German

Urning

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’s engraved that appeared as a portrait in one of his works. The forerunner of homosexuality and heterosexuality, coined various terms such as Uranierin.
Free-use photograph scanned by Jdsteakley, downloaded from wikipedia, resized, and customized.

Urning is a German term rarely used today, but it is the predecessor of the term homosexual, in this case referring to men. Coined in 1862 by activist and writer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, he defined Urning as “the soul of a woman in a men’s body,” in the same way that the analogous term for men was Uranierin, whose definition was “the soul of a man in a woman’s body”. It may seem silly, but it must be taken into account that, at that time, homosexuality did not exist, but just homosexual behavior that first was a sin and then a crime. These terms represented a paradigm shift since they anticipated the identity aspect of homosexuality, and from afar, the overcoming of the binary sexual model.Uranismus (uranism) was the term Ulrich used to refer to what only a few years later (1869), Karl Maria Kertbeny coined as homosexuality. Ulrichs’ idea was so successful that we find it in many other languages.

The relationship between being, come from or living on the planet Uranus, and homosexuality, arises in Plato’s work, Symposium, in which he relates it to men’s homosexual behavior; a story of gods…

Variations: Uranier, Uranist, Uri, Urnist, Urnisch (adjetiv).