Sexological cases and the prehistory of transgender identity politics in interwar Germany

This chapter examines how this new branch of subcultural media negotiated questions of transvestite identity, and in doing so adapted the narrative model of the sexological case history. Drawing on Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant's formulations of 'sexual publics', it explores how these mediated cases developed into a new subgenre of confessional transvestite autobiography, helping to create a distinct transvestite reading public and subcultural identity during the Weimar Republic. The chapter explores how an analysis of transvestite cases both medical and autobiographical, contribute to a more critical historiography of transgender identity politics. It expresses that the conventional queer temporalities that situate the birth of Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer, LGBTQ activism in the second half of the twentieth century marked symbolically by the 1969 Stonewall riots by exploring the prehistory of contemporary sexual identity politics. The looping effect between sexology and an emerging transvestite public was not a matter of straightforward uptake.