There and Back Again: Trans people in the West are losing ground in their struggle for rights

The Western history of the trans rights struggle is inseparable from that of the LGBTQ+ movement as a whole. In the mid-19th century, the German lawyer and scientist Karl Ulrichs, a pioneer of sexology, introduced the term Urning (the German for “Uranian”) — a person with a male body and the “soul of a woman.”

In 1862, Ulrichs announced to his family and friends that he himself was an Urning (a revelation our contemporaries refer to as a “coming out”). The researcher recounted how even as a child he'd felt different from other boys. By his admission, he was more feminine in character, often secretly wore women's clothes, played only with girls, and wanted to be a girl himself — even if, as he grew older, he lost interest in the dressing-up part. Ulrichs' contemporaries recalled that he behaved like a conventional man, although he continued to experience attraction to people of the same sex.