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  • Title: [The fake lady on trial: transvestitism in psychiatry and the sexual sciences, or the regulation of public dress-code].
    Author: Herrn R.
    Journal: Medizinhist J; 2014; 49(3):199-236. PubMed ID: 26035916.
    Abstract:
    With the publication of Carl Westphal's "die conträre Sexualempfindung" or "the Contrary Sexual Feeling" (1870), non-conform sexual/gender behavior, such as wearing clothing from the opposite gender, fell within psychiatry's field of activity; psychiatrists cooperated with law enforcement to maintain the public ordering of the sexes. On the basis of the Charité's medical records of a male patient, reported to have publically appeared in women's clothing and thereby making headlines in 1910 as the 'fake lady', the positions of psychiatrist Theodor Ziehen and sexual scientist Magnus Hirschfeld stand in contrast to one another--a development, which affected their forensic argumentation. As Hirschfeld had, in the same year 1910, introduced the concept of transvestitism to describe this very phenomenon, a transfer of competing interpretations out of sexual science and into psychiatry can be studied. The circulation of Magnus Hirschfeld's questionnaire to the vita sexualis allows for an investigation of the effects of such on the collective, biographical narration of sexual minorities, as well as on diagnostic capacity in psychiatry, in reference to transvestitism. An analysis of press-reports on the case and trials of the 'fake lady' approaches the question, how non-conform sexual behavior was to be recognized or identified in public and, for the sake of prevention, how it was explained. Such an analysis also investigates the role of the press in the popularization of Hirschfield's transvestitism concept.
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