ABSTRACT
The author was an influential medical doctor and advocate for sexual liberation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He thought that most people could be considered “sexual intermediaries” who combined a variety of physical and psychological traits in innumerable potential mixtures that existed somewhere on a spectrum between a hypothetical “pure heterosexual male” and “pure heterosexual female.” His 1910 book The Transvestites situated cross-gender behavior within his “sexual intermediaries” framework. He used the word transvestite in a more general sense than has become common in recent decades, to refer to all sorts of people who crossed gender—everything from episodic fetishistic cross-dressing for sexual pleasure to non-erotic cross-dressing in daily life to desires for medically assisted gender-transition later classified as “transsexualism.” In Case 13, the author's informant is someone who seems very much like a contemporary trans woman. She tells of her friendships with working-class lesbians and female sex workers.
