Many terms have been used to talk about homosexuality. Uranism is one that lasted until the beginning of the XNUMXth century.

Assessor at the court of the kingdom of Hanover then journalist, German Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825-1895), is the founding father of the homosexual emancipation movement and is the first coming out of modern times. In his work “Researches on the enigma of love between men”, published in 1864 under the pseudonym Numa Numantius, he coined the term “uranism” which takes its root from “Ourania”, the other name of the goddess Aphrodite. He names “Urninge” (Uranians or Uranists) the men who love men, Dioninge the people who love the opposite sex and Urninden the women who love women. These people are, according to him, part of a third sex and advance the theory of the female soul in a male body and vice versa.

In the beginning, sexualities were governed by religion. And sexuality outside procreation (sodomy, masturbation, interrupted coitus) was considered a sin and therefore punishable by law. It was not until the 1867th century that medicine took up the question of sexuality. In August 1870, at the Annual Conference of German Jurists which takes place in Munich, Ulrichs, in his speech, pleads for Uranism to be socially tolerated rather than condemned, demands sexual freedom and love. The scandal is total. A refugee in Wurzburg, he continued to write the rest of his research. In 1919, he tried to found a Uranian review called Prometheus, but he failed for lack of support. Later, in 1868, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld (1935-1928) founded in Berlin, the first institute of sexology in the world and fought to obtain the decriminalization of homosexuality, then illegal in Germany. There, he receives patients of all sexual orientations for consultations and group therapy on contraception and sexually transmitted diseases, at a time when syphilis is raging. In 1921, Hirschfeld founded the World League for Sexual Reform (WLSR), which had its roots in a first international conference for science-based sexual reform he organized in XNUMX.

According to the alienist doctor Richard von Kafft-Ebing, mental illnesses are transmitted hereditarily: with an alcoholic mother and a monomaniac father, the child is likely to become homosexual. From the religious criminal, the vision is henceforth medical and psychiatric. But, for Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, if homosexuality is and always has been a fixed sexual orientation from birth, homosexual love is as normal as heterosexuality, a condition which does not lend itself to treatment but which is rather a endowment of nature which should be respected as part of a person’s identity.

Dr Hirschfeld, too, argued that sexual orientation was innate and not a deliberate choice, and he believed that scientific understanding of sexuality would promote tolerance among sexual minorities. His research in sexology was guided by empiricism and activism, motivated by the belief that the sexual ideology of Judeo-Christian civilization was a serious obstacle to understanding sexuality and to reforming laws and practices that regulated it.

Dr Hirschfeld also argued that there are many types of natural sex variations found in the human population, such as hermaphroditism, homosexuality, and cross-dressing. He is also credited with coining the term “transvestite”.

As for Freud, if for him homosexuality is not a disease, he does not validate it for all that as a normal sexual behavior but as a perverse behavior in the sense of the unusual.

Across all cultures, 2-10% of people report having same-sex relationships. Despite these numbers, many people still view same-sex behavior as an abnormal choice. However, biologists have documented homosexual behavior in more than 450 species. Geneticist Andrea Ganna and researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard described the largest investigation to date into genes associated with homosexual behavior. By analyzing the DNA of nearly half a million people in the United States and the United Kingdom, they came to the conclusion that genes made up between 8 and 25% of homosexual behavior, that there was no had no single “gay gene”, but that a complex mix of genetics and environment influenced a person’s choice of same-sex sexual partners.

Numerous studies have established that sex is not just male or female. Biologists now believe that there is a broader spectrum than that. New technologies in DNA sequencing and cell biology reveal that almost everyone is, to varying degrees, a patchwork of genetically distinct cells, some with a gender that may not match the rest of their bodies. Some studies even suggest that the sex of each cell determines its behavior, through a complex network of molecular interactions.