, HKW campaigns for the visibility of different lifeworlds and draws attention to marginalization processes. In addition, HKW aims to offer a platform for partner events dealing with queer and non-normative lifeworlds, such as the international LGBTIQ conference. Since 1992, HKW has also tackled the debate817 over Hirschfeld’s scientific heritage and the history of the sexual sciences.818
HKW, in addition to showcasing the grandeur of ‘non-European’ arts, confronts Europe’s colonial past. Loss of control and the alienation being caused by elements of globalisation, such a digitalisation, is resulting in support for ‘neo-nationalist parties’, which HKW states must be thwarted by ‘solidarity’ with groups and individuals. ‘New forms of resistance and alternative models of thought and life are needed. HKW would like to contribute to them’.819
HKW is part of what is a familiar theme. It aims to initiate ‘new forms of resistance’ against the ill-effects of globalisation, yet exists to promote the globalisations of culture, and moreover to play an active part in opposing those movements that truly are trying to offer new forms of resistance to globalisation; what it terms the ‘neo-nationalist parties’. What is significant is that the origins of the HKW — as with much else we have been considering — has its origins as part of U.S. Cold War strategy:
The square was destroyed during the Second World War. In 1957, at the height of the Cold War, the Congress Hall was erected near to the Reichstag. The building was a present from the US government to the City of Berlin. As a venue for international encounters, the Congress Hall was designed as a symbol of ‘freedom’ in the ‘island city’ of Berlin.820
The intention was to serve as a propaganda icon against the Soviet bloc, the aim being to showcase the artistic wonders that are possible under American liberal democracy. This is openly stated:
In 1955, Hugh Stubbins started work on a design for a building that would soon become a remarkable landmark in the cityscape of post-war Berlin. Stubbins, who had been Gropius’s assistant at Harvard before the Second World War, was familiar with Germany. Wanting to make a statement on that conflict between the systems commonly referred to the Cold War, Stubbins planned a building with a hall to hold cultural events and congresses. It was intended to serve as a symbol and beacon of freedom with its message reaching the East too. The former Zeltenplatz square was chosen as the site. To ensure its contours would be clearly seen from ‘Communist-ruled’ East Berlin, the Congress Hall was erected on an artificial mound.821
The architect Stubbins designed a modernist building consciously intended to confront ‘socialist realism’. According to Stubbins, speaking at the opening, to which he paid particular tribute to Mrs. Eleanor Dulles (sister of John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State; and Allen Dulles, CIA Director) of the U.S. State Department, ‘This hall is dedicated to one of the great freedoms — the freedom of expression. Its form was inspired by an attempt to express that great purpose. In this sense, the form is a symbol’.822
The watershed moment for the deconstruction of the male-female pair-bond came in 1973 when homosexuality was declassified as a disease by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). Until then, homosexuality had been classified by the APA as a ‘sociopathic personality disturbance’. The change of classification was ideologically driven. A particularly cogent description of the process of declassification was given by the widely experienced and acclaimed psychiatrist Charles W. Socarides.823 He wrote of the ‘revolutionary changes’ this decision had brought to multiple factors:
A significant portion of society today is of the belief that homosexuality is a normal form of sexual behavior different from but equal to that of heterosexuality. Many religious leaders, public officials, educators, social and mental health agencies, including those at the highest level of government, departments of psychiatry, psychology, and mental health clinics, have been taken in by a widespread sexual egalitarianism, by accusations of being ‘undemocratic’ or ‘prejudiced’ if they do not accept certain scientific assertions thrust upon them, as if deprived of all intellectual capacity to judge and reason. It is my contention in this paper that this threat of revolutionary change in our sexual mores and customs has been ushered in by a singular act of considerable consequence: the removal of homosexuality from the category of aberrancy by the American Psychiatric Association.824
Socarides provided the historical background, referring to a 1963 enquiry into homosexuality by the Committee on Public Health of the New York Academy of Medicine. The committee in its 1964 report re-affirmed the then scientific consensus that ‘homosexuality is indeed an illness’, warning that ‘some homosexuals have gone beyond the plane of defensiveness and now argue that deviancy is a “desirable, noble, preferable way of life”’. Socarides urged an enquiry into the treatment of homosexuality, and this resulted in a Task Force of the National Institute for Mental Health issuing a report in 1969. However, this had been stacked with those who had been biased in favour of normalising homosexuality, including Paul Gebhard, co-author of the second Kinsey report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female; and Dr. John Money, of Johns Hopkins University, ‘an early proponent of transsexual surgery’. The Task Force report neglected to provide an opinion on homosexuality being ‘arrested psychosexual development’, hence lending tacit approval to its normalisation.
At this time, homosexual agitation began to intrude on scientific conferences: ‘Meanwhile, militant political homosexual groups continued to disrupt a number of scientific programs both at the national and local level in which findings as to the psychopathology of homosexuality, its origins, symptomatology, course, and treatment, were going to be discussed. …’ Psychiatrists who maintained the traditional opinion came under attack in the APA journal Psychiatric News, and a campaign of threats of violence emerged. In 1972, Socarides succeeded in having the New York County District Branch of the American Psychiatric Association establish a task force on homosexuality comprised entirely of psychiatrists, drawn from the ‘major medical centers of New York City’. After two years of deliberation, the task force ‘attempted to submit its report on homosexuality to the Executive Council of the New York City District Branch of the APA. However, the report was ‘not acceptable’, so the task force published the report in 1974, without recognition by the APA New York Executive.
In mid-1973, Vice President Judd Marmor of the APA and John Spiegel, President of the APA, and other psychiatrists met with the Gay Activist Alliance, the Mattachine Society and its female ancillary, the Daughters of Bilities, and the Nomenclature Committee of the American Psychiatric Association at Columbia University, New York City, to discuss the deletion of ‘homosexuality’ from the diagnostic nomenclature.825
The meeting with Marmor and Spiegel was fruitful: in November 1973, a cocktail party was held at the Washington D.C. APA headquarters celebrating the revised definition of homosexuality by the APA’s Nomenclature Task Force on Homosexuality, headed by Dr. Robert L. Spitzer (Columbia University), who had never previously addressed the matter.
The proposed change to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual went to the APA Reference Committee. Socarides and two others, who held out for retaining a scientific rather than an ideologically-driven approach, ‘received a hearing immediately preceding the Board of Trustees vote on December 14, 1973’. Socarides was given five minutes to present his case, arguing against something that he saw would become a dogma.
The Board of Trustees voted practically unanimously against us, with two abstentions. It is interesting to note that only two thirds of the members of the Board of Trustees were present, barely enough to constitute a quorum for this important decision. Were some members simply avoiding a confrontation with the majority view already determined and adamant in their conviction? Otherwise, how could one explain their absence on such a critical issue?826
Several weeks later, the Board’s vote was explained as being based on two items. A few weeks later, the rationale for the deletion of homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder was presented to the medical community. This was in two items: The first was the position paper of Spitzer’s Nomenclature Task Force on Homosexuality, Psychiatric News stating that it was ‘essentially upon the rationale of Dr. Spitzer’s presentation that the Board made its decision’.827 Ignoring the corpus of material on the subject, Spitzer’s conclusion was that of Kinsey’s, that homosexuality did not meet the requirements of a psychiatric disorder since it ‘does not either regularly cause subjective distress’ or is not ‘regularly associated with some generalized impairment in social effectiveness or functioning’.828 Secondly were the conclusions of Drs. Marcel T. Saghir and Eli Robins from their book Male and Female Homosexuality (1973). Socarides states that Saghir and Robins had not used psychoanalytic methodology, but rather a survey of homosexuals recruited via homosexual advocacy organisations.
A petition for a referendum on reversing the Board decision was signed by 243 participants at the APA conference in New York. In April 1974, a vote of the APA membership was held. Despite behind-the-scenes lobbying by homosexual activists, of the 10,000 who voted, 40% disagreed with the Board’s decision, ‘asserting that there were no legitimate scientific reasons for the APA’s change in fundamental psychiatric theory’. However, only 25% of those eligible to vote had sent in their papers.829 It is therefore a myth that a majority of the APA’s members voted in favour of the Board’s decision.
The importance of the issue was expressed by Abram Kardiner,830 former Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University, who wrote to Socarides:
There is an epidemic form of homosexuality, which is more than the usual incidence, which generally occurs in social crises or in declining cultures when license and boundless permissiveness dulls the pain of ceaseless anxiety, universal hostility and divisiveness. Thus in the Betsileo of Madagascar the incidence of homosexuality was visibly increased at a time when the society was under a state of collapse. Supporting the claims of the homosexuals and regarding homosexuality as a normal variant of sexual activity is to deny the social significance of homosexuality. To do this is to give support to the divisive elements in the community. Above all it militates against the family and destroys the function of the latter as the last place in our society where affectivity can still be cultivated.
Homosexuals cannot make a society, nor keep ours going for very long. Homosexuality operates against the cohesive elements in society in the name of fictitious freedom. It drives the opposite sex into a similar direction. And no society can long endure when either the child is neglected or when the sexes war upon each other.831
As Kardiner states, this is one more factor in the deconstruction of the organic social community, ‘in the name of a fictitious freedom’. Kardiner opines that homosexuality increases during times of cultural crisis. He provides an example and points out that among the Betsileo homosexuality is a manifestation of social abnormality. There are variables at work. It is poor scholarship that forms a conclusion without considering such variables.
We have considered in some detail the background of the controversy regarding homosexuality within the APA because:
1) the change in stance is cited as proof in a shift of scientific evidence; and the current transgender agenda follows the same pattern,
2) it is a far-reaching example of how science can be hijacked and diverted to serve an agenda.