New TG Archive Acquisition: 1928 1st Edition Havelock Ellis Book, Eonism and Other Studies
Studies in th Psychology of Sex by Havlock Ellis: Eonism and Other Studies
The Transgender Foundation of Americ has acquired a first edition copy of Havelock Ellis’ “Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume VII Eonism and Other Supplementary Studies”. This volume is significant to both the transgender lexicon and the development of the understanding of transgender expression.
Magnus Hirschfeld and Havelock Ellis were the first to really look at transgenders. Both initially concluded the phenomenon of transgender behavior was grounded in sexuality. It is easy t understand why this happened: There are many crossdressers who dress for sexual reasons; and, Freudian psychology was the gold standard of the day for psychological professionals. In 1910, Hirschfel published, The Transvestites: An Investigation of th Erotic Desire to Cross Dress and in 1913, Ellis published a paper in which he looked into the issue of those with a ‘sexo-aesthetic inversion’.
In this book, Ellis states that his term, ‘sexo-aesthetic inversion’ was misleading and should not be used. Through this book, Ellis entered a new term into the transgender lexicon: ‘Eonism’, after the French transwoman, Chevalier d’Eon.
Ellis and Hirschfeld’s work was groundbreaking in that it mainly interested in simply gathering information about transgender people instead of trying to design a cure. Freud and his followers, on the other hand, felt that transgender behavior was a pathology and that it likely stemmed from small boys seeing their mother’s genitalia which created a deep anxiety about the notion of losing his own penis.
Emil Gutheil used the work of Ellis and Hirschfeld to bring the psychological world out of the dark ages of Freudian views of gender normative behavior and into an enlightened age where there was room for a view of transgenders that was not completely driven by the assumption that transgenders are essentially the same in that they are all motivated through fetishistic drive.
This is an incredibly important work in the history of the modern transgender theory. Without the work of Ellis, and the complementary work of Hirschfeld, Freudian views of transgender behavior would have been the only voice driving transgender care when Harry Benjamin decided to begin his historic work with the transgender community.
