The Intermediaries: A Weimar Story

by Brandy Schillace

Overview

The fascinating history of a daring team of sexologists who built the first trans clinic in the shadow of the Third Reich.

Set in interwar Germany, The Intermediaries tells the forgotten story of the Institute for Sexual Science, the world’s first center for homosexual and transgender rights. Headed by a gay Jewish man, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, the institute aided in the first gender-affirming surgeries and hormone treatments, acting as a rebellious base of operations in the face of rising prejudice, nationalism, and Nazi propaganda.

An expert in medical history, Brandy Schillace tells the story of the Institute through the eyes of Dora Richter, an Institute patient whom we follow in her quest to transition and live as a woman. While the colorful but ultimately tragic arc of Weimar Berlin is well documented, The Intermediaries is the first book to assert the inseparable, interdependent relationship of sex science to both the queer rights movement and the permissive Weimar culture, tracking how political factions perverted that same science to suit their own ends.

This riveting book brings together forgotten scientific and surgical discoveries (including previously untranslated archival material from Berlin) with the politics and social history that galvanized the first stirrings of the trans rights movement. Through its unforgettable characters and immersive, urgent storytelling, The Intermediaries charts the relationships between nascent sexual science, queer civil rights, and the fight against fascism. It tells riveting stories of LGBTQ pioneers—a surprising, long-suppressed history—and offers a cautionary tale in the face of today’s oppressive anti-trans legislation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324036319
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	05/13/2025
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Brandy Schillace is a historian, former professor and museum professional, and editor of Medical Humanities, a social-justice journal. She writes about gender, medical history, and neurodiversity for outlets including Scientific American, Wired, CrimeReads, and Undark. She lives in Ohio.

Editorial Reviews

"Brandy Schillace is a wise, witty, humane, and insightful guide in this fascinating and revelatory history. The Intermediaries is essential reading."— Laura Helmuth, former editor in chief of Scientific American

"Riveting, incendiary—I couldn’t pull myself away."— CN Lester, author of Trans Like Me

"[The Intermediaries] is the crunchy, smart history of sexual science and liberation that we’ve all been waiting for."— Annalee Newitz, best-selling author of Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age

"The Intermediaries is irrefutable proof that trans people have always existed, a story of liberation in the face of oppression—and a case study in how institutionalized hatred can grow alongside queer and trans joy."— Mya Byrne, Americana singer-songwriter and trans rights advocate

"[The Intermediaries] is an indispensable read for historians and enthusiasts seeking to uncover the nuanced and seldom-told stories of transgender people in history."— Erin Reed, journalist and trans rights activist

"Brandy Schillace is a first-rate medical historian with a novelist’s soul. . . . The Intermediaries is a slam dunk."— Lindsey Fitzharris, author of The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

From the Publisher

★ 2025-02-13
The fight to affirm gender.

Drawing on abundant primary sources, medical historian Schillace, editor of the journalMedical Humanities, vividly depicts the maelstrom of race, politics, and scientific discovery that shaped attitudes about gender identity from 1890 to 1933 in Weimar, Germany. For homosexuals and nonbinary individuals, the period was fraught. Rapid industrial growth, immigration, and a growing women’s movement incited male panic about effeminate men and same-sex attraction. Closeted homosexuals, outed in scandalous exposure in the press, lost powerful positions. Central to her well-populated history is gay Jewish physician Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935), whom Hitler called “the most dangerous Jew in Germany.” In 1897, he established the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, whose mission targeted the overthrow of Paragraph 175, an oppressive law that made homosexuality a crime. From his medical practice, Hirschfeld concluded that “discrete, tidy genders didn’t exist.” Instead, he posited a continuum of gender identities: nonbinary, trans, and queer individuals whom he called “intermediaries.” His Institute for Sexual Science, in Berlin, was a safe place where they could get counseling, hormonal treatment, and even surgery, including for patients who had tried, with dire results, to remove their own breasts or penises. Dora Richter, born Rudolf, was the first patient to undergo complete gender-affirming surgeries. Schillace recounts advances in endocrinology, beginning with the discovery of sex hormones and genes in 1905; the rise of eugenics, which fed Nazism; and the advent of Freudian psychotherapy. The history is appended with a glossary of pertinent terms in English and German, such as the now outdated “inversion” and “hermaphrodite”; capsule biographies of the large cast of characters; and a timeline of major scientific and political events. Hysteria about gender identity, Schillace warns, has never abated; the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights continues.

A richly detailed, prodigiously researched history.

Kirkus Reviews