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Schnittmuster des Geschlechts. Transvestitismus und Transsexualität in der frühen Sexualwissenschaft. By RAINER HERRN. Gießen, Germany: Psychosozial-Verlag, 2005. Pp. 246. euro29.90 (paper).
Rainer Herrn's recent book, Schnittmuster des Geschlechts, offers a groundbreaking contribution to historical investigations of transvestism and transsexuality as well as to our understandings of the development and practice of sexology in early-twentieth-century Europe. Highly original and innovative, the book traces the emergence of transvestism as a sexological category as well as the interplay of this category with juridical and social relations. As such, the book makes an important contribution to the history of medicine, the law, and social movements.
Herrn begins his treatise with a consideration of cross-dressing in sexology, notably its association with the notion of pathology. He goes on to provide an extended discussion of the work of the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld. Hirschfeld published Die Transvestiten: Eine Untersuchung über den erotischen Verkleidungstreib (Transvestites: An Investigation of Erotic Cross-Dressing) in 1910, and it situated transvestism within the realm of a drive, a notion...