This Day in Jewish History | 1868: The ‘Einstein of Sex’ Is Born (And Dies)

Sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld was an early visionary of the sexuality spectrum, which he failed to ‘sell’ to Nazi Germany, however.

Convinced that one’s sexuality was innate, Hirschfeld argued that it was unjust to blame or punish people for their nature. And while he proposed early on that homosexuals comprised a “third sex,” he eventually developed a far more nuanced spectrum that posited the existence of 64 different varieties of sexual identity.