His books were banned and confiscated in Saxony, in Berlin and throughout Prussia.Īs a patriotic Hannoverian he was briefly imprisoned after the Prussian Anschluss in 1866. He then wrote more under his own name, and pleaded at the Congress of German Jurists in Munich for a repeal of the anti-homosexual laws. He proposed that Urnings are anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa (a female psyche confined in a male body), a metaphor that would be applied to trans persons in later generations. He describes himself as an Urning, and used Dioning for males attracted to females. Under the pseudonym of Numa Numantius, he wrote a series of booklets in the 1860s proposing that homosexuality is natural and biologically based. He then worked as a reporter for the Allgemeine Zeitung, and lived off a small inheritance. From 1849 to 1857 he was a legal advisor for the district court of Hilesheim in Hanover. His dissertation, in Latin, was on the Peace of Westphalia. He studied law and theology in Göttingen and history in Berlin. His first sexual experience was at age 14 with his riding instructor. He later recalled that as a young child he wore girls’ clothes, played with girls and wanted to be one. Ulrichs was born and raised in Aurich, Hanover.
