THE BOOK IS A GO!
Transgender History out 2025
Good morning—GOOD NEWS! Going on 2 years ago, I published my article in Scientific American about #transgenger + #hormone history 🗃️🧪🏳️⚧️. I finished the book in Oct, and my editor just wrote to say she loves it and it will publish next winter!
This book almost didn’t happen. It was so hard to write. It *hurt* to write. Watching the news and reading history, it felt the same—rise of fascism and attacks on minorities and LGBTQ. But it’s done, it is written.
THE INTERMEDIARIES tells the story of that science—itself often strange and remarkable—as well as the man, his band of revolutionaries, and the Institute for Sexual Science, both center of the homosexual and trans community and base of operations for the first LGBTQ rights movement of the 20th century.
Sexual and gender nonconformists, what Hirschfeld called the intermediaries, had a right to live, a right to thrive. They also had a right to joy. Science would lead the way, but this history unfolds as an interwar thriller—patients and physicians risking their lives to be seen and heard even as Hitler began his rise to power. They faced abuse, blackmail, and political machinations; they responded with secret publishing campaigns, leaflet drops, pro-homosexual propaganda, and alignments with rebel factions of Berlin’s literati. It’s a story about pioneers. And about hope.
And it all started here:
The Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin would be a century old if it hadn’t fallen victim to Nazi ideology
