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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
Trans seems to be everywhere in American culture. Yet there is little understanding of how this came about. Are people aware that there were earlier periods of gender flexibility and contestability in American history? How well known is it that a previous period of trans visibility in the 1960s and early 1970s faced a vehement backlash right at the time that trans, in the form of what was then termed transvestism and transsexuality, seemed to be so ascendant? Was there transness before transsexuality was named in the 1950s and transgender emerged in the 1990s? Barry Reay explores this history: from a time before trans in the nineteenth century to the transsexual moment of the 1960s and 1970s, the transgender turn of the 1990s, and the so-called tipping point of current culture. It is a rich and varied history, where same-sex desires and identities, cross-dressing, and transsexual and transgender identities jostled for recognition. It is a history that is not at all flattering to US psychiatric and surgical practices. Arguing for the complexity of a trans past and present, Trans America will be a groundbreaking work for the trans community, as well as anyone interested in the history of medicine, sexuality, psychology and psychiatry.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Front Matter
Introduction
Notes
1 Before Trans
Introduction
Sexology: Krafft-Ebing
Sexology: Hirschfeld
Sexology: Ellis
A Transsexual Incubator
Sexology in America
Trans Moments
Hidden in Plain Sight
Language of the Streets
Sex Reassignment Before Sex Reassignment
Conclusion
Notes
2 The Transsexual Moment
Introduction
Transsexuality
Early Days
At a Popular Level
Treatment
Lou Sullivan
Transvestism
Female Impersonation
Conclusion
Notes
3 Blurring the Boundaries
Introduction
Self-narratives
Categories
From Gay to Trans
Flaming Creatures
Blurring Boundaries
Conclusion
Notes
4 Backlash
Introduction
Early Critiques
Attitude to Patients
Surgery
Therapy
Behaviour Therapy
Definition/Diagnosis
Assessment
Conclusion
Notes
5 The Transgender Turn
Introduction
The Turn
Diversity
Drag Kings
Drag Queens
Decolonizing Transgender
Surgery Again
Complexities
Children
Conclusion
Notes
Conclusion
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Figure 1
A transmasculine doctor in front of his computer. Photograph by Zackary Drucker,…
Figure 2
Original Plumbing, Issue 20, featuring Amos Mac and Rocco Kayiatos. Photograph b…
Chapter 1
Figure 3
Transvestiten vor dem Eingang des Instituts für Sexualwissenschaft [Transvestite…
Figure 4
A cross-dressed owner of a male brothel, 1930s/1940s, a friend of Thomas Painter…
Chapter 2
Figure 5
Publicity for Glen or Glenda? (1953: dir. Ed Wood). Wikimedia Commons.
Figure 6
A group of transsexuals, trans women, in the 1950s, part of the Harry Benjamin a…
Figure 7
A pair of transsexuals, trans women, in the 1960s, part of the Harry Benjamin ar…
Figure 8
Attributed to Andrea Susan, ‘Susanna at Casa Susanna’, 1964–9. Copyright: © Art …
Figure 9
Attributed to Andrea Susan, ‘Photo Shoot’, 1964–9. Copyright: © Art Gallery of O…
Figure 10
Group portrait of four cross-dressers, including Michael ‘Bronze Adonis’ Phelan …
Figure 11
Female impersonators, Dew Drop Inn, New Orleans, 1954. Ralston Crawford Collecti…
Figure 12
Skip Arnold at the Jewel Box, 1959. Robert Heishman Collection, Dr Kenneth J. La…
Chapter 3
Figure 13
Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn at The New York Cultural Center, 1974. Photogra…
Figure 14
Mario Montez in Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey’s Chelsea Girls, 1966. Photo by S…
Figure 15
Fayette Hauser, ‘The Cockettes in a Field of Lavender, Marshall Olds, Bobby Came…
Figure 16
Nan Goldin, ‘David at Grove Street, Boston 1972’. Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Mus…
Figure 17
Amos Badertscher, Steven, 1973. Badertscher Collection. By permission of Amos Ba…
Figure 18
Amos Badertscher, Sandy, 1976. Badertscher Collection. By permission of Amos Bad…
Figure 19
Amos Badertscher, Todd, 1975. Badertscher Collection. By permission of Amos Bade…
Figure 20
Amos Badertscher, Frank, 1974. Badertscher Collection. By permission of Amos Bad…
Chapter 4
Figure 21
Images (originally in colour) projected during behavioural conditioning in the t…
Chapter 5
Figure 22
Transsexual and transgender on Google Ngram. Google and the Google logo are regi…
Figure 23
Drag kings on The Joan Rivers Show, c.1995. Johnny Science Papers, Fales Library…
Figure 24
Nan Goldin, Jimmy Paulette, and Tabboo! in the bathroom, NYC 1991. Harvard Art M…
Figure 25
Amos Badertscher, Sista Face, 1997. Badertscher Collection. By permission of Amo…
Figure 26
Amos Badertscher, John Flowers, 1999. Badertscher Collection. By permission of A…
Figure 27
Katsu Naito, ‘West Side Rendezvous, 1992’. By permission of Katsu Naito.
Figure 28
Jeff Cowen, Greenwich Street, 1988. By permission of Jeff Cowen.
Conclusion
Figure 29
Lou Sullivan, 1988. GLBT Historical Society, San Francisco, Louis Sullivan Photo…
Guide
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‘Trans America places the recent conversation about trans issues in its historical context, in impressive depth. Sweeping across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Barry Reay provides an accessible yet comprehensive guide to the important people, places, and trends, in the US and beyond – ideal for anyone who wants to understand what came before the “Transgender Tipping Point”.’
Juliet Jacques, author ofTrans: A Memoir
‘The richly varied nature of the current trans movement is so beautifully explored and uncovered in Barry Reay’s new book. A pleasure to read.’
Fayette Hauser of The Cockettes
‘This is an admirable contribution to trans history by a highly respected scholar. It is a story of shifting categorizations, often highly medicalized and limiting, but above all a narrative of agency as trans people pushed definitions to the limit, bent them, and broke them, and increasingly spoke for themselves in a powerful, if not always singular, voice. It’s a major achievement and deserves to become a classic.’
Jeffrey Weeks, London South Bank University
‘This book is of very high quality. Reay is a major scholar in the field and writes with great authority and assurance.’
Thomas Laqueur, University of California at Berkeley
Trans America
A Counter-History
Barry Reay
polity
Copyright © Barry Reay 2020
The right of Barry Reay to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2020 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or, otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1182-2
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Reay, Barry, author.Title: Trans America : a counter-history / Barry Reay.Description: Cambridge ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A history of trans before the “trans moment”-- Provided by publisher.Identifiers: LCCN 2019043752 (print) | LCCN 2019043753 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509511785 | ISBN 9781509511792 (pb) | ISBN 9781509511822 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Transgender people--United States--History. | Gender identity--United States--History.Classification: LCC HQ77.95.U6 R43 2020 (print) | LCC HQ77.95.U6 (ebook) | DDC 305.3--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019043752LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019043753
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Introduction
Trans seems to be everywhere in American culture. Yet there is little understanding of how this came about. Are people aware that there were earlier times of gender flexibility and contestability in American history? How well known is it, say, that a previous period of trans visibility in the 1960s and early 1970s faced a vehement backlash right at the time that trans, in the form of what was then termed ‘transvestism’ and ‘transsexuality’, seemed to be so ascendant? Was there transness before transsexuality was named in the 1950s and transgender emerged in the 1990s?
This book explores this history: from a time before trans in the nineteenth century to the transsexual moment of the 1960s and 1970s, the transgender turn of the 1990s, and the so-called tipping point of current culture. It is a rich and varied history, where same-sex desires and identities, cross-dressing, and transsexual and transgender identities jostled for recognition. It is a history that is not at all flattering to US psychiatric and surgical practices.
There are competing narratives in trans history. Some have maintained that convictions of gender dislocation have always existed; this was claimed in True Selves (1996), the popular guide to transsexuality recommended by Jennifer Finney Boylan when she declared her transition to her academic colleagues: ‘one indisputable fact remains: transsexualism exists and has always existed’.1 The authors of True Selves were in good company. ‘The historical records make it very clear that transsexualism has been a human problem since the most ancient times’, wrote the wealthy, female-to-male transsexual Reed Erickson in his foreword to the classic Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment (1969).2 For Max Wolf Valerio, a former radical feminist, ‘People like me have always existed, in every era, on every continent.’3 Yet this is not the case. As this book will explore, transgender does not float free of historical or cultural context.4
For others, far from ‘always’ existing, transsexuality was a late-twentieth-century phenomenon. As Catherine Millot once put it, there is a sense in which there was no transsexuality before experts like Harry Benjamin and Robert Stoller ‘invented it’.5 Although Joanne Meyerowitz’s influential book on the subject has charted individual and sporadic instances of surgery and experimental sex modifications in Europe and (more rarely) in the USA from the early twentieth century, she effectively began her story with the intense publicity surrounding the sex-reassignment surgery of Christine Jorgensen in the 1950s: ‘Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty’.6 Transsexuality, a category that had once not existed, quickly became a widely recognized term after it had been named and described in Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon (1966), Richard Green and John Money’s edited collection Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment (1969), and Stoller’s The Transsexual Experiment (1975).7 Before that, those who experienced gender disjunction would invariably have explained those feelings in terms of homosexual or heterosexual transvestism – such was the rapid movement of sexual classification.8 Over the next ten years, the US national picture changed from one of no significant institutional support for transsexual endocrinology, therapy, and surgery to a situation where, by 1975, major medical centres were offering treatment and many transsexuals had been provided with surgery.9
One of the notable aspects of trans history is the rapid shift in sexual and gender configurations.10 The transgender community emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, more sexually and gender diverse than the older transsexual community (which it incorporated) and less wedded to medical intervention.11 When Anne Bolin published her study on male-to-female transsexuals in 1988, stressing surgery (‘There are no halfway measures. If one is a transsexual, then pursuit of surgery accompanies one’s transition’), it was in that period of movement from transsex to transgender – and already seemed dated.12 By 2008, on the other hand, Walter Bockting was explaining that there was ‘no one way of being transgender’: ‘Feminizing and masculinizing hormones and genitalreconstructive surgery are no longer two steps of one linear process of sex reassignment … Clients no longer necessarily need surgery to live and be recognized in the desired gender role.’13 Trans surgery too – for wealthy trans women at least – has shifted from an emphasis on ‘the genitals as the site of a body’s maleness or femaleness’ to an increased focus on the face as a site of true sex: moving from genital reconstruction surgery to facial feminization surgery.14
The category transgender includes people who want to create and/ or retain characteristics of both genders and who see themselves as neither or both male and female; significantly, other pieces by Bolin in the 1990s argued for far more gender flexibility.15 The most recent large-scale survey of transgender people has discovered a vast range of different self-identity descriptions among those in the survey who classified themselves as ‘other’ or ‘transgender’, the more common self-descriptions including genderqueer, androgyne, and bi-gender.16Trans/Portraits (2015), which contains short testimonies of the experiences of a spectrum of American trans individuals, includes an array of trans masculinities and femininities, as well as those who identify as nonbinary, agender, and gender queer.17 Dakota, who was agender, said that they were ‘a sort of subset of genderqueer, in that I feel like I don’t really have a gender at all. I don’t feel male or female. I have elements of both sexes, or maybe neither.’18 In short, there is a new awareness of the ‘diversity of transgender experience’.19
We are now past the moment when the inaugural 2014 issue of the new academic journal TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, itself indicative of the shift, could refer to the ‘postposttranssexual’.20 It is the era of trans*.21 Transgender is considered too limiting, still connoting a gender binary. The asterisk in trans* indicates more openness, ‘greater inclusivity of new gender identities [though even the notion of identity may be too restrictive as we will see later in this book] and expressions … such as gender queer, neutrios, intersex, agender, two-spirit, cross-dresser, and genderfluid’.22 Aren Z. Aizura opts for ‘gender nonconforming’.23 More crucially, these terms do not necessarily reflect those used by trans people to describe themselves. They have often seen no ambiguity: that is an outsider perspective. Or they have embraced their blurring of conventional gender boundaries – for example, those who use the pronoun ‘they’ instead of ‘she’ or ‘he’. Nonbinary has become a new category.24 CN Lester prefers to be referred to as ‘they’; and considers themself as ‘outside of the gender binary’, neither a man nor a woman.25Aperture magazine’s 2017 visual homage to ‘Future Gender’ stresses gender as ‘a playground’.26 The androgynous, genderfluid bodies of Ethan James Green’s photographic portfolio Young New York (2019) capture the current moment perfectly.27
‘Today trans is everywhere’, wrote Jacqueline Rose in 2016.28 There are trans-themed television series: Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black (2013–19), Amazon Studios’ Transparent (2014–17), and Pose (2018– ), the last with significant trans participation in acting, directing, and the whole creative process.29 There is an interest in transgender children that ranges from the ‘superficially positive’ to the downright hostile.30 There is a developing trans fiction, aimed at young adults, clearly intended to educate non-trans readers and to support a trans audience.31 There are trans celebrities: the very white Caitlyn Jenner of I Am Cait (2015–16) and Vanity Fair (2015) fame, and the black trans woman Janet Mock, with her best-selling memoirs and progressive advice about trans sex work and men who are attracted to trans women.32 Trans women counsel non-trans women on their makeovers, reality television style.33 YouTube has cleverly crafted – if highly idealized – visual records of trans self-fashioning, charting the respective effects of testosterone and oestrogen on trans man masculinity and trans woman femininity.34 And the website has its own trans celebrities: Giselle Gigi Lazzarato, for example, with her 2.7 million YouTube subscribers.35
There is a comprehensive, trans, self-help guide, Trans Bodies, Trans Selves (New York, 2014), the trans equivalent to the iconic feminist text Our Bodies Ourselves.36 There is a lavishly illustrated, colour-pictured guide to gender affirmation surgery, which does not spare the reader the lows as well as the highs of vaginoplasty and phalloplasty, and may not prove to be the best publicity for such procedures.37 There are medical guides to assist health-care professionals in their treatment of trans patients, which, in contrast to earlier doctor–patient interactions (as we will learn), stress ‘a therapeutic physician–patient alliance’.38 Such humane principles have been comprehensively enshrined in the ‘Standards of Care for the Health of Transsexual, Transgender, and Gender-Nonconforming People, Version 7’ (2011), with its proclamation that being trans ‘is a matter of diversity, not pathology’, and in the World Professional Association for Transgender Health declaration (2018) that ‘opposes all medical requirements that act as barriers to those wishing to change legal sex or gender markers on documents’.39
There are foundational Transgender Studies Readers, representing both Transgender Studies 1.0 and Transgender Studies 2.0.40 There is a new transgender studies textbook, written by a nonbinary trans academic, intended for use by high-school and college students, and with significant input from trans contributors, including a section in each chapter called ‘writings from the community’.41 There is an anthology of trans poetry and poetics: ‘Strange that you’d let me / give birth to my own body / even though I know I’ve always been / a boy, moving / toward what? Manhood?’42 There are trans archives. The Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria, in Canada, is a relatively new archive (2011), formed out of the collection of Rikki Swan and the papers of Reed Erickson.43 Cyberspace provides the scope for ‘transgender history to be provoked, recorded, disseminated, accessed, and preserved in ways untethered from traditional, offline, and analog practices of history’; the curated Digital Transgender Archive is a most impressive demonstration of that very potential.44 The Tretter Transgender Oral History Project of the University of Minnesota provides nearly 200 moving-image oral histories online.45 There is a growing portfolio of trans photography: most recently, Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst’s moving catalogue of a trans/trans relationship, and Mark Seliger’s beautiful images of trans masculinity and femininity, and those in-between – ‘endless possibilities of potential selves’, in Janet Mock’s words.46Vice.Com has set up the online Gender Spectrum Collection, providing free stock photographs of trans and nonbinary models (taken by Drucker) to increase the visual presence and enhance the media representation of those ‘beyond the binary’.47 See Illustration 1. Although it has just stopped publication, for ten years trans men had their own, genuinely innovative, magazine, Original Plumbing, edited by Amos Mac and Rocco Kayiatos, which, both visually and in prose, shows the sheer range and vibrancy of trans male culture.48 See Illustration 2.
1A transmasculine doctor in front of his computer.
Hence, it has become possible to ask, ‘Is Pop Culture having a Trans Moment?’49Time magazine cover stories can proclaim a ‘Transgender Tipping Point’ (with the black, trans woman Laverne Cox on its cover) and ‘Beyond He or She’.50 The National Geographic, no less, has had a special edition on ‘The Shifting Landscape of Gender’.51
I will be using the literature of psychology, psychiatry, and modern surgery among my source material. But that does not mean that I have been captured by what is usually called the medical model, where trans is viewed through the lenses of the medical and psychiatric experts, the gatekeepers of transition. Some trans advocates, as we will see, are deeply suspicious of such influences; others have opted to work strategically within the system.52 The trans community has long been divided on such issues.53 On the one hand, the medical model provides (some) access to health care and (as a legitimizer) to legal advocacy, even if many of those involved do not really believe in the paradigm. On the other hand, it is resisted because it not only pathologizes but also privileges a particular kind of transgender, excluding more flexible forms of transness as well as those (the majority) precluded by poverty.54 As Riki Lane expresses it, the ‘tension between seeking approval for treatment and resisting pathologization is a defining characteristic of the relationship between clinicians and TGD [trans and gender-diverse] people, both as individuals and as a social movement’.55
Obviously, the medical model has framed discussion and shaped the lives first of transsexuals and then of transgender people; it has determined the rules, the parameters, the gates to treatment, and even self-perception. Austin Johnson’s labels ‘hegemonic’ and ‘normative’ are entirely appropriate.56 The sociologist Myra Hird was horrified by the attitudes of psychiatrists, physicians, and psychologists when she attended a gender identity conference in 2000, including ‘highly stereotyped notions of gender’ and the continued framing of transsex (and homosex) as pathology.57 Many commentators have pointed to the persistent gender essentialism and heteronormativity of the paradigm still present in the regime of DSM-5.58
Yet, despite this dominating role, there has still been room for trans agency, evidence of what Dean Spade has termed ‘a self-conscious strategy of deployment of the transsexual narrative by people who do not believe in the gender fictions produced by such a narrative, and who seek to occupy ambiguous gender positions in resistance to norms of gender rigidity’.59 Judith Butler once referred to San Francisco’s ‘dramaturges of transsexuality’, who coached trans men in the gender essentialism which they did not personally hold – yet needed when they approached the psychiatrists and doctors who were the gatekeepers to the sought treatment.60 ‘I braced myself for a conversation where not adhering to stereotypes and clichés could undo this whole plan’, the British trans woman Mia Violet recalled of her encounter with her therapist in the 2000s. ‘I recited my history of gender dysphoria on cue.’61 She carefully avoided complicating the expected narrative.
2 Original Plumbing, Issue 20, featuring Amos Mac and Rocco Kayiatos.
What clinicians took for patient duplicity could be interpreted as trans agency – as in the case of the famous Agnes, discussed in a later chapter. L. M. Lothstein, the psychologist at Case Western Reserve Medical School in Cleveland, whom we will also encounter later, held group therapy sessions in the 1970s in which patient power was evident. Some black trans women brought their street alliances (forged in sex work) into the clinic, where it became black patient versus white clinician. One, Ann, ‘argued that the real experts on transsexualism were the patients and that the therapists were learning a lot about them via the group therapy’. She claimed that therapists could be ‘bullied into recommending all patients for surgery’.62 When a surgeon was invited in to show slides of gender reassignment, ‘the group focused on the “ugliness” of the constructed vagina’.63 In a later study, Lothstein and his team claimed that such therapy revealed material that had been ‘denied’ and ‘falsified’ in earlier evaluations, again evidence of patient initiative.64
Elroi J. Windsor has outlined the strategies (apart from submission) available to trans men when negotiating therapy: what Windsor terms ‘manipulation’ (choosing sympathetic therapists, and/or seizing back the initiative in the patient–therapist interaction), and ‘resistance’ (avoiding therapy, challenging diagnosis, walking away when the therapy does not suit). There are overlaps between categories, but the essential point is that, other than merely just ‘doing what needed to be done’ on the therapist’s terms (which was also a tactic), trans men could operate within the medical model.65 Readers should afford me the comparable ability to work the sources analytically, to read against the grain, rather than assume that I am the prisoner of a literature of which I am very critical anyway.
This will apply, too, with the discussion of surgery, which will recur in the pages that follow. We will see that many trans people eschew such accounts because they objectify and pathologize the trans body and pander (again) to the medical model. In his account of his trans journey, Nick Krieger consciously edited out descriptions of the immediate results of his top surgery in an effort to avoid a ‘trans narrative cliché’.66 Yet, either in its practice or in its absent presence (its denial), surgery has always been part of trans history.67 As Eric Plemons frames it, ‘I am an ethnographer of trans- surgical practice not because surgery defines us as trans- people but because it is so very important to so many of our lives.’68
We have to be wary of essentializing categories. Just as we should avoid subsuming transvestism under transsexuality, we should resist transgender as a master category for all aspects of trans history: the danger of the Transgender Studies Readers is that they may do just that. When Megan Davidson interviewed over 100 transgender activists in 2004 and 2005, well into the second decade of the transgender turn, she found conflict as well as shared values.69 There were those for whom the medical model of transsexuality, with its binary and surgical certainties, was imbricated in their sense of self. Then there were those for whom fluidity was the key. The former sometimes saw the latter, especially those self-identifying as gender queer, as the province of white, privileged, college students. Davidson encountered an activist who clearly resented what they called the ‘girl in a tie with a crew cut who now feels male and yet is not willing to manifest it other than [with] a tie and a crew cut’.70 Raewyn Connell’s deft history of transsexual women for a feminist readership demonstrates both an awareness of the emergence of transgender and her own preference for transsexuality as the more meaningful category, presumably because it best fits the centrality of the body to that history.71
Something strange is happening in some strands of trans studies: the erasure of much of trans history. Of course, historical frames of reference vary. For Zackary Drucker, one of the current trans generation, the mid-1990s were formative, and she spoke of discovering the words ‘queer’ and ‘transgender’ as a ‘fourteen-year-old queer youth’. Kate Bornstein was her ‘gender pioneer’. But Bornstein, Zackary’s inspiration, had different influences and perspectives, other historical reference points: Christine Jorgensen, Lou Sullivan, Tula’s 1982 book I Am Woman.72 Writing in the early 1990s, Gordene Olga MacKenzie identified the influence of the TV talk shows – mainly negative – on trans ‘coming out’.73 For Rhyannon Styles, on the other hand, history is compressed even more. Her inspiration, as a gay club kid, was reality television. Before that, ‘Men could only be women in pantomimes, or when using drag to entertain’!74
The most recent trans generation, of course, turns to the Internet, to varied online communities, Gaming, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and YouTube.75 Tiq Milan has said that in the early 2000s he thought that he was the only ‘Black trans man in existence’ until he found a Yahoo discussion group.76 ‘Computer games were my mirror’, writes Shane McGriever, a trans boy, ‘showing me the truth of myself while giving me the purest escape from truth’.77 For Harlow Figa, it was YouTube’s trans male vloggers (‘up to ten hours a day’) who were his big influence: ‘I learned how to speak about my transness through YouTube.’78 The queer, gender-nonconforming, and trans youth at the drop-in centre studied by Mary Robertson found their sexual scripts on Google, and in anime and fan fiction.79 Not surprisingly, Genny Beemyn and Susan Rankin’s survey of nearly 3,500 transgender people has argued that the Internet was crucial to transgender identity work among the younger transgender participants.80
But, whatever the favoured medium, narrative, or cited forerunner, the tendency has been to obscure what this book will argue was a contested and troubled – even provisional – past. In Drucker’s representation, the 1960s seem lost in the mists of time: ‘For the 1960s, that was so forward thinking.’81 For genderqueer, nonbinary Jacob Tobia, the 2000s – inconceivably, given all that you will read in this book – provided no language to describe their genderless feelings, and 2009 is almost ancient history: ‘no one knew who Laverne Cox was yet (can you imagine?)’.82 Or take the historical introduction to Vanity Fair’s 2015 special edition, Trans America, that denies any ‘smooth continuum’ from trans rejection to acceptance, yet which demonstrates the precise opposite by moving quickly to what it terms the ‘sustained high’ for transgender in contemporary US culture and to the celebrity trans promoted by that magazine.83 Lest it be argued that these are examples of popular rather than academic culture, consider Jack Halberstam’s recent book Trans* (2018), which, apart from a discussion of 1970s feminism, has almost nothing from the period before the 2000s.84 Of course CN Lester must be excluded from my criticism, for they have read widely in the historical literature and are thoughtful about the value of the past for the trans community: ‘What I have learnt about our histories shows me that the gendered bars and limits placed around us need not be permanent.’85 Similarly, many of the contributors to the edited collection Trap Door (2017) are committed to recovering a useable trans history.86 But they are the exceptions that prove the rule.
When did this neglected history actually begin? Was it in the 1950s as already intimated? Or does this Jorgensen-inspired focus on those years distort a longer story? Julian Gill-Peterson has convincingly argued for ‘displacing the 1950s as a default starting point for trans history’.87 If it is possible to think of heterosexuality before heterosexuality, and homosexuality before homosexuality, why not think of transgender before transgender?88 What is the history of trans feelings, tendencies – it is difficult to find the right term – before transsexuality and transgender were named in the second half of the last century? How useful is it to claim transsexual subjectivities for the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Chapter 1, ‘Before Trans’, deals with these issues.
Chapters 2 to 4 examine the so-termed transsexual moment. Janice Irvine, one of the most perceptive observers of the twentieth-century historical sociology of sex, has written of transsexuality’s ‘widespread public and professional acceptance’ by the 1970s, ‘an accepted syndrome, buttressed by a vast medical armamentarium of research, publications, and treatment programs’.89 But how seamless, really, was the triumph of transsexuality in the 1960s and 1970s? Chapter 2, ‘The Transsexual Moment’, discusses this ostensibly successful establishment of a new medical diagnosis and entity, arguing for the importance of cross-dressing (then known as transvestism) during this period of trans history. There is a case that the rather more fixed definitional qualities of the earlier 1960s and 1970s regime of transsexuality were necessary to establish a new category and to distinguish it from homosexuality and transvestism. However, we will see in Chapter 3, ‘Blurring the Boundaries’, that this sexual certainty masked a world of far more ambiguous alliances and practices. Chapter 4, ‘Backlash’, deliberates a neglected aspect of trans history, a period of intense critique right at the point where transsexuality had seemed to have become established.
Chapter 5, ‘The Transgender Turn’, considers the shift from transsexuality to transgender, and it assesses claims about the speed with which transgender has become established in the American cultural psyche. How, and in what ways, has that shift occurred? Has there been both a 1990s turn and a 2010s tipping point? Is trans culture really experiencing a cultural high?
Categories like transvestite, transsexual, transgender, and trans itself are good to rethink US history, but this book will demonstrate that it is the slippages and overlaps between these types that can be the most informative. As most dictionaries will explain, trans means across, beyond, over, and between; it can also denote change, transformation.90 The history that follows will include those with transgender bodies before transgender emerged as a descriptor; those who cannot be categorized as either transvestite or transsexual; cross-dressers who modify their bodies but who are not transsexual; those who wanted to be homosexual rather than heterosexual after their bodily reconstruction; and those who consider themselves beyond classification. This book will locate and contest some of the more significant structural and conceptual weaknesses in trans history: the neglect of an important period of critique in transsexuality’s early years; a claimed recognition of systems of technology and therapy and notions of sexual identity that I will suggest were far more tentative, contested, and fragmentary; and a neglect of other forms of trans expression both before and after the transsexual moment of the 1960s and 1970s. This book will attempt a new history of transsexuality and transgender in modern America.
Notes
1.
M. L. Brown and C. A. Rounsley,
True Selves: Understanding
Transsexualism – For Families, Friends, Coworkers, and Helping Professionals
(San Francisco, 1996), p. 25; J. F. Boylan,
She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders
(New York, 2003), p. 174.
2.
R. Erickson, ‘Foreword’, in R. Green and J. Money (eds.),
Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment
(Baltimore, 1969), p. xi.
3.
M. W. Valerio,
The Testosterone Files: My Hormonal and Social
Transformation from Female to Male
(Berkeley, 2006), p. 2.
4.
E. B. Towle and L. M. Morgan, ‘Romancing the Transgender Native: Rethinking the Use of the “Third Gender” Concept’,
GLQ,
8:4 (2002), 469–97.
True Selves
comes in for specific criticism in this regard (at 478).
5.
C. Millot,
Horsexe: Essays on Transsexuality
, translated by K. Hylton (New York, 1990), p. 141. First published in French in 1983. Robert Stoller termed transsexualism ‘a newly described condition (the literature begins only in 1953)’: R. J. Stoller,
The Transsexual Experiment
(London, 1975), p. 2.
6.
J. Meyerowitz,
How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States
(Cambridge, Mass., 2002), p. 1. See chs. 1 and 2.
7.
H. Benjamin,
The Transsexual Phenomenon
(New York, 1966); Green and Money (eds.),
Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment
; Stoller,
Transsexual Experiment
. The term was really first used in print by the popular sexologist D. O. Cauldwell in 1949, as will be discussed in
chapter 2
.
8.
The best history of transsexuality is Meyerowitz,
How Sex Changed
.
9.
Ibid., pp. 217–22.
10.
For an excellent short history of US transgender, see G. Beemyn, ‘US History’, in L. Erickson-Schroth (ed.),
Trans Bodies, Trans Selves: A Resource for the Transgender Community
(New York, 2014), ch. 22. The essay was published separately in a longer version as an Ebook: G. Beemyn,
Transgender History in the United States
(New York, 2014).
11.
See, for example, R. Ekins and D. King,
The Transgender Phenomenon
(London, 2006); S. Stryker, P. Currah, and L. J. Moore, ‘Introduction: Trans-, Trans, or Transgender?’
Women’s Studies Quarterly
, 36:3–4 (2008), 11–22; S. Stryker,
Transgender History
(Berkeley, 2008, 2017).
12.
A. Bolin,
In Search of Eve: Transsexual Rites of Passage
(New York, 1988), p. 84.
13.
W. O. Bockting, ‘Psychotherapy and the Real-Life Experience: From Gender Dichotomy to Gender Diversity’,
Sexologies
, 17:4 (2008), 211–24, quote at 214.
14.
H. L. Talley, ‘Facial Feminization and the Theory of Facial Sex Difference: The Medical Transformation of Elective Intervention to Necessary Repair’, in J. A. Fisher (ed.),
Gender and the Science of Difference: Cultural Politics of Contemporary Science and Medicine
(New Brunswick, NJ, 2011), ch. 10; E. Plemons,
The Look of a Woman: Facial Feminization Surgery and the Aims of Trans-Medicine
(Durham, NC, 2017), quote at p. 1.
15.
D. Denny, ‘Interview with Anne Bolin, Ph.D.’,
Chrysalis Quarterly
, 1:6 (1993), 15–20; A. Bolin, ‘Transcending and Transgendering: Male-to-Female Transsexuals, Dichotomy and Diversity’, in G. Herdt (ed.),
Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History
(New York, 1996), ch. 10.
16.
G. Beemyn and S. Rankin,
The Lives of Transgender People
(New York, 2011), pp. 23–6.
17.
J. W. Wright,
Trans/Portraits: Voices from Transgender Communities
(Hanover, NH, 2015).
18.
Ibid., pp. 72–3.
19.
L. M. Diamond, S. T. Pardo, and M. R. Butterworth, ‘Transgender Experience and Identity’, in S. J. Schwartz and others (eds.),
Handbook of Identity Theory and Research
(New York, 2011), ch. 26, quote at p. 630.
20.
The title of the journal’s double inaugural issue, ‘Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty-First-Century Transgender Studies’,
TSQ
, 1:1–2 (2014).
21.
For trans*, see S. Stryker and P. Currah, ‘Introduction’,
TSQ
, 1:1–2 (2014), 1–18, quote at 3. See also A. Tompkins, ‘Asterisk’,
TSQ
, 1:1–2 (2014), 26–7.
22.
Tompkins, ‘Asterisk’, 27.
23.
A. Z. Aizura,
Mobile Subjects: Transnational Imaginaries of Gender
Reassignment
(Durham, NC, 2018), pp. 11–12.
24.
M. Rajunov and S. Duane (eds.),
Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity
(New York, 2019).
25.
CN Lester,
Trans Like Me: A Journey for All of Us
(London, 2017), Ebook, loc. 521.
26.
The editors, ‘Future Gender’,
Aperture
, 229 (2017), 23.
27.
E. J. Green,
Young New York
(New York, 2019).
28.
J. Rose, ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’
London Review of Books
, 5 May 2016.
29.
For
Transparent
, see S. Stryker and others, ‘Virtual Roundtable on
Transparent
’,
Public Books
, 1 August 2015:
www.publicbooks.org/artmedia/virtual-roundtable-on-transparent
.
30.
For television and trans children, see A. Prochuk, ‘From the Monster to the Kid Next Door: Transgender Children, Cisgender Parents, and the Management of Difference on TV’,
Atlantis
, 36:2 (2014), 36–48, quote at 37.
31.
For example, J. A. Peters,
Luna a Novel
(New York, 2004); M. Ewert,
10,000 Dresses
(New York, 2008); B. Katcher,
Almost Perfect
(New York, 2009); J. Carr,
Be Who You ARE!
(Bloomington, Ind., 2010); C. Beam,
I Am J
(New York, 2011); C. Kilovadis,
My Princess Boy
(New York, 2011); K. Cronn-Mills,
Beautiful Music for Ugly Children
(Woodbury, Minn., 2012); K. E. Clark,
Freak Boy
(New York, 2013); A. Fabrikant,
When Kayla Was Kyle
(Lakewood, Calif., 2013); A. Gino,
George
(New York, 2015); D. Gephart,
Lily and Dunkin
(New York, 2016); M. Russo,
If I Was Your Girl
(New York, 2016). I am grateful to Claire Gooder for compiling this list.
32.
For Jenner, see the two-season reality series,
I Am Cait
(2015, 2016);
Vanity Fair: Trans America
, Special Edition, 18 August 2015; and C. Jenner and B. Bissinger,
The Secrets of My Life
(London, 2017). For Mock, see J. Mock,
Redefining Realness
(New York, 2014); J. Mock,
Surpassing Certainty
(New York, 2017); and her blog
https://janetmock.com
.
33.
M. Lovelock, ‘Call Me Caitlyn: Making and Making Over the “Authentic” Transgender Body in Anglo-American Popular Culture’,
Journal of Gender Studies
, 26:6 (2017), 675–87.
34.
L. Horak, ‘Trans on YouTube: Intimacy, Visibility, Temporality’,
TSQ
, 1:4 (2014), 572–85; T. Raun, ‘Archiving the Wonders of Testosterone Via YouTube’,
TSQ
, 2:4 (2015), 701–9, quote at 701; T. Raun,
Out Online: Trans Self-Representation and Community Building on YouTube
(London, 2016). See, too, M. Heinz,
Entering Masculinity: The Inevitability of Discourse
(Chicago, 2016), which discusses trans masculinity on YouTube.
35.
D. Udy, ‘“Am I Gonna Become Famous When I Get My Boobs Done?”: Surgery and Celebrity in
Gigi Gorgeous: This Is Everything
’,
TSQ
, 5:2 (2018), 275–80.
36.
Erickson-Schroth (ed.),
Trans Bodies, Trans Selves
.
37.
C. S. Salgado, S. J. Monstrey, and M. L. Djordjevic (eds.),
Gender Affirmation: Medical & Surgical Perspectives
(New York, 2017).
38.
W. O. Bockting and J. M. Goldberg (eds.),
Guidelines for Transgender
Care
(Binghamton, NY, 2006); A. E. Eyler, ‘Primary Medical Care of the Gender-Variant Patient’, in R. Ettner, S. Monstrey, and A. E. Eyler (eds.),
Principles of Transgender Medicine and Surgery
(New York, 2014), ch. 2, quote at p. 26.
39.
E. Coleman and others, ‘Standards of Care for the Health of Transsexual, Transgender, and Gender-Nonconforming People, Version 7’,
International Journal of Transgenderism
, 13 (2011), 165–232, quote at 168; G. Knudson and others, ‘Identity Recognition Statement of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH)’,
International Journal of Transgenderism
, 19:3 (2018), 355–6, quote at 356.
40.
S. Stryker and S. Whittle (eds.),
The Transgender Studies Reader
(New York, 2006); S. Stryker and A. Z. Aizura (eds.),
The Transgender Studies Reader 2
(New York, 2013).
41.
A. Haefele-Thomas,
Introduction to Transgender Studies
(New York, 2019).
42.
E. Shipley, ‘Etymology’, in T. C. Tolbert and T. T. Peterson (eds.),
Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics
(Callicoon, NY, 2013), pp. 193–4, quote at p. 193.
43.
A. H. Devor,
The Transgender Archives: Foundations for the Future
(Vancouver, 2014); A. H. Devor and L. Wilson, ‘Putting Trans* History on the Shelves: The Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria, Canada’, in A. L. Stone and J. Cantrell (eds.),
Out of the Closet, Into the Archives: Researching Sexual Histories
(Albany, NY, 2015), ch. 10.
44.
K. J. Rawson, ‘Transgender Worldmaking in Cyberspace: Historical Activism on the Internet’,
QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking
, 1:2 (2014), 38–60, quote at 38;
www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/about/overview
.
45.
www.lib.umn.edu/tretter/transgender-oral-history-project
.
46.
Z. Drucker and R. Ernst,
Relationship
(New York, 2016); M. Seliger,
On Christopher Street: Transgender Stories
(New York, 2016). The quote comes from Mock’s ‘Foreword’ to Seliger, p. 12.
47.
https://broadlygenderphotos.vice.com
.
48.
https://originalplumbing.bigcartel.com/category/magazines
. See the recent sample: A. Mac and R. Kayiatos (eds.),
OP Original Plumbing: The Best Ten Years of Trans Male Culture
(New York, 2019).
49.
R. Bastanmehr, ‘Is Pop Culture Having a Trans Moment?’
Vice
, 3 November 2014:
www.vice.com/read/were-having-a-trans-moment-456
.
50.
K. Steinmetz, ‘The Transgender Tipping Point’,
Time
, 29 May 2014; K. Steinmetz, ‘Beyond He or She: How a New Generation is Redefining the Meaning of Gender’,
Time
, 27 March 2017.
51.
National Geographic
, January 2017.
52.
M. C. Burke, ‘Resisting Pathology: GID and the Contested Terrain of Diagnosis in the Transgender Rights Movement’,
Advances in Medical Sociology
, 12 (2011), 183–210.
53.
For early statements, see M. D. O’Hartigan and R. A. Wilchins, ‘The GID Controversy’,
Transgender Tapestry
, 79 (1977), 30–1, 44–5.
54.
For a perceptive discussion of these tensions, as they relate to both medicine and law, see J. L. Koenig, ‘Distributive Consequences of the Medical Model’,
Harvard Civil Rights – Civil Liberties Law Review
, 46 (2011), 619–45.
55.
R. Lane, ‘“We Are Here to Help”: Who Opens the Gate for Surgeries?’,
TSQ
, 5:2 (2018), 207–27, quote at 208.
56.
A. H. Johnson, ‘Normative Accountability: How the Medical Model Influences Transgender Identities and Experiences’,
Sociology Compass
, 9:9 (2015), 803–13.
57.
M. J. Hird, ‘A Typical Gender Identity Conference? Some Disturbing Reports from the Therapeutic Front Lines’,
Feminism & Psychology
, 13:2 (2003), 181–99, quote at 183.
58.
Z. Davy, ‘The DSM-5 and the Politics of Diagnosing Transpeople’,
Archives of Sexual Behavior
, 44:5 (2015), 1165–76; G. Davis, J. M. Dewey, and E. L. Murphy, ‘Giving Sex: Deconstructing Intersex and Trans Medicalization Practices’,
Gender & Society
, 30:3 (2016), 490–514.
59.
D. Spade, ‘Mutilating Gender’ [2000], in Stryker and Whittle (eds.),
Transgender Studies Reader
, ch. 23, quote at p. 326.
60.
J. Butler, ‘Doing Justice to Someone: Sex Reassignment and Allegories of Transsexuality’,
GLQ
, 7:4 (2001), 621–36, quote at 632.
61.
M. Violet,
Yes, You Are Trans Enough: My Transition from Self-Loathing to Self-Love
(London, 2018), Ebook, locs. 2636–40.
62.
L. M. Lothstein, ‘Group Therapy with Gender-Dysphoric Patients’,
American Journal of Psychotherapy
, 33:1 (1979), 67–81, quotes at 71.
63.
Ibid., 75.
64.
A. C. Keller, S. E. Althof, and L. M. Lothstein, ‘Group Therapy with Gender-Identity Patients – A Four Year Study’,
American Journal of Psychotherapy
, 36:2 (1982), 223–8, quote at 224.
65.
E. J. Windsor, ‘Golden Ticket Therapy: Stigma Management Among Trans Men’, in O. Gozlan (ed.),
Current Critical Debates in the Field of Transsexual Studies
(New York, 2018), ch. 9, quotes at pp. 134, 135.
66.
N. Krieger, ‘Writing Trans’, in Erickson-Schroth (ed.),
Trans Bodies, Trans Selves
, pp. 582–3, quote at p. 583.
67.
See E. Plemons and C. Straayer (eds.),
TSQ
, 5:2 (2018):
The
Surgery Issue
.
68.
Plemons,
Look of a Woman
, p. 17.
69.
M. Davidson, ‘Seeking Refuge Under the Umbrella: Inclusion, Exclusion, and Organizing Within the Category
Transgender
’,
Sexuality Research & Social Policy
, 4:4 (2007), 60–80.
70.
Ibid., 66.
71.
R. Connell, ‘Transsexual Women and Feminist Thought: Toward New Understanding and New Politics’,
Signs
, 37:4 (2012), 857–81.
72.
K. Bornstein and Z. Drucker, ‘Gender is a Playground’,
Aperture
, 229 (2017), 24–31.
73.
G. O. MacKenzie,
Transgender Nation
(Bowling Green, OH, 1994), p. 6.
74.
R. Styles,
The New Girl: A Trans Girl Tells It Like It Is
(London, 2017), Ebook, locs. 111–16.
75.
See the essays in E. Deshane (ed.),
#Trans: An Anthology About Transgender and Nonbinary Identity Online
(Santa Cruz, 2017).
76.
T. Milan, ‘For Years, Tiq Milan Felt Like the Only Black Trans Man on Earth’,
Vice
, 27 March 2019:
www.vice.com/en_us/article/zma9pe/tiq-milan-black-trans-man-community-online
.
77.
S. McGriever, ‘The Mirror of Truth’, in Deshane (ed.),
#Trans
, pp. 24–30, quote at p. 25.
78.
H. Figa, ‘YouTube Auto-Ethnography: An Introduction of Sorts’, in Deshane (ed.),
#Trans
, pp. 14–22, quotes at pp. 14, 20.
79.
M. Robertson,
Growing Up Queer: Kids and the Remaking of LGBTQ
Identity
(New York, 2019), ch. 4.
80.
Beemyn and Rankin,
Lives of Transgender People
, pp. 44–5, 54, 57–9, 75, 121, 140–1. Given that the survey was Internet based, these are hardly untainted findings.
81.
Bornstein and Drucker, ‘Gender is a Playground’, 28.
82.
J. Tobia,
Sissy: A Coming-Of-Gender Story
(New York, 2019), pp. 96, 165.
83.
B. Bissinger, ‘Across the Ages’,
Vanity Fair: Trans America
, Special Edition, 18 August 2015.
84.
J. Halberstam,
Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender
Variability
(Oakland, Calif., 2018).
85.
Lester,
Trans Like Me
, loc. 2114.
86.
R. Gossett, E. A. Stanley, and J. Burton (eds.),
Trap Door: Trans
Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility
(Cambridge, Mass., 2017).
87.
J. Gill-Peterson,
Histories of the Transgender Child
(Minneapolis, Minn., 2018), ch. 2, quote at p. 11.
88.
For heterosexuality before heterosexuality, and homosexuality before homosexuality, see K. M. Philips and B. Reay,
Sex Before Sexuality: A Premodern History
(Cambridge, 2011).
89.
J. M. Irvine,
Disorders of Desire: Sexuality and Gender in Modern
American Sociology
(Philadelphia, 2005), p. 208.
90.
For an analysis of the meanings of trans, see R. Brubaker,
Trans:
Gender and Race in an Age of Identities
(Princeton, NJ, 2016).
1Before Trans
Introduction
‘When we first examined him [sic] we could not make up our minds whether we should send him [sic] to the men’s wards or in with the women.’ Such was a brief entry in the memoirs of the man who had been the Chief Surgeon at San Quentin, California’s State Prison. ‘After many careful examinations by many physicians’, he continued, ‘it was the consensus of opinion that Artie had been born a normal male child, and that some skilful surgeon, for reasons unknown, had operated … and turned him [sic], to all outward appearances, into a woman.’ The memoirs are from 1940, so the recollection is from any time between then and (going backwards) 1913, when Leo L. Stanley took up his post at San Quentin. They are from the period before the transsexual moment of the 1960s and 1970s, when what is now called gender reconciliation became a feasible option for people like ‘Artie’. The surgeon’s description certainly hinted that some form of surgery had occurred, even if it was removal of the penis and testicles rather than any attempted vaginal reconstruction. ‘Artie’ was ‘completely asexualized’. There had been attempts too at facial reconfiguration: ‘Scars dotting his [sic] face were evidently the result of attempts to destroy the beard by electrolytic needle. What medical brute did such a thing, and why, we shall probably never know.’1
Leo L. Stanley’s cryptic chronicle of attempted gender modification is typical of so much of the historical evidence in the period before transsexuality and transgender were named. One might assume that Stanley would have been attuned to the varieties of genital surgery, given his (notorious) eugenicist medical experiments with sterilization and testicular implants.2 With his oversight of thousands of inserts of testicular substance, and experimentation with transplanting the testicles of executed prisoners, he should have known an absent testis when he did not see one.3 However, he claimed that he was perplexed at first sight of ‘Artie’. ‘I thought he [sic] was a true case of dual sexuality [intersex as it would come to be called] … Leading physicians from the nearby cities came to examine Artie. It took a corps of them to determine if he [sic] were male or female.’4
As far as we are aware, the inmate ‘Artie’, our person of interest, left no historical traces other than these medical/mediated ones. It is possible that there are more detailed case notes in Stanley’s archive at the California Historical Society in San Francisco, not obvious from a quick survey of its guide.5 But, as things stand, the person known only as ‘Artie’ does not speak to us directly. Apart from the fact that they were eventually perceived by Stanley as a neutered male, we have no idea what their female name was. In keeping with modern trans sensibilities, we should probably attribute womanhood, yet we have no way of ascertaining how ‘Artie’ saw themself at that particular moment in San Quentin – whenever that was. Did they identify as female or male or neither? Stanley claimed that ‘Artie himself [sic] was uncertain’ and begged the Chief Surgeon to ‘reinstate him [sic] by operative means to either male or female status’.6 This did not occur; ‘there is no hope of making a normal being of him [sic]. Trained only in bisexual perversion, syphilitic, and undoubtedly insane, what chance has this victim of human bestiality?’7 Stanley’s summary was harsh: ‘A moronic monster, he [sic] could only jabber filth. He [sic] leered in answer to our questions and made obscene replies. Evidently, he [sic] knew nothing of his [sic] origin or sex, and only some of the most shocking adventures of his [sic] life were remembered.’8
What do we make of such cases? Can we get beyond the medical or disciplinary case study, the moral judgements, the objectification and victimhood? Was gender modification possible before the well-publicized cases of the 1950s? Are there other Arties, and, if so, are they part of trans history? Can we even think of trans before trans? While not assuming that transsexuality, transgender, and trans have always existed, what is their prehistory?9 Some promising investigations have been ‘trans-ing’ (Clare Sears’s term) the history of nineteenthand early-twentieth-century America, so the issue is worth pursuing.10 Emma Heaney has discussed what she calls the ‘trans feminine’ in some nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century texts, including some of the sexological works that are discussed in this chapter.11 Yet her subjects too quickly become ‘trans women’ in the discussion.12 Similarly, is Jay Prosser right to claim transsexual subjectivities for this prehistory?13 Or is transhistoricity or ‘trans*historicities’ a better way of conveying – in the words of Kadji Amin – not some ‘stable foundation’ of transsexuality or transgender but rather ‘a network whose nodes eventually shifted, were rejected, and fused with new elements to compose what we now know as “transgender”’?14 How do we write the history of transgender before transgender?
The task is by no means simple. Rachel Hope Cleves’s short biography of Frances ‘Frank’ Ann Wood Shimer, a nineteenth-century American teacher, once identified as lesbian, has posed five contemporary ways of making sense of his or her masculinity – with six if the more modern ‘lens of trans studies’ is invoked with Frank Shimer as a trans man.15 But the danger is that, whatever authorial intent, this mere invocation, this naming, ‘Six Ways of Looking at a Trans Man?’, will foreclose the subtleties of historical reinvestigation.16 Searching the US newspapers from the 1870s to the 1930s, Emily Skidmore has located sixty-five instances of ‘individuals who had been assigned female at birth but [who] chose to live as male’, many of them married to or living with women. Yet whether they should be described as ‘trans men’ (as Skidmore does) is completely different.17 Or there is the question of what we do with the historical material. Over much the same period as that covered by Skidmore, Peter Boag has established the ubiquity of cross-dressing in the frontier West, both male-to-female and female-to-male, and Clare Sears has discussed the numerous San Francisco cases (nearly one hundred in all) of those who fell foul of the cross-dressing laws. She contrasts the popularity of on-stage cross-dressing performances (Julian Eltinge and Vesta Tilley) to the practice’s criminalization on the streets.18 But what to do with this omnipresence? As Boag writes of Portland’s Harry Allen / Nell Pickerell, who in 1912 lived with a Seattle female sex worker and had reputedly caused the suicides of two women with whom he was involved (when they discovered his female origins):
Did Allen don male clothes for economic reasons, or because he saw himself as a male, or because she wished to contest custom and law? Was Allen male or female, or a sexual invert? Did Allen’s close relationships with women include a sexual component? Or did Allen simply have great sympathy for them, doing what he could with the limited means and opportunities available to him to assist them?19
Can we separate hints of sexual and gender identity from economic motivation? How many of the cases qualify as transgender before transgender?
Given that this is a book on American trans, it would have been logical to have discussed the nation’s indigenous two-spirit people of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, formerly called ‘berdaches’ by Western observers, but known by a variety of local names by native peoples themselves: lhamana (Zuni), winkte (Lakota), badé or bodé (Crow), ayekkwew (Cree), nadle (Navajo), alyha and hwame (Mohave).20 Remarkably widespread (indeed found in nearly 160 tribes21), they were the men and women who combined the gender roles (and often the clothing) of the opposite sex, and who were considered to be a third or fourth gender, ‘not man, not woman’.22 As one chronicler of the American West wrote in 1920 of a famous lhamana, the Zuni We’wha, ‘She was a remarkable woman, a fine blanket and sash maker, an excellent cook, an adept in all the work of her sex, and yet strange to say, she was a man.’23 However, in-depth historical analysis of the two-spirit people is difficult, given the layered interpretations of both colonial record-keepers, who classified berdaches as sodomites, and modernday, queer Native American observers whose concept of two-spirit includes gay and lesbian as well as transgender identities.24
Sexology: Krafft-Ebing
As with so much modern sexual history, and along with the transsexual experts of the 1960s, we could start with the sexologists in Europe in the nineteenth century. Contrary sexual feeling or sexual inversion, terms that were synonymous with homosexuality in the nineteenth century, were conceived as a disjunction between an outer body and an inner soul. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs wrote in 1864 (talking about men) of a ‘certain feeling of discomfort in one’s own body, a certain dissatisfaction of the feminine soul with a body with the male form in which it is enclosed’.25 He used the analogy of a hand in the wrong glove.26 It sounds remarkably like the ‘wrong body’ narrative, which we will see is so influential in later transsexual histories.
The cases in Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) are especially interesting. Many were the case notes of medical or psychiatric consultation, forged in the interaction and negotiation of expert and patient and then classified according to the taxonomy of the medical scientist. However, others were unsolicited. Homosexuals read and responded to Krafft-Ebing’s influential chronicles, for example, and, in turn, became incorporated into the next edition.27 Although we should not minimize the power of sexology in shaping discourses and mapping out the parameters of sexual subjectivities, it was never a simple case of imposition. Harry Oosterhuis has argued that Krafft-Ebing’s theoretical perspective was affected by the input of his patients; the influences were certainly not one-sided.28 As Ivan Crozier has explained, the sexual categories the sexologists produced were ‘manifestations of power’ and a mapping of normality, yet there was interaction between authority and subject: ‘People have an awareness of their own subjectivities, which is how they react to discourses about them (by accepting them, by understanding themselves in these scientific terms, by resisting them, by actively ignoring them).’29 The sexological studies are important not merely for their categorization and analysis of forbidden desires but for the case histories that they contain.
Krafft-Ebing believed that sexual desire was gendered and comprised of both bodily and psychical elements. ‘If the sexual development is normal and undisturbed’, he wrote, ‘a definite character, corresponding with the sex is developed. Certain well-defined inclinations and reactions in intercourse with persons of the opposite sex arise; and it is psychologically worthy of note with what relative rapidity each individual psychical type corresponding with the sex is evolved.’30 In other words, in ‘normal’ sexual development males assumed male bodies and matching psyches and desired females accordingly. Females acquired female mental and bodily characteristics and desired males. Homosexuality represented a disjunction of these alignments. He insisted on the gendered interaction between the physical and the psychological. This was the process that he referred to as eviration (the feminization of men) and defemination (the masculinization of women), involving ‘deep and lasting transformations of the psychical personality’. With men, the patient
