Laverne Cox, Magnus Hirschfeld, and the Jewish Roots of the Transgender Rights Movement

The comprehensive dismantling of Western sexual norms.

A video recently circulated on social media shows transgender actor and LGBTQ activist Laverne Cox drawing parallels between anti-transgender legislation and National Socialist Germany during a January 2023 Morning Joe appearance. His remarks ignited controversy, but they tell a story many a court historian has sought to suppress for years.

Cox, who appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 2014, told Morning Joe that anti-trans sentiment and antisemitism are connected phenomena. He anchored the claim in the story of Magnus Hirschfeld, the German Jewish physician who founded the world’s first sexology institute in Berlin in 1919. “People should know that one of the first things that the Nazis did in 1933 was they burned Magnus Hirschfeld’s gender and sexuality” research, Cox said. “He was studying trans people, LGBTQ people. Lili Elbe, the Danish individual that the film was about, had his first transgender procedure at Magnus Hirschfeld’s clinic. The Nazis burned it down. All of this research.” He noted that “there were LGBTQ people in concentration camps stamped with pink triangles,” and drew a direct line to the present, arguing that the simultaneous rise of antisemitism and anti-trans legislation in the United States is not a coincidence. “It’s all happening and it’s happened before.”

Enter Magnus Hirschfeld

To understand Cox’s argument, one must understand the man at its center. Magnus Hirschfeld was born in 1868 in Kolberg, Pomerania, into an Ashkenazi Jewish family. His father, Hermann Hirschfeld, was a respected local physician. Magnus followed him into medicine, earning his degree in 1892. Shortly after beginning practice, a patient who was a homosexual man took his own life, leaving Hirschfeld a note asking him to help educate the public about the struggles homosexuals allegedly faced at the time. The note closed with the words, “The thought that you could contribute a future when the German fatherland will think of us in more just terms sweetens the hour of my death.”

Hirschfeld would later cite that suicide as the catalyst for everything that followed. He devoted the rest of his career to dismantling the legal and cultural structures that made it impossible for sexual minorities to live openly, pursuing that goal through science, law, film, and institution-building.

In 1897, Hirschfeld co-founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, the world’s first homosexual rights organization. Its primary mission was repealing Paragraph 175, the German statute that criminalized sexual relations between men. The committee’s petition gathered over 5,000 signatures from prominent Germans, including Albert Einstein, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, and Stefan Zweig.

He coined the term transvestite in 1910 and developed a theory of sexual intermediaries that proposed several dozen possible types ranging from masculine to feminine. He co-wrote and appeared in Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others) in 1919, one of cinema’s first sympathetic depictions of a homosexual couple.

The apex of his work was the Institut fur Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science), which he opened in Berlin in 1919. It was the first institution of its kind anywhere in the world. The institute offered counseling, sex education, treatment for sexually transmitted infections, and some of the earliest transgender surgeries ever performed. Among its patients were Dora Richter, one of the first men to undergo surgical transition, and Lili Elbe, whose story the film The Danish Girl later adapted for the screen.

None of it survived when Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) came to power in 1933. On May 6, members of the German Student Union stormed the Institute for Sexual Science, occupying the building, beating staff, and hauling away its contents. Four days later, on May 10, the library was burned at Bebelplatz alongside thousands of other volumes in one of the earliest and most famous Nazi book burnings. More than 20,000 books, case records, photographs, and a bust of Hirschfeld were destroyed. Hirschfeld, already traveling abroad, watched the destruction in a cinema newsreel and never returned to Germany. The Nazi government revoked his citizenship. He died in exile in Nice, France, on his 67th birthday in 1935.

Hirschfeld’s Associates

Hirschfeld did not build his institute alone. The researchers and physicians who joined his project came from overlapping worlds of medicine, psychiatry, and advocacy. They were disproportionately Jewish and played an outsized role in promoting sexual deviancy in Weimar Germany.

Arthur Kronfeld (1886–1941)

Arthur Kronfeld was a psychiatrist and one of the institute’s co-founders. Born to a Berlin Jewish family, he built a distinguished academic career, becoming the first Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry at a German university in 1931. He was forbidden to lecture in February 1935 under the Nazi government’s racial laws. He emigrated to Switzerland, was refused asylum, and then relocated to Moscow, where he became a university professor and was granted Soviet citizenship. In October 1941, as German forces advanced on Moscow, Kronfeld and his wife Lydia committed suicide by ingesting an overdose of Veronal.

Ludwig Levy-Lenz (1892–1966)

Ludwig Levy-Lenz served as the institute’s gynecologist and, alongside surgeon Erwin Gohrbandt, performed some of the earliest documented sex reassignment surgeries in history. His Jewish background made him a target of Nazi persecution, and after the institute’s destruction in 1933, he fled Germany. He ultimately settled in Cairo, where he established a clinic, before returning to Germany late in life. He died in Munich in 1966.

Eugen Steinach (1861–1944)

Eugen Steinach was an Austrian endocrinologist of Jewish extraction who collaborated with Hirschfeld on hormone research. Steinach’s work on the role of sex hormones and gonads in shaping secondary sex characteristics helped establish the scientific foundation that later made hormone therapy possible.

Harry Benjamin (1885–1986)

Harry Benjamin is the thread that connects Hirschfeld’s Weimar Berlin to mid-20th century America. Born in Berlin, Benjamin encountered Hirschfeld around 1907 through mutual acquaintances in Berlin’s homosexual subculture, an experience that shaped his lifelong interest in gender and sexuality. He emigrated to the United States and eventually became the leading authority on what he termed transsexualism. His 1966 book The Transsexual Phenomenon became the defining text of transgender medicine for decades. The Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, now the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, was named in his honor. He lived to 101.

Arnold Zweig (1887–1968)

Arnold Zweig was a German-Jewish novelist and a vocal supporter of Hirschfeld’s work. Zweig publicly championed Hirschfeld’s campaigns against the persecution of homosexuals. The two visited Palestine in 1932, each unaware of the other’s presence. Zweig maintained a twelve-year correspondence with Sigmund Freud from 1927 to 1939, later published in book form, and witnessed the burning of his own books on Unter den Linden in 1933 before fleeing to Palestine, where he spent 15 years in disillusioned exile. He returned to East Germany in 1948, served as president of the DDR Academy of Arts, and received the Soviet Union’s Lenin Peace Prize in 1958 before dying in East Berlin in 1968.

Hirschfeld’s Legacy Lives On

Hirschfeld’s legacy did not end with the burning of his institute. It traveled with his students and collaborators into exile, and eventually into the institutional structures of American Jewish life. Today, several major Jewish organizations rank among the most prominent advocates for transgender and LGBTQ rights in the United States.

Union for Reform Judaism

The Union for Reform Judaism represents the largest branch of Judaism in North America. Its engagement with LGBTQ issues stretches back to 1965, when the Women of Reform Judaism called for the decriminalization of homosexuality. In 2015, the URJ passed a landmark resolution explicitly supporting transgender rights and calling for the full equality, inclusion, and acceptance of people of all gender identities and gender expressions throughout its congregations. The movement grounds transgender dignity in Jewish text, citing the principle that all human beings are created b’tzelem Elohim, in the Divine image, drawing on Genesis 1:27.

Keshet

Keshet works for LGBTQ equality across Jewish life. In 2022, it launched the Thrive coalition with over 300 Jewish organizational partners to defend transgender and LGBTQ youth. On Yom HaShoah 2024, Keshet published a tribute to Hirschfeld titled Through Science to Justice, connecting his legacy directly to contemporary Jewish LGBTQ advocacy and acknowledging both his pioneering courage and the complexity of his legacy.

Anti-Defamation League

The ADL has advocated for LGBTQ rights for decades, filing amicus briefs in landmark cases including Obergefell v. Hodges and supporting anti-discrimination laws covering gender identity. In November 2022, the ADL partnered with GLAAD to counter anti-LGBTQ extremism and hate, hiring a dedicated analyst to track threats against LGBTQ individuals and producing joint reports documenting over 700 incidents of anti-LGBTQ hate in a single year.

Prominent Jewish individuals have also played a critical role in advancing transgenderism in contemporary times. Jennifer Pritzker, a transgender billionaire from the Jewish Pritzker family that built the Hyatt Hotels empire, came out in 2013. Through his Tawani Foundation, he donated $2 million to create the world’s first endowed academic chair of transgender studies at the University of Victoria in 2016. He also funded a $1.35 million study at the Palm Center on transgender military service. His philanthropy has fundamentally shaped the academic infrastructure of transgender studies.

The connection Cox drew on Morning Joe was not invented. It traces a direct historical line from Hirschfeld’s pioneering work in Weimar Germany, through Harry Benjamin’s mid-century medical practice in New York, to today’s institutional support from Reform Judaism, the ADL, Keshet, and the American Jewish World Service.

Cox himself is a product of this multi-decade Jewish activist project, and his success has largely been driven due to his connections with Jewry in America. He has spoken openly about his personal affinity for Jewish men. In a 2014 appearance on Chelsea Lately, he described himself as “the nation’s premiere black transgender shiksa,” a remark covered by The Forward. A decade later, he revealed on Call Her Daddy that he had used JDate, the Jewish dating platform, alongside other apps. His career has been shaped by Jewish creatives, from Jenji Kohan, who created his breakout role as Sophia Burset on Orange Is the New Black, to Norman Lear, whose Act III Productions produced his 2026 series Clean Slate. The Jewish Women’s Archive has profiled his activism, and a 2014 Dame Magazine essay drew explicit parallels between his experience of gender transition and Jewish identity transformation.

The Nazis understood what they were doing when they burned Hirschfeld’s institute. They were not simply destroying paper. They were incinerating a subversive vision of humanity, one that sought to undermine long-standing sexual norms in gentile civilization. The researchers who built that institute, many of them Jewish, scattered across the world. Some survived. Some did not. But the science they built did not disappear. It traveled with them into exile, and it eventually found a home in the American medical and legal institutions that currently form an integral part of the transgender movement.

From a big picture perspective, the transgender movement should be viewed as another vehicle for Jewish subversion. The scrutiny directed toward Jewish influence since October 7 reveals an undeniable continuity between the subversion of national sovereignty abroad and the dismantling of sexual norms on the American home front. As this awareness matures into a broader understanding of Jewish group power, the system will undoubtedly resort to more heavy-handed tactics and preemptive censorship to forestall the crystallization of a unified, oppositional gentile identity.

The unfolding resistance is an essential stage in the historical arc, moving inexorably toward a defining battle between the interests of gentile nations and those of organized Jewry. As this conflict matures throughout the 21st century, it will serve as the essential catalyst for gentiles to dismantle the structures of their dispossession and reassert sovereignty over their own civilizational future.

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