Published in 2025
11 hours and 37 minutes
Brandy Schillace is a historian, former professor and museum professional, and editor of Medical Humanities, a social-justice journal. She writes about gender, medical history, and neurodiversity for outlets including Scientific American, Wired, CrimeReads, and Undark. She lives in Ohio.
What is this book about?
The fascinating history of a daring team of sexologists who built the first trans clinic in the shadow of the Third Reich.
Set in interwar Germany, The Intermediaries tells the forgotten story of the Institute for Sexual Science, the world’s first center for homosexual and transgender rights. Headed by a gay Jewish man, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, the institute aided in the first gender-affirming surgeries and hormone treatments, acting as a rebellious base of operations in the face of rising prejudice, nationalism, and Nazi propaganda.
An expert in medical history, Brandy Schillace tells the story through the eyes of Dora Richter, an Institute patient whom we follow in her quest to transition and live as a woman. The Intermediaries is the first book to assert the inseparable, interdependent relationship of sex science to both the queer rights movement and the permissive Weimar culture, tracking how political factions perverted that same science to suit their own ends.
This book brings together forgotten scientific and surgical discoveries with the politics and social history that galvanized the first stirrings of the trans rights movement. Through its unforgettable characters and immersive storytelling, The Intermediaries charts the relationships between nascent sexual science, queer civil rights, and the fight against fascism. It tells riveting stories of LGBTQ pioneers and offers a cautionary tale in the face of today’s oppressive anti-trans legislation.
