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In 1903, young Viennese philosopher Otto Weininger (1880–1903) published Geschlecht und Charakter. Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung (literally: Sex and Character. A Principled Investigation), in which he maintained that the conception of "permanent bisexuality" he advanced was completely new. His claims were challenged in 1906 by physician Wilhelm Fließ (1858–1928), who referred to his elaborations on the issue in a treatise published in 1897. The accusation of plagiarism against the by then deceased Weininger were aggravated as Fließ blamed Sigmund Freud for having orchestrated an intrigue aiming at informing Weininger about the ideas on permanent bisexuality the physician had articulated. Despite the heated debate surrounding the primacy claims, none of those involved was prepared to admit that sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935) had been the first to conceptualize permanent bisexuality in connection with his 1896 discussion of the sexual intermediariness of all human beings. Hirschfeld's Sappho und Sokrates—his first sexological treatise—aimed in the last resort at debunking closed distributional schemes of sexuality for the sake of a template of universal bisexuality modulated by the individual's unique sexual intermediariness. On these assumptions, it is not surprising that Hirschfeld's counterintuitive and profoundly deranging postulation of potentially infinite bisexual forms encompassing all existing sexed individuals was ignored by those partaking in the primacy debate. Irrespective of the disagreements the litigants may have had among themselves with respect to chronological or theoretical issues, they all sought to restore the full rights of the endangered phallicism subtending Western culture that Hirschfeld had set out to confute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two prominent representatives of the sexual emancipation movement in Germany, John Henry Mackay (1864-1933) and Magnus Hirschfield (1868-1935) launched significant attacks on sexual binarism and its combinatories. Although Mackay defended the "nameless love" against seminal Christian and subsequent secularised misconstructions of its nature, he was unable to overcome the fundamental scheme of binomic sexuality. Hirschfield, however, resolved the theoretical issue through his "doctrine of sexual intermediaries" (Zwischenstufenlehre) which purports that--without exception--all human being are intersexual variants, i.e., unique composites of different proportions of masculinity and femininity. Since these proportions vary from one sexual layer of description to another in the same individual and can alter or be altered in time, it is sensu stricto not possible to postulate discrete sexual categories. Hirschfield's "doctrine" implies a radical deconstruction of not only binomic sexuality but its supplementation through a "third sex." It offers a meta-theoretical framework for rethinking sexual difference beyond the fictional schemes and categorical closures of Western traditions of sexual identity. His assumption of potentially infinite sexualities anticipates some of the basic tenets forwarded by the philosophical and political agendas of queer studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]