ABSTRACT
Magnus Hirschfeld was a scholar, physician, researcher, publicist and an activist. In 1913 he gave a series of successful lectures in London which inspired the creation of the British Society for the Study of Sexual Psychology. In 1897 Hirschfeld became one of the founding fathers of the Association for the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, principally to fight Paragraph 175 of the Imperial Penal Code. Hirschfeld would have been comfortable working within the parameters described by advocates: The biopsychosocial model is both a philosophy of clinical care and a practical clinical guide. Hirschfeld, whose support for gays, lesbians, transvestites was unconditional, condemned ‘the androgyne for its supposed lack of harmony’. A chief talent of critical psychologists is to develop linguistic landscapes for investigating complex phenomena. Hirschfeld was keenly interested in the power of the media to change people’s attitudes. Bourgeois humanism was indeed Hirschfeld’s refuge from the realities of class antagonism, and he dismissed class identity as yet another form of selfishness.
