The Administration of Gender Identity

in Nazi Germany
by Jane Caplan

The history of women and gender has undergone profound transformations

and elaborations since Tim Mason began his work on ‘Women in Germany’

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for the Ruskin History Workshop in 1973. At that time women’s history
barely existed as an academic field, and what most of us knew about women
in Nazi Germany was still largely drawn from Clifford Kirkpatrick’s
1939 book on women and family life.1 In German women’s history, the
two British pioneers were Jill Stephenson and Richard Evans, both of
whom were completing dissertations on the subject that were published
shortly before Tim’s two-part essay appeared in History Workshop Journal
in 1976.2 He began with one of his overriding concerns, the mobilization of
resources for war, and with a characteristic question: why did something not
happen that might have been expected to happen? In this case, why were
women not mobilized to meet the wartime demand for labour? Typically, his
answer led him into a wide-ranging and thoughtful account that took in the
social history of women and the family, as well as the economics and politics
of women’s waged labour between the 1920s and the 1940s. As always, he
was sceptical of large-scale theories of determination – here, prevailing ideas
about patriarchy, the family and capitalism that ignored, as he put it, ‘all the
questions about Vermittlung [mediation] . . . It won’t do to postulate even the
most plausible of concordances between capitalism & 19-20c family organ-
ization & then simply assert that the latter was determined by the former’.3
I will return to this point at the end of this essay.
I decided to use my contribution to this feature to pick up Mason’s cue
of explaining why something expected didn’t happen, and in an aspect
of women’s and gender history that had barely got started in the 1970s:
‘outsider’ sexualities in Nazi Germany. Serious research on this began to
appear only in the 1990s, with an agenda of questions arising from both
feminist and gay history.4 Since then a lot of painstaking research has
recovered histories of persecution and survival, and has mapped the multiple
and not altogether consistent operations of gender and sexuality in the
power circuits of National Socialism.5 This essay explores one of these
inconsistencies which appeared at the far margins of outsider sexual
behaviours and gender identities. Obviously the most important thing to

St Antony’s College, Oxford jane.caplan@sant.ox.ac.uk

History Workshop Journal Issue 72 Advance Access Publication 23 August 2011 doi:10.1093/hwj/dbr021
ß The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved.
172 History Workshop Journal

acknowledge about anyone caught in these situations is what he or she

suffered and why. But I will take a rather different approach here: to see
how sex and gender became entangled in networks of official categorization
and bureaucratic transactions.
My starting-point was a documentary accident. I was working in the
Berlin archives on the proof and policing of individual identity under the
Nazi regime, but also looking sideways at files on police encounters with
women suspected of homosexuality. Since this behaviour was never crim-
inalized,6 records on women are minimal by comparison with the prolific
documentation on male homosexuals. My eye was caught by an even smaller
sub-group of women in these files: women who were issued with police
permits to cross-dress, or in other words, to appear in public wearing the

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clothing of the sex to which they had not been assigned at birth. Let me
summarize some of the cases.
In January 1938, Erna K., a fifty-year-old worker, was taken into
‘protective custody’ for ‘endangering public security and order’ by wearing
men’s clothing in public, ‘despite the fact that the permit previously issued to
her had been withdrawn in the year 1933’. Erna K. was sent to the women’s
concentration camp in Lichtenburg, but was released in October 1938,
armed with temporary permission from the camp’s Political Department
to wear men’s clothing pending the issue of an official permit by the
Gestapo. This permission was based on a medical examination which she
had undergone while in the camp. The Gestapo issued their permit shortly
after her release, on the condition that she could not use public conveniences
or baths when wearing male clothing. And in November the Interior
Ministry granted permission to ‘the female transvestite Erna Anna Marie
K.’ to substitute the name ‘Gerd’ for her registered forenames, and her
record was duly corrected. K. remained under police surveillance, without
giving cause for any further action, and in 1939 the records end.7
The case of Agnes S., described as a ‘lesbian known to the police since
1926’, had a different outcome.8 S. was detained in Berlin in June 1939,
while selling apples from a barrow, wearing, according to the police,
‘a man’s suit (jacket and trousers) . . . without being able to show a
permit’. Unlike Erna K., Agnes S. left an account of herself, albeit through
police interrogations, in which she admitted to having had sexual relations
with women in the past, and also to having a ‘pronounced need’ since her
childhood to wear men’s clothing. She feared that if she were now forbidden
to wear men’s clothing she would lose her mainly female clientele and would
be unable to make a living. The police were unmoved, but although she had
no choice but to abide by the ruling, they conceded that she could change
her clothing style gradually and thus less conspicuously.
By August 1940, however, S. was again the subject of a police investiga-
tion into her male clothing. This time she was described as a ‘female trans-
vestite’ who was wearing men’s clothes ‘for indecent motives’, despite the
fact that neither then nor previously was there any evidence that she had
 The Administration of Gender Identity in Nazi Germany 173

caused public offence. The interrogation on this second occasion followed

the unpleasant style that has been documented by several historians, with
the police exacting descriptions of her sexual behaviour in prurient and
humiliating detail. Once again she pleaded that her neighbours and her
clientele – among whom her nickname was ‘Kleener’ or ‘Dicker’ (Tiny or
Tubby, both masculine) – knew her only as a man, and would not accept her
as a woman. Again she promised that in future she would wear only clothes
that ‘would allow me to be immediately recognizable as a woman’, under
pain of further police attention. Nevertheless she had committed no offence
and was released, probably to be kept under police surveillance. Who knows
whether this second bruising encounter with the police was enough to
deter her from continuing to follow her ‘pronounced need’.

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Different again, finally, was the situation of Gertrud W., a postal worker
who had been issued with a permit to cross-dress in 1932 and was known
informally by the male abbreviation of her given name, Gerd.9 Her situation
by the mid 1930s was pitiable. Dressed as a man, but saddled officially with
a woman’s name, she had evidently been unable to find a job because no-one
would employ someone who exhibited such a blatant discrepancy between
name and appearance. But when she then resolved to try living as a woman,
she was subjected to public humiliation and rejection, and so in 1940 peti-
tioned the police to have her permit restored. Following a medical examin-
ation and her assurance that she had never had homosexual relations and
lived in seclusion, the police informed her that she could dress as a man
provided that she caused no public offence; but they also refused to issue
her with a new permit.
Let me briefly explain the background to these permits to cross-dress.10
I must make it clear that I am not trying to work out here what might be the
‘correct’ definition and assignation of transvestism, transsexuality or homo-
sexuality. My refusal mirrors what was experienced by the Berlin authorities
as a sense of bafflement. They never quite knew how to identify these indi-
viduals, or even what pronoun to use, as they confronted identities and
behaviours that challenged the unsubtle categorizing practices of police
and bureaucrats. For them, ‘transvestite’ and ‘homosexual’ functioned as
adequate catch-all and overlapping terms.
Cross-dressing as such was not illegal under early twentieth-century
German law, unless it was for purposes of criminal deception, but
cross-dressing men or women were vulnerable to the provisions of the
penal code against breach of the peace or causing public outrage.11 Before
1914 women in male or mannish clothing were liable to be detained by the
police, either on these grounds or because the police suspected them of being
men disguised in women’s clothing for nefarious sexual purposes; they were
occasionally even brought to trial.12 (Cross-dressing men were also detained
and charged, or on occasion issued with a permit.)13 Before 1914 a few
enterprising or desperate individuals in this situation approached the
sexual reformer Magnus Hirschfeld to help them acquire a police statement
174 History Workshop Journal

about their clothing so as to avoid this risk. Hirschfeld medically examined

them and took their life and sexual histories in order to establish what he
regarded as their ‘objective’ sexual identity; the term ‘transvestite’ was in
fact his coinage. His reports were submitted to the police as evidence for the
issue of what was to become known as a ‘Transvestitenschein’, a transvestite
pass. In the case of Katharina T. in 1908, for example, he argued that
permission to wear men’s clothes corresponded to her inner self and was
essential to her well-being and even survival; and that given her masculine
physique she was more likely to cause ‘public outrage’ if she dressed as
a woman.14 Hirschfeld’s first success was in 1912, on behalf of Louise S.,
and in the Weimar Republic, partly as a result of his pressure, the police pass
was transformed into a specific permit as such (hand-written, so evidently

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not numerous).15
In the 1920s Hirschfeld was also instrumental in aiding a number of
people to register an official change of forename to one that suited their
sense of gender identity. I cannot go into the esoteric details of German
name law here, except to say that between 1920 and 1932 the official change
of forename in Prussia was licensed through a simplified version of the
reformed procedures for change of family name. The procedure was
initiated through application to the local court (Amtsgericht) and supervised
by the justice ministry. This provided cross-dressers with a capacity to
legally change an inappropriate forename, and a number of such applica-
tions backed by Hirschfeld’s institute were approved by the Berlin courts:
thus a Grete became Gerd, and a Bertha, Berchtold.16 In all cases the legal
change of name had to be followed up with a formal correction of the civil
registers, showing that the new name had been officially substituted for
the original given name.
For Hirschfeld, these cases were part of a broad campaign of sexual
enlightenment and emancipation: to improve the medical recognition and
official and public tolerance of paraphilias of all kinds. His strategy
(in keeping with a prevailing psychosexual position) was to insist on the
objective constitutional foundation of all sexual identities, in opposition
to the psychopathological model of abnormality which, for homosexuals
for example, focused on perverted, degenerated and seductive desires. The
transvestite belonged in Hirschfeld’s schema of intermediate sexualities
(Zwischenstufe) which challenged the dichotomous norm of male and
female. For these reasons, Hirschfeld was a target of particular Nazi
venom and his institute and its principles of sexual enlightenment fell
immediate victim to the new regime.17 But the fates of those he had
helped did not necessarily follow the same trajectory after 1933. This can
be illustrated by following through a complicated case from its origin in
1919 to its not altogether predictable conclusion in 1941.
In September 1919, Jenny S., born in Erfurt in 1898, successfully applied
for a police permit to wear men’s clothing, supported by expert evidence
from Hirschfeld as to her ambiguous anatomical sexuality.18 In September
 The Administration of Gender Identity in Nazi Germany 175

1920, S. was successful in petitioning the Amtsgericht Berlin-Mitte to change

her name to Alex, and in November the civil register in Erfurt was accord-
ingly corrected to show the new name; her registered gender remained
unchanged by this.19 Two subsequent medical examinations in 1928
came to contradictory conclusions as to Alex’s true sex, again on anatom-
ical and physical grounds: one spoke of a ‘dual sexuality-bisexuality’
(Doppelgeschlechtigkeit-Bisexualität), the other concluded that ‘Alex S. is
to be seen as female’.20 Ten years later, in September 1939, Alex S. peti-
tioned Göring for the birth register to be altered to show that he was not a
girl but a boy. S. gave up this attempt as hopeless in February 1940, but his
file was already in the hands of the authorities responsible for the supervi-
sion of the register offices (Standesämter) in Berlin. Here the reaction was

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one of predictable outrage. Only a morally degenerate state could have
licensed ‘such homosexual individuals’ to wear women’s clothing, let alone
use a woman’s name, and this kind of thing was unacceptable in the new
Nazi state. The Berlin authorities therefore expected the Erfurt Standesamt
to rescind the name-change, after which they would take steps to ensure that
Alex S. also lost his Berlin Transvestitenschein.
Unexpectedly, however, the register office proved unable to rescind the
change of name, because following a change in the law in 1932, an amend-
ment of this kind required an executive decision by the interior administra-
tion, potentially at ministerial level. And although the Erfurt officials shared
the disgust of their Berlin colleagues and tried to pursue the case further,
they were thwarted by the fact that in October 1939 all proceedings in
change-of-name cases had been suspended for the duration of the war as
a labour-saving measure.21 The register authorities nevertheless continued
their efforts, on the grounds that this was not a private case but a matter of
interest to the state. Yet the Interior Ministry’s final decision, reported in
May 1941, might surprise us. S. having lived as a man since 1920, the min-
istry felt it would be ‘an unjustifiable hardship’ and ‘probably quite impos-
sible’ for him to have to start living as a woman again. On these grounds
too, the ministry refused to rescind the 1920 name change, conceding only
that he would not be allowed to marry.22
I do not know whether this really was the end of the matter for Alex S.,
any more than we know whether the other cross-dressing women discussed
above were left in peace by the police after their case files closed. This might
well be doubted, yet even these few examples draw attention to striking
inconsistencies in their treatment by the police and by civil servants. In
her recent study of prostitution in Germany between 1914 and 1945,
Victoria Harris argues that in that area of policed sexuality we can see
‘a mix of permissiveness and repression’ running through both the
Weimar and Nazi eras. 23 There is something to be said for testing the
same argument here, although I am not sure that permissiveness and repres-
sion are the only terms for what I have been discussing: expertise and frus-
tration might also fit. The evidence gives pause to any presumption that
176 History Workshop Journal

individuals who so starkly tested the norms of bipolar sexual identity would
be automatic candidates for repression and exclusion.
Was this because the numbers were too small and the anomalies too
marginal to generate any public danger or any clear standard of decision?
Even though historians must sometimes be content with this kind of unsat-
isfactory conclusion, we must also note that each case cited here was in fact
investigated in some way, demanded some form of official negotiation, and
was brought to some kind of conclusion, whether permanent or provisional,
and whether or not this was satisfactory for the parties concerned. It also
depends what questions one wants to answer.
I started my investigation of these cases out of simple curiosity: they were
surprising, and I wanted to know how they arose and how to explain their

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unexpected procedures and outcomes. But my wider interest comes from a
question which is perhaps analogous in bureaucratic terms to Tim’s demand
that I mentioned at the start of this essay: that we investigate and under-
stand systems of mediation. The interesting issue here is the tangle of
mediations and determinations that loop between bureaucracies and indi-
viduals as they negotiate and transact the systems of categorization and
sorting that are integral to complex political and social structures.24
These cases certainly posed, to a regime with a punitive approach to the
policing of an allegedly dichotomous system of gender identity, a fundamen-
tal challenge: how to distinguish between female and male. Such cases
demonstrate how people and power interrelate at these low, quotidian
levels: how anomalous individuals explode the prescribed ways in which
the authorities are charged with handling them. Students of Nazi
Germany are well aware of the ways in which Nazi racial policies produced
a landscape of intermediate statuses and anomalies. Racial categorization
seeped into every aspect of German life after 1933, and massive bureaucratic
efforts were devoted to establishing, applying and policing racial identities
on this larger scale, with the objective of ensuring that no one eluded their
allotted pigeon-hole. These processes propelled hundreds of thousands of
Jewish men and women into newly defined states of insecurity and danger
about who they were and what defined them as such (parentage, ancestry,
marriage, upbringing, synagogue membership, political conviction). They
intensified risk for anyone already on the margins.
Gender identity looked simple by comparison, yet here too anomalies
eluded conclusive decidability, especially after anatomical investigation:
intended to elicit the truth of sex, this proved just as likely to muddle it
further.25 For the police, these cases disclosed moments where official
ignorance and uncertainty proved incapable of being fully crystallized into
knowledge and certainty. The police – who were so insistent in their perse-
cution of male homosexual desire – were not entirely consistent in their
handling of ostensible women who blurred the gender boundaries, as witness
the case of Agnes S. who was forced back into women’s clothes. But perhaps
as long as there was no evidence of ‘perverse’ behaviour and no obvious
 The Administration of Gender Identity in Nazi Germany 177

threat to public order, the police used their discretion to leave them in the
various states of limbo to which their subjective gender ambiguity already
consigned them.26
In Alex S.’s case, the Interior Ministry’s decision may have reflected the
view that a potential man would be demeaned by being forced to live as
a woman.27 The register offices were in theory somewhat more familiar with
the problem of sexual if not gender ambiguity, since there were recom-
mended procedures for the provisional registration of an infant of indeter-
minate sex as a ‘Zwitter’ or hermaphrodite.28 But these cases were
vanishingly rare and in any case at some point a permanent assignment of
a sex and a name had to be made, however ambiguous the evidence, since
the civil code knew only two sexes.29 The Berlin city administration had

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devoted some efforts after 1933 to improving both the technical and political
qualification of its register officials, and one senses their unease on both
scores: a woman with a man’s name confounded the bureaucratic categories
and had become politically intolerable for a profession newly schooled in its
national importance.30 The Berlin register officials, like the police, ultimate-
ly found it easier to force the ambiguous physical evidence they had into the
only category they wanted to acknowledge: the morally opprobrious cat-
egory of homosexual desire. As for the subjects of these cases, their efforts to
underwrite their subjective gender identity were no doubt evidence of pro-
found psychological drives as well as practical needs. Yet even so, tangled as
they were in potentially disastrous machineries of moral and medical power,
they were surprisingly determined to claim their own identity against the
intrusions of an intractably powerful police.

Jane Caplan teaches modern European history at Oxford and is a Fellow of

St Antony’s College where she is also director of the European Studies
Centre. She has worked mainly on the history of Nazi Germany and the
history of individual identity documentation in modern Europe, and is cur-
rently researching the proof and policing of identity in Nazi Germany.
Her publications include Written on the Body: the Tattoo in European and
American History (ed.; London/Princeton, 2000); Documenting Individual
Identity: the Development of State Practices in the Modern World (co-ed.
John Torpey; Princeton, 2001); Nazi Germany (ed.; Oxford, 2008); and
Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: the New Histories (co-ed.
Nikolaus Wachsmann; London, 2010). She is an editor of History
Workshop Journal.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

My thanks to the History Faculty of the University of Oxford for supporting the research on
which this essay is based; and to Jutta Braun, Christiane Kuller, Jan Lambertz, Marti Lybeck,
178 History Workshop Journal

Katie Sutton and Laurie Marhoefer as well as editors of History Workshop Journal for
invaluable suggestions and references.
1 Clifford Kirkpatrick, Woman in Nazi Germany, London, 1939.
2 Tim Mason, ‘Women in Germany 1925-1940: Family, Welfare and Work’, Part 1,
History Workshop Journal 1, spring 1976, Part 2, History Workshop Journal 2, autumn 1976;
Richard J. Evans, ‘The Women’s Movement in Germany 1890-1919’, DPhil. dissertation,
Oxford, 1972; Jill Stephenson, Women in Nazi Germany, London, 1975; for Germany, see
Gendering Modern German History: Rewriting Historiography, ed. Karen Hagemann and
Jean Quataert, London and New York, 2007; among important early US publications,
When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany, ed. Renate Bridenthal,
Atina Grossman and Marion Kaplan, New York, 1984.
3 Letter from Tim Mason to Jane Caplan, 14 Sept. 1975 (author’s possession).
4 Among the earliest works see Claudia Schoppmann, Nationalsozialistische Sexualpolitik
und weibliche Homosexualität, Pfaffenweiler, 1991; Günter Grau (with Claudia Schoppmann),
Homosexualität in der NS-Zeit. Dokumente einer Diskriminierung und Verfolgung, Frankfurt am

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Main, 1993; Burkhard Jellonnek, Homosexuelle unter dem Hakenkreuz. Die Verfolgung von
Homosexuellen im Dritten Reich, Paderborn, 1990; and see also the Journal of the History of
Sexuality, founded in 1990. For legal aspects see Geoffrey J. Giles, ‘Legislating Homophobia in
the Third Reich: the Radicalization of Prosecution against Homosexuality by the Legal
Profession’, German History 23: 3, 2005, and Robert Moeller, ‘ ‘‘The Homosexual Man is
a ‘Man’, the Homosexual Woman is a ‘Woman’ ’’: Sex, Society, and the Law in Postwar
West Germany’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 4, 1994.
5 Now a huge literature; see initially Claudia Koonz, ‘A Tributary and a Mainstream.
Gender, Public Memory, and Historiography of Nazi Germany’, in Gendering Modern German
History, ed. Hagemann and Quataert; Sexuality and German Fascism, ed. Dagmar Herzog, New
York/London, 2005; and special issues of German History 23: 3, 2005, ‘Sexuality in Modern
German History’; and Journal of the History of Sexuality 17: 1, 2008, ‘Masculinity
and Homosexuality in Germany and the German Colonies 1880-1945’.
6 The likely reasons are summarized by Schoppmann and they reflected older stereotypes
as well as newer eugenic considerations; see also Geoffrey Giles’s argument that the Nazi
leadership used the campaign against male homosexuality for the purposes of ‘consensus
building’ – a consideration that would not have applied so clearly to female homosexuals;
Giles, ‘Legislating Homophobia in the Third Reich’, p. 352. The cases discussed in this
paper came to police notice in three main ways: raids on homosexual bars; police street
observation; denunciation.
7 Landesarchiv Berlin (LAB) A Pr. Br. 030-02-05 (Kriminalpolizeileitstelle Berlin
Personenkarten ‘Allgemein’), Nr. 195.
8 LAB A Pr. Br. 030-02-05, Nr. 855.
9 LAB A Pr. Br. 030-02-05, Nr. 929 .
10 Taken from Magnus Hirschfeld, Transvestites: the Erotic Urge to Cross-Dress (1910),
Buffalo, 1991; Rainer Herrn, Schnittmuster des Geschlechts. Transvestismus und Transsexualität
in der frühen Sexualwissenschaft, Giessen, 2005, the relevant section of which is based on some
of the same documentation from the Berlin Landesarchiv that I refer to. My thanks to Katie
Sutton for this reference.
11 Strafgesetzbuch des Deutschen Reiches (1871), §360 (11) (‘grosser Unfug’) and §183
(‘öffentlicher Ärgernis’).
12 Hirschfeld, Transvestites, chap. 13.
13 See Magnus Hirschfeld, Der erotische Verkleidungstrieb (Die Transvestiten), Illustrierter
Teil, Berlin, 1912, Fig. XVIII and caption, showing that Joseph Meissauer had been issued with
such a permit by the Berlin and Munich police authorities.
14 Hirschfeld, Transvestites, p. 154.
15 An example from Cologne in May 1918 took the form of a generic police travel pass
with photo, description, signature and a handwritten note on the back, signed by the police,
declaring that ‘B.B., holder of this pass, is not forbidden to wear men’s clothing’ (LAB A.
Rep. 341-04, Nr. 1087, p. 16), reproduced in Herrn, Schnittmuster des Geschlechts, p. 130.
16 Herrn, Schnittmuster, pp. 126ff.
17 See the on-line exhibition on the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft 1919-1933 at:
http://www.hirschfeld.in-berlin.de/institut/de/index1024_2.html (consulted 16 May 2011).
18 LAB A. Rep. 001-02 (Magistrat der Stadt Berlin, Generalbüro), Nr. 2269.
 The Administration of Gender Identity in Nazi Germany 179

19 Herrn, Schnittmuster, p. 128, reproduces the change of name announcement in the

Deutscher Reichsanzeiger und Preussischer Staatsanzeiger, 18 Sept. 1920, but without further
comment or evidence; copy of correction (Berichtigung) to birth register in LAB A.
Rep. 001-02, Nr. 2269, p. 5.
20 ‘Zeugnis des Kassenarzt Dr Placzek in Berlin v. 4.4.1927: Ergebnis’ and ‘gerichtsarz-
tliches Zeugnis’ by Drs Klemperer and Kracauer (copies in LAB A. Rep. 001-02, Nr. 2269).
Formal procedures existed for subsequently correcting an erroneous registration of sex in
the birth register (see references in n. 28 below).
21 Reich Interior Ministry circular (RdErl.), 20 Oct. 1939, Reichsministerialblatt für die
innere Verwaltung, 1939, 2182, cited in copy of letter to Berlin Police President
(Polizei-Präsident), 4 June 1940 (LAB. Rep. 001-02, Nr. 2269). The writer of this letter
appeared unaware of the simultaneous suspension of pending cases to rescind grants of
‘German-sounding’ surnames to Jews, a matter of presumably no less ‘public interest’
(Bundesarchiv Lichterfelde, R 1501, nos. 127443-127447).
22 Polizei-Präsident Berlin to Standesamt Erfurt, 6 May 1941 (copy in LAB Rep. 001-02,
Nr. 2269; this is the final document in this file). It was made clear that he would be ‘prevented’

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from marrying, including as a woman.
23 Victoria Harris, Selling Sex in the Third Reich: Prostitutes in German Society 1914-1945,
Oxford, 2010. See also Dagmar Herzog’s claim about the endorsement of infantile polymorph-
ous sexuality by the SS magazine Das Schwarze Korps, in ‘How ‘‘Jewish’’ is German Sexuality?
Sex and Antisemitism in the Third Reich’, in German History from the Margins, ed. Neil
Gregor, Nils Roemer and Mark Roseman, Bloomington, 2006, p. 194.
24 See for example Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan L. Starr, Sorting Things Out:
Classification and its Consequences, Cambridge MA., 1999, and David Lyon, Surveillance as
Social Sorting, London, 2003.
25 On the impossibility of grounding sex in the body, see for example Body Guards: the
Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, New York, 1991;
and Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, ‘The Hermaphrodite and the Order of Nature.
Sexual Ambiguity in Early Modern France’, in Premodern Sexualities, ed. Louise
Fradenburg and Carla Freccero, London, 1996. The best-known nineteenth-century case is
that of Herculine Barbin: see Herculine Barbin. Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of
a Nineteenth-century French Hermaphrodite, intro. Michel Foucault, New York, 1980.
26 Note the case of Louise Sch. in 1912 (discussed by Herrn, Schnittmuster, pp. 85–91),
which appears to be unique in that the Prussian police went further than the petitioner had
requested, and enabled a change not only of name to Louis, but also of sex, on grounds of
‘seelisches Zwittertum’. His new sex was entered into the civil register, and on this basis Louis S.
was evidently allowed to marry. In 1882/3, Sophie Krüger was apparently able to secure the
amendment of her baptismal certificate (from the days before the introduction of compulsory
civil registration) to show her sex as ‘male’ and her forenames as Hermann Carl (documenta-
tion in LAB A Pr Br Rep 030 Tit 185, Nr 20431, a file titled ‘Acta des Königlichen
Polizei-Praesidii zu Berlin, betr. die Kleidungen des weiblichen Geschlechts, insbesonderen
die Erlaubnis Manneskleidern tragen zu dürfen 1813-1883’). Legislation in 1980 established
a new legal basis for the registration of change of sex and forename in Germany: Gesetz
über die Änderung von Vornamen und die Feststellung der Geschlechtszugehörigkeit in beson-
deren Fällen, 10 Sept. 1980, Bundesgesetzblatt (BGBl) 1980 I, 1654; and see also
Personenstandsrechtsreformgesetz, 19 Feb. 2007, re confidentiality of the birth certificate
(BGBl 2007 I, 122).
27 Thanks to Marti Lybeck for this suggestion.
28 Under earlier law (e.g. Prussia’s Allgemeines Landrecht of 1797) either the parents or
the child itself on reaching adulthood could make the choice, but in the nineteenth century this
was superseded by calling in expert medical testimony as to the ‘predominant’ sex. For recom-
mended practice in the civil register offices following the introduction of compulsory civil
registration in 1875, see A. von Erichsen, Die Führung der Standesregister, Berlin, 1900, 8th
edn, pp. 57 (commentary) and 88, no. VII (standard form for ‘Eintragung über eine uneheliche
Zwittergeburt’); similarly, Hans Dippel, Standesamt und Standesamtsführung. Eine erste
Einführung für den neuernannten Standesbeamten, Berlin, 1941, pp. 72–3; also Geertje Mak,
‘Doubtful Sex in Civil Law: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Proposals for Ruling
Hermaphroditism’, Cardozo Journal of Law and Gender 197, 2005-6.
29 See Eugen Wilhelm, Die rechtliche Stellung der (körperlichen) Zwitter de lege lata und de
lege ferenda, Halle, 1909, pp. 21–4.
180 History Workshop Journal

30 For the status of the civil registrars in Nazi Germany, see Siegfried Maruhn,
Staatsdiener im Unrechtsstaat. Die deutschen Standesbeamten und ihr Verband unter
dem Nationalsozialismus, Frankfurt/Berlin, 2002; and Jane Caplan, ‘Registering the
Volksgemeinschaft. Civil Status in Nazi Germany 1933-1939’, in A Nazi ‘Volksgemeinschaft’?
German Society in the Third Reich, ed. Bernhard Gotto and Martina Steber, Oxford, 2012,
forthcoming.

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