20th Century Transgender History And Experience

Kay Brown

Today’s highly visible transgender movement is the continuation of a century of experience and activism. From the beginning it has been an international effort to gain self-determination and medical and legal recognition, with heroes, villains, triumphs and defeats in every decade. The experiences of transsexuals, transgenderists, cross-dressers and intersexuals have interwoven as definitions of sex, gender, perversion and disorder evolved from Victorian to Post-Modern. This class will explore the people and the issues they faced as the transgender community formed and helped create today’s celebration of diversity. The medical, scientific, cultural and legal changes brought about by determined transgender people will be covered. We will also collectively analyze strategies and tactics that might be used in the future. This class is for transgender people and others who wish to understand where we have been and where we might be going.

TransHistory FAQ

Who was the first transsexual to have surgery?

It is hard to say who was the “first”. It depends very much on definition. In the ancient world castration and penectomy were common among transsexuals in Europe, the Middle East, South & South-East Asia, and China. The practice was suppressed in the Christian world (not counting castration of male singers as boys to maintain voice quality) but throughout Asia it continued right to the present, notably in South Asia; India and surrounding countries. The modern form of Male to Female surgery in which a vagina is also formed is believed to date from 1930 in Germany. Mastectomy and Radical Hysterectomy for Female to Male is known to have occurred as early as 1917 in the United States... and an unconfirmed reference suggests 1912 in Europe. Phalloplasty is more recent but still dates to the middle of the 20th Century.

Isn’t transgenderism / transsexuality an invention of modern medical technology?

No... as we can see from historical examples of transsexuals seeking whatever medical technology of their time offered throughout history, and in every culture studied.

When did hormones become available?

Chinese medicine was recovering male hormones from urine hundreds of years ago. Di-Ethyl Stilbesterol (DES) became available in 1938. Premarin became available in 1941.

When did the term Transgender come into use?

Virginia Prince, a full time cross dresser who openly disdained transsexuals, coined the term “Transgenderist” in the mid ‘70s to describe herself and others like her... but by 1981 the term “Transgender” had taken on its modern meaning of covering nearly the whole “gender community”, cross dressers, transsexuals, and intersexed people.

Do you have a question? Write to me!

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Timeline of Significant Events:

Stolen History — Secret Lives

Transgender people are often disrespectfully addressed by the wrong gender pronouns. It should come as no surprise that historical figures are wrongly assigned to their birth sex, their gender indentity ignorantly or deliberately disregarded. The reason that this is done bear examining. One clue to the possible reason is found in the glaring disparity in gender vector of those whose identity is stolen. It is far more likely that a female-to-male transgendered person is to have his life misinterpreted.

The explanation is that those who willfully steal FTM identities hold to the Oppression Theory to explain the presence of transgendered people. Oppression theory relies on historical oppression experienced by homosexual people and women in many professions. The professional discrimination theory does not have any explanatory power for the presence of male-to-female transgendered people, but the gay oppression does. However, a woman is still more likely to experience greater discrimination in most professions than a closeted gay man. Thus Oppression Theory is easier to apply to FTM people as it easier to imagine a ‘woman’ to be willing to hide her sex to gain entree into a profession than for a ‘man’ to hide his sex to gain access to male lovers, though it is sometimes applied.

Dr. Joshua Gilbert, who assisted Alan Hart with his transition, published Hart’s case in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disorders in 1920, but kept his patient’s identity a secret. The fact that Dr. Gilbert’s “H” and Dr. Alan Hart were one and the same was first publicized by Jonathan Ned Katz in his Gay American History (1976). Katz portrayed Hart as a victim of internalized homophobia, who assumed a false identity as a man to love whom "she" chose and who even had surgery to lessen her “guilt” about her Lesbianism. Katz says of Hart, “The story of [Hart] illustrates only too well one extreme to which an intelligent, aspiring Lesbian in early twentieth-century America might be driven by her own and her doctor's acceptance of society's condemnation of women-loving women.” But the facts of Hart’s life clearly show that he was not a victim, but rather a transsexual man who had the courage to be true to himself, who sought help to live in his gender of self-identity.

It is perhaps revealing that the gay historians who revealed Dr. Hart’s secret life were unable to interview his widow, “Ruddy” Hart, because they had alienated her by referring to her dead husband as a lesbian, and by association calling her a lesbian. Mrs. Hart insisted to her dying day that Alan Hart was a man.

Some historians dispute applying the term “transsexual” to Hart since he himself did not use the term. But why should he? The term was not coined until 1923 and not widely used until the 1960’s, around the time of Hart’s death. Although, according to Dr. Gilbert, Hart “accepted [his] condition as one of abnormal inversion,” it must be recognized that in the early 1900’s the concept of sexual inversion blended aspects of what today are considered entirely separate issues of gender identity and sexual orientation. After his transition, Hart had no desire to identify himself as anything other than what everyone accepted him to be: a man. Thus he was a transsexual — a true pioneer — one that is seen as a hero by today’s transsexual community.

In the 1980s, a Gay and Lesbian political action committee in Oregon, the Right to Privacy PAC (RTP), named an award and annual award dinner after Alan Hart... or rather after his birth name, Lucille Hart. While there were occasional complaints from transgendered people they were ignored. It took united transgendered community protests at the dinner in 1995 to force the board of RTP to listen to the Ad Hoc Committee of Transsexual to Recognize Alan Hart. In early 1996 they dropped all reference to Dr. Hart.

Transgendered man Billy Tipton died in 1989 and was ‘outed’ by the coroner. Soon after, non-transgendered people speculated as to why a “woman” would live fifty-six years as a man, not telling even his wife and kids! The notion that he was transgendered did not often enter their thoughts.... Columnist Clark Humphrey however quipped, “... only wish Billy Tipton, the deceased Spokane jazz ‘man’ who wasn’t, had recorded a duet with Wendy Carlos.”

Diane Wood Middlebrook, an English professor at Stanford University, wrote a well researched book, Suits Me, on Mr. Tipton’s life and times... unfortunately, she is unable to acknowledge Tipton as a transgendered man, taking great pains to ‘prove’ that this was a woman who needed to present as a man in order to survive... and failing miserably. Middlebrook’s thesis is that Tipton began ‘passing’ as a man to play jazz in the ‘30s, was trapped by his success at passing as a man, and would have ended it if he could. However, Tipton had many opportunities to step back from his life as a man, and refused to his dying day. Many of Tipton’s friends, his ex-wives, and his children, now knowing full well that he was female bodied, insisted that he was a man in the psychological and spiritual sense. His friends spoke for him... when he could no longer speak for himself.

Brandon Teena who was murdered along with several roommates, because he was transgendered became the subject of an independent film by two women. The women consistently referred to Brandon as a lesbian, thus stealing even a contemporary transgendered man.

While FTM transgendered people are usually usurped by those who want to use their punitive victim status to make a political point, MTF trangendered people are usually belittled and denied their accomplishments, sometimes their very existence.

In Out For Good, the authors usually mention transgendered people only by their description, their names are lost to history. The only two transgendered people mentioned by name are Beth Elliott, and Silvia Rivera. Ms. Elliott is mentioned only in connection with her appearance at the West Coast Lesbian Conference in 1973, and her subsequent transphobic expulsion from the Daughter’s of Bilitus. No mention is made of her work to reform California's anti-sodomy laws, or her work in founding the Alice B. Tokla's Gay Democratic Club. Nor are her years as a columnist in a gay & lesbian newspaper mentioned. Her life and contribution to the formation of the Gay Rights Movement is conveniently ignored. Sylvia Rivera gets more mention, but with a knife that is twisted, as she, along with Ms. Elliott, is constantly referenced by masculine pronouns. Ms. Rivera is further denigrated by reference to her attire as campy and slovenly. No surprise, not one FTM person is mention in the entire book! Thus, are transgendered people made invisible.

TransGender Theory

To understand the history of transgender people, one must also understand how both transgendered people themselves, and non-transgendered people explained the presence of such apparent misfits in the otherwise neat binary sex/gender social fabric. One can understand how law, medicine, and society in general treated transgendered people only within the context in which the transgendered person fit into a theoretic framework. If transsexuals were a medical entity, one still needs to know if it is a psychiatrically pathological entity, or a developmentally intersexed entity. If the former, one would expect that “cures” would be attempted, if the latter, then compassionate, though not always welcome, medical treatments might be applied. The law could see the transgendered person as a civil identity question, a criminal pervert, or as a medical entity. The law's treatment very much depends on the explanatory world view surrounding the transgendered in society.

Judeo-Christian-Moslem culture, drawing on a single verse in one old testament book, Deuteronomy 22-5, held that cross-dressing was an “abomination in the sight of the Lord”. Some biblical scholars hold that this line refers to a prohibition of the Hebrew people from participating in religious practices of the neighboring cultures, which included the followers of Cybele whose priestesses were post-operative male to female transsexuals. This single edict, surrounded by edicts that are seldom if ever followed today, save for the Ultra-Orthodox Jews, is sometimes quoted as sanctioning the worst transphobic treatment of transgendered people. Other old testament laws detail the status of “eunuchs”, males whose genitals have been surgically removed. Primarily these laws prescribe a second class status to the eunuch, since they are no longer “men”, they do not have male privileges, including the right to “testify” in court... since they no longer have the required equipment, testicles. (This is not a pun, but literally the origin of the words... one needed testicles to testify... and the old testament really does refer to the story, or testimony, of patriarchy.) Thus, built into Judeo-Christian-Moslem is the assumption that MTF transgendered people are untrustworthy abominations. This explains why Judeo-Christian-Moslem cultures have mistreated transgendered people while other cultures have either tolerated, or sometimes, venerated transgendered people, why Joan d’Arc was burned at the stake for wearing men’s vestments as well as armor, while the hijira of India have houses that have been in existence for hundreds of years.

Early in this century, as the United States population moved to the cities, transgender people, though extremely rare, started finding each other, just as they had in other city cultures in more populated countries as China and India. These gatherings of transgendered people were noted by their neighbors. These good people, educated in Christian values, complained to the civil authorities, who duly passed ordinances outlawing transgender expression, society, and existence. It was the cities who passed the laws against transgendered people. It must be noted that these laws were passed in the same climate and time that produced laws prohibiting citizens of African descent from owning property in the city limits, or of Catholics to operate schools. It should be noted that while the cities passed ordinances against transgendered people, the States were concerned with criminalizing homosexual conduct. City police, when they wanted to harass homosexuals, used the ordinances against the transgendered as more visible targets. Thus, the Stonewall riots of 1969, naturally began with the standard sweeping arrests of transgendered people. The ordinances began to be repealed in the 1970s. It is perhaps fitting that the first governmental bodies to atone for past discrimination by passing anti-discrimination measures in the 1990s should be the very cities that once had laws designed to expose them to criminal sanction.

Laws criminalizing homosexuality were also used to incarcerate or force medical treatment on the transgendered. In the name of eugenics, homosexual and transgendered people were sterilized against their wills. Later, when hormones became available, various medical treatments were devised. Some sought to reduce the libido by suppressing natural hormones, others sought to replace putatively low hormones. These actions were done under the theory of enlightened criminologists that many lawbreakers were rehabiitable using modern medicine. It was rarely questioned in law enforcement that the law itself was in need of rehabilitation. But there were movements to do just that, lead by social reforming physicians such as Magnus Hirschfeld in Germany.

There were times, when the transgendered person came to the attention of the courts through the medical establishment, rather than the police, when compassionate justice prevailed. Until the mid to late century, the prevailing mechanism for transgendered people to gain protective legal status was to seek a change of sex status through correction of birth certificates or registry in the same manner as was done in cases of intersex, where physicians provide for a ‘second opinion’ as to a person’s sex later in life. The law literally saw transsexuals as a form of intersex and helpfully corrected sex designations when asked. It was not until the popular press created the myth of “sex change” that the law began to see transsexuals as separate from intersexed people. Only after this change in perception was it necessary for specific statutes needed to secure a mechanism for transsexuals to change birth certificates and identification cards. Even then it was done as an extension of the intersex theory, a reaffirmation, to counter the “sex change” paradigm.

At the turn of the century, the concepts of sexual orientation and gender identity were conflated. One was either a normal man or woman, or one was an abnormal psychosexual invert. In some respects this concept is closer to the modern concept of the classic transsexual in that it was conceptualized as a person who both identified with and shared the same sexual object as a normal member of the opposite sex. Only through education by the homophile community and open minded sexologists such as Evelyn Hooker and Alfred Kinsey was the homosexual person viewed as having a congruent gender identity, merely finding one’s own sex to be the chief object of amorous affections. This left the concept of gender identity separable from sexual attraction, opening the door to conceptualizing the categories of the lesbian identified male to female and the gay male identified female to male transsexual. Still, it took the work of FTM transman Lou Sullivan in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s, to get the medical establishment to recognize the distinction.

There are three main currents of thought on the origin of gender identity in humans, Essentialism, Social Constructionism, and Psycho-Socialism. In academic circles these differing theories are hotly debated. But in the lives of ordinary people, especially transgendered people, the model that is applied by the medical, educational, legal, and even parental authorities that transgendered people interact, as individuals and as a class, deeply influence the interaction and the outcomes.

PsychoSocial Theories

Though Sigmund Freud was from Austria originally, his work influenced North American thought to a greater degree than European. His thoughts on the developing sexual identity and sexuality of infants and children profoundly influenced how transgendered people would be viewed in North America. Freud felt that gender identity was mediated by the existence or absence of a penis, directly. In the case of the owner of a penis the discovery that not all humans have one occasions deep anxiety lest that delightful organ of pleasure might be removed. This “Castration Anxiety” led to a distancing of the owner of the penis from the caretaker who did not own one... presumably because that person might want to steal it. While simultaneously, the owner of the penis wishes to emulate the other caretaker who by good fortune still owns a penis. Thus the owner of a penis learns to be a boy. Meanwhile, the infant who does not own a penis discovers that there are individuals who do own one. This occasions extreme jealousy. This “Penis Envy” leads one to court, and compete for, the affections of the caretaker who owns this marvelous appendage, while simultaneously emulating the caretaker who does not own a penis, who demonstrates ways of successfully courting the affections of the owner of a penis. Thus the one who lacks a penis learns to be a girl.

The existence of transgendered people brought the theory a serious challenge. How to explain people who end up having the exact opposite reaction to the presence or absence of a penis? The first answer of any theorist to such a challenge is denial, “transgendered people are psychotic”, likening the transsexual to a delusional man who believes himself to be Napoleon. This glib answer sufficed for those who had never actually spoken at length with transgendered people. But the diagnosis of psychosis failed to hold up upon examination. The challenge remained.

For FTM transgendered people the failure to resolve “Penis Envy” was enough explanation. But MTF trangendered people were still a mystery. The psychoanalytic theorists response was to posit a family constellation involving an overly close mother, who kept her son wrapped up in her emotional world, and a distant or absent father. The son could not make the emotional and subsequent identity break with his mother. Perhaps we can call this theory “Castration Envy”? This seemed at first glance to hold up well, since such family histories were indeed present in MTF transgendered people. Except it didn’t explain all of the cases since many profoundly transsexual MTF individuals had extremely good relationships with their fathers. The theory further broke down when comparing the statistics with non transgendered people. The were many families with an absent or emotionally distant father, the vast majority of single mothers, whose sons did not show signs of being transgendered. Though it remained popular to blame mothers, especially single mothers for all sorts of society’s woes, transgenderism was not able to hold up as being caused by family dynamics when tested statistically.

Still the psychoanalytic model held for most of the 20th Century, inspite of repeated failures of psychoanalytic therapy to dissuade transgendered people to abandon their gender identity. It is probably responsible for the prevailing attitude that Gender Identity Disorder is a psychiatric illness as defined by the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistic Manual.

Toward the middle of the 20th Century, as the psychoanalytic model for all mental illness began to be cast into doubt, a new model of gender identity came into vogue, “Imprinting”. One the chief proponents of the theory was John Money, Ph.D. Observing that intersex infants with the same physical features at birth who had been assigned to different sexes both seemed to adjust equally well, Money theorized that there was a critical period in the infant’s early life when the parents’ sexually dimorphic treatment imprinted upon the child a congruent gender identity. The notion of imprinting comes from observation that some animals imprint the image of a caretaker in infancy. The popular image is that of gosslings first sight of a farmer’s child, who subsequently is followed around as “mother”. This lead to the standard procedure of early genital surgery for intersexed infants to unambiguously assign a sex, any sex, to child so that an unambiguous gender identity will be imprinted by parents and family who “know” the child's sex. It lead to a medical ethic of misinforming even the parents as to the intersexed nature of the child. It also resulted in sterilization of thousands of male children, who born with a phallus too small to be comfortably described as a penis were reassigned as female.

Transgender people were explained by the imprinting theory similarly to the psychoanalytic model, blaming the mother. Again, an overly emotionally close mother, and sometimes the father as well, coset and pamper a male child in a manner that the hapless male child gets the message that it is female. Sometimes it was noted that the feminine male child was “physically beautiful”, that is, like a pretty girl child, eliciting a response from adults in a manner that reinforces the mistaken identity as a female child. Similarly, a physically adventurous female child might illicit masculinizing responses.

Money’s hypothesis and recommendations lead directly to the tragedy and “experiment of opportunity” of John Theissen, a man who’s penis was accidentally destroyed during circumcision. Mr. Thessien was later surgically reassigned as female. His parents then proceeded to raise him as their daughter, while his identical twin brother served as “control”. When the children we several years old the clinics declared that the reassigned child was accepting “her” gender as a girl. The case became known as that of John/Joan. Money published this case as proof of his hypothesis. Unfortunately, John Theissen as a teen refused to continue the program, insisting that he was a boy... he grew to be a man, obtained phalloplasty, married, and is raising three children from his wife’s prior relationships. It can be said that his is a case of surgically created transsexuality, as his personal gender identity was at odds with his sex assignment as an infant. Mr. Theissen’s story was published in Rolling Stone magazine in the mid ‘90s after a scientific paper was published by Milton Diamond, a proponent of pre- and neonatal hormonal brain sex differentiation.

Social Constructionism:

As the Second Wave of Feminism grew in strength, criticism of discrimination against women led to a reaction to prescribed restrictive societal roles for the sexes. “Biology is not destiny” became a rallying cry. What started out as a criticism of socially constructed roles developed into a theory of gender which denied Essentialism in every form, stating instead that society took the biological differences of procreation, and instilled in them an artificial behavioral difference. The theory, thus expanded, denies that there is any natural basis for gender identity. Thus it denies to transgender people any rational cause... while at the same time, presenting no reason why not.

To some authors this meant that transgender people were free to express themselves in any manner they chose since all gender expression is as valid as any other. Only societal convention stands in the way of such freedom. Such conventions can be modified by the society as is deemed desirable. To some, all such restrictions are to be avoided, in a live and let live ethos.

Other authors, Janice Ramond and Germaine Greer being notable examples, saw MTF transgender people as exploitive of women, aping the forms of femininity, supporting the artificial sexist forms that oppress women. It is interesting that in this regard they exhibit a hidden Essentialism, one that focuses on the genitalia as defining classes of human beings. They decried the restrictions on one class, while despising those of the other class when they break those very restrictions.

Still the existence of transgender people poses a challenge to the social constructionist theory. One must explain both why gender identity exists, how it is perpetuated, enforced, and why some rare individuals “chose” to express a gender identity at odds with societal prescribed gender expression norms.

Performance Theory has it that we are taught to Perform Gender, to act it out, in the same way that we learn to act out social roles like teacher, student, friendly store clerk, police officer, etc. One is said to “do gender” rather than “have a gender”. This is very similar in basics to the psychosocial theory of imprinting, save that there is no instinctual basis for having the ability to absorb a particular gender identity. We are taught a set of gender behaviors that become so ingrained as habit that we forget that we are merely acting them out.

Transgender people are explained by this as having been improperly instructed. Even among those inclined toward psychosocial models as one would expect physicians to be, one finds this theory in currency. It is the model used in justifying Behavioral Modification Therapy to treat Gender Identity Disorder in children. Under the assumption that even though gender identity is arbitrarily socially constructed and taught to children, one should not allow children to express gender behavior different than the norm. Some rationize it on the basis of wanting the children to fit in, experience less rejection and bullying, a ‘blame the victim’ mentality. Others are simply moralists that insist that God has ordained that we should all behave in a certain prescribed manner.

One Post-Modern philosophical theory, one that has a striking resemblance to the psychosocial theory that transgendered people are simply crazy, has it that transgendered people are suffering under a “false consciousness'”. That they are not really experiencing a gender at all... but an alienation from their social and biological reality. This theory is perhaps the most transphobic of all theories in that it denies what is called in Post-Modern cant, “agency”, the characteristic of experiencing and expressing their existence and very real psychic pain.

Oppression Theory starts from the assumption that transgendered people are very much in command of their faculties and have made a rational decision to avoid societal restrictions on desires they experience. The usual script is that an ambitious woman noting that she is unable to succeed “in a man’s world”, dons men's clothes, assumes a fictious identity as a man, in order to achieve career success. These “passing women” are the darlings of the feminist historian because they are revered as daring pioneers for women’s liberation, or they are held as examples, proof, of how horrible conditions were in some past epoch. To the feminist historian, modern FTM transsexuals are an embarrassing disproof of the theory. Similarly, Oppression theory is used to explain modern MTF transgendered people as being examples of internalized homophobia in gay men, too ashamed to live openly, and so have to “pretend” to be women in order to express their desire for same sex relations. To such gay male chauvinists, the fact that half of transgendered people identify as lesbian or gay male after transition, are an equally embarrassing disproof of the theory.

Social Constructionist theories fail to note that ethnobiological studies of sexually dimorphic behavior in animals is not socially constructed for non-humans. Nor does it explain the cross cultural similarity and temporal stability of core gender identity throughout history around the world.

Essentialism:

Essentialism posits that men and woman are “made that way”. It is a deceptively self-evident fact that most everyone accepts since for over 99% of the population there is a clear cut correlation between genital morphology and gender identity. It is easy to for the average person to ignore the disquieting cases of intersex that cast doubt on the simplistic assumption of binary sex assignment. The question of which sex an intersex person “really is” demonstrates the essentialist bias through much of Western Society for the past two centuries. Historically, Essentialism divided on which of two somatic characteristics was indicative of the “real sex” of an individual, genitalia or gonads. For most people the genitalia, the presence or absence of a penis was the overriding feature. As medical science grew more sophisticated in the 19th century, the gonads came to be the indicative feature. But early in the 20th Century the newly discovered chromosomes, specifically the presence or absence of the “Y” chromosome, became the newly crowned final arbiter of “real” sex. The faith in microscopic examination to “scientifically” determine one’s sex was unquestioned.

In 1968 the International Olympic Committee instituted chromosomal karyotyping for all female athletes. Any that did not have the required 46,XX chromosome karyotype were disqualified from competition, informed that, scientifically speaking, they were not women. The demonstrable fact that they had female genitalia, had lived as female all of their lives not knowing that they did not have the officially approved karyotype for women, did not enter into the unfeeling officials minds. Reductionist Essentialism had no room for intersexed people. They were counseled to fake an injury, slink away into silence to keep their shame of being “not female” from becoming known.

In 1970, the Corbet vs Corbet decision to nullify the marriage of a MTF transsexual to a non-transsexual man used karyotyping as the “scientific” marker for sex and gender that the law was henceforth to follow in the United Kingdom, throwing the legal status of transsexual and many intersexed people into limbo, neither male nor female.

Although essentialism has often been used as a philosophy to ‘prove’ that transsexuals and transgendered people do not have a valid claim to their identity, Essentialism still has explanatory power. If the locus of gender is found, not in the genitals or chromosomes, but elsewhere, transsexuals could be rationally described as “men trapped in women’s’ bodies” or “women trapped in men's’ bodies”. There are several loci that are, or have been proposed as the Essential Seat of Gender, but they come down to two main categories, “Brain Sex”, and “The Soul”.

Many religions have a concept of an essential self, separable from the body. In Judeo-Christian-Moslem belief systems one’s soul separates from the body after death. This soul retains the sense of self, including gender identity. Some religious thought includes the concept of the soul entering the body at some point in becoming a living being... and therefore must become, or always have been a gendered self. For religions that included the concept of reincarnation, the notion that a being always returns to the same sex body suggested an explanation for transgendered identity. Once in a while, a soul finds itself in the wrong sexed body. This idea was openly discussed in newsletters published in the ‘60s and ‘70s by the Erickson Education Foundation, as this was the personal belief of Reed Erickson, the Foundations benefactor. The Church of Latter-day Saints (Mormon) debated the issue of pre-born souls finding themselves in the wrong body with Kristi Independence Kelly in 1980 at her excommunication. The Church held that, though the pre-born souls did have a gender before birth, God did not make mistakes: “There is no such thing as a man in a woman’s body or a woman in a man’s body” was declared, ex-cathedra by the leader for the Mormon faith. Apparently, intersexed people must have also intersexed souls?

Some non-Judeo-Christian-Moslem cultures held that transgendered people were indeed gendered souls in the wrong body. Some believed that this juxtaposition have the transgendered person a special status with the spirits of nature or the powers. In ancient times in the Mediterranean culture, MTF transsexual women became priestesses, Galla, of the goddess, Cebele. The Hopi Nation held that a transgendered spirit, or Katchina, sent visions to transgendered people. In India, the hijira, transgendered and intersexed people are both reviled and revered, given varying circumstances. Mystical Essentialism has played an important role in various cultures, including our own.

The early 20th Century European researchers and medical practitioners believed that gender and sexual behavior in general are the result of a sexually dimorphic brain. That is to say that the brain itself has a sex. This sex usually conforms with the chromosomal and the genital sex. However, just as there can be chromosomal and genital intersex conditions, the brain might also exhibit intersex morphology leading to behavior and that elusive personal experience, gender identity, at odds with either somatic or chromosomal sex. Magnus Hirschfeld, a leading early researcher described the entire spectrum of what today we would call Queer expression, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, as forms of “Sexual Intermediates”, or intersex. This was not a metaphor or a rationalization. Instead it was an earnest theory, based on careful observation and scientific generalization, understanding the then current lack of neurological science. Hirschfeld and his colleague, Harry Benjamin believed that as our understanding of the brain grew we would discover just where and how the brain was organized to produce sexual orientation and gender identity. For Hirschfeld, there was no major divide between non-conforming sexual orientation and gender identity, they were simply different forms that intersex could take. Thus for Hirschfeld, the late 20th century division between the concepts of gender identity and sexual orientation, the great political divide between the gay & lesbians and the transgender community would be meaningless. To Hirschfeld, we are all transgendered, gay and transsexual alike.

In the first decades of the century, experiments with cross sex gonadal implants in animals suggested that there was a connection between hormones and gender specific behavior. This lead to horrific experiments in humans during the NAZI era and beyond as hormones became available as a common pharmaceutical. Testosterone was administered to gay men and MTF transgendered people in an attempt to ‘cure’ them. The hormone treatments had no effect on the sexuality or gender identity of the experiments. No lasting harm was done to the gay men. But the super-masculinizing effects on the transgendered victims was severely traumatizing.

In the later decades of the century, neuroscientists found significant sexual dimorphism in microstructures in the brains of animals and humans. Experiments on rats indicated that hormone levels during a period in late gestation and early post-natal development to be critical to the development of these structures and subsequent behavior. Gorby was able to create what he described as a laboratory model of transsexuality in rats. He demonstrated this in both MTF and FTM cases. When he introduced them to each other, the FTM rats mounted the receptive MTF rats.

Using human children to explore gender identity and sexual orientation would be extremely unethical in the laboratory, but science often uses “experiments of opportunity”. Simon La Vey used autopsy material from straight and gay men who had died from aids to find that a small microstructure of the brain differed in the two populations, suggestive of a sexual orientation controlling microstructure. The same technique of using autopsy was performed by Swaab to discover a different structure associated with gender identity. Shaffer, in an as yet unpublished study, used MRI data from a large pool of controls, MTF and FTM transsexuals to demonstrate that the corpus coliseum showed sexually dimorphic structures that, on a statistical basis, correlated with gender identity. Both Swaab’s and Shaffer’s work ruled out effects of hormones in adulthood.

The early data is tantalizing, and agrees with laboratory findings using animals. However, it is also known that experience can shape the brain. Lack of sensory stimulus and a chance to work out problems leads to dramatically less brain development in infantile rats. In humans there is a suggestion that early musical training affects the shape of the corpus coliseum, building greater connectivity between the two hemispheres of the brain. These early experiences suggest that early gender experiences could also lead to sexual dimorphism in the human brain by a similar mechanism. This would agree with Dr. Money’s imprinting hypothesis... But would be at odds with Gorby’s work with rats, and the results of the case of “John/Joan”.

Science could very well demonstrate that the seat of sexual orientation and gender identity is located in the brain. How that arises developmentally is still open for further research.

Early 20th Century - The Sexual Intermediates

Transgendered people in the early 20th Century did not have much access to medical technology. Hormones were not generally available. Experiments with transplanting gonads in animals suggested that bodily changes were possible if hormones could be obtained. Surgeons were loath to perform such operations on humans as it could lead to serious, often deadly, complications. However removing gonads was a several millennia old technique for removing the source of endogenous, and for the transgendered individual, unwanted sex hormones.

One early 20th Century transgendered person who successfully sought gonadectomy was Alan Hart.Alan Lucil Hart, M.D. was born Oct. 4, 1890 in Hall’s Summit Kansas and moved to Oregon two years later, where he was raised, unhappily, as a girl child. Upon reaching mature, educated adulthood, he took steps, including psychiatric counseling and surgery — as trassexuals do today — to live his life as a man. Dr. Joshua Gilbert, who assisted Hart with his transition, published Hart’s case in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disorders in 1920, but kept his patient’s identity a secret.

Deeply unhappy, and having considered suicide, Hart sought counseling in 1917 while attending the University of Oregon Medical College. At first he said his reason for seeking help was to cure a fear of loud noises. However, it soon became clear to Gilbert that Hart’s troubles were “connected in some way with sex.” Hart described identifying as a boy from earliest memory and, according to Gilbert, often spoke of himself in male terms, saying “the other fellows and I” or “what could a fellow do?” He also visualized himself as male in sexual fantasies. In a physical examination, Hart clamed that his “breasts are undergoing atrophy” and that his menstrual periods were painful and becoming shorter in duration. Since there was little evidence of abnormality, these statements could signal a wish to be rid of female sexual characteristics, one of the hallmarks of transsexualism.

Hart loved women and seemed to have little difficulty attracting or being physically intimate with them. He claimed that some of his lovers saw him as male. One woman told him that being with him was “exactly like going with a man.” But although he easily attracted women, he had difficulty maintaining long-term relationships with them, due in part to his situation. This was a source of pain to him.

Gilbert reported that “after long consideration, [Hart] came to the office with her mind made up to adopt male attire in conformity with her true nature...” Gilbert, though clearly a product of his time, was open-minded enough to believe Hart’s self-reporting and help him achieve what he wanted so badly. Together with Dr. Gilbert, Hart charted the course of his own treatment, surgery, and entry into society as a man.

Hart proposed radical hysterectomy to eliminate menstruation and the possibility of ever becoming pregnant. This was in 1917 or early 1918, decades before male hormones become available. Dr. Gilbert was at first reluctant to comply with Hart’s request, but finally conceded that his prejudice was all that objected, not his medical knowledge. This marks a milestone in transsexual history: the first time a psychiatrist recommended the removal of a healthy organ based solely on an individual’s gender identification.

Gilbert considered Hart extremely intelligent and not mentally ill but afflicted with a mysterious disorder for which he had no explanation. He had never seen such in his practice before, in spite of having counseled gay and lesbian patients. It is to Gilbert’s credit that he recognized the true nature of Hart’s problem and what his patient really needed, decades before The Transsexual Phenomena was described by Dr. Harry Benjamin. Although Dr. Gilbert continued to refer to Hart as “she” , he wrote, “... from a sociological and psychological standpoint she is a man” and that living as one was Hart’s only chance for a happy existence, “the best that can be done.” He adds, “Let him who finds in himself a tendency to criticize to offer some constructive method of dealing with the problem on hand. He will not want for difficulties. The patient and I have done our best with it.”

Hart had his surgery in 1918 and made arrangements to change his name. Soon after, he married Inez Stark (who was fully aware that he had been born female) and started a medical practice in Gardiner, Oregon. But only months after his arrival in Gardiner, he was outed by a former medical school classmate and forced to move. His early career was marked by such discoveries and transphobic treatment. No doubt because of this, Inez divorced him in 1923. In spite of this he never wavered from his identity as a man.

Despite Hart’s early difficulties, this earliest known attempt at modern sex reassignment was successful when judged by the remainder of Hart’s life. His second marriage, to Edna Ruddick in 1925, lasted until the end of his life—over 37 years. Hart published five books, including four novels and a text on his medical specialty (reoentgenology / radiology). He had successful medical practices in Tacoma, Washington and Hartford, Connecticut, where he died on July 1, 1962, of heart failure. As with transsexuals today, living in his gender of self-identity had profound psychological benefits for Dr. Alan L. Hart.

Hart’s novels are particularly interesting for the insight they provide into his thinking. The Undaughted (1936) contains two semi-autobiographical characters which seem to express two sides of Hart’s own personality and life experiences. The main character, Richard Cameron, a doctor and medical researcher, becomes a “cripple” (his words) when his foot has to be amputated due to a persistent bone infection. He worries that this physical defect will drive women away, but ends up marrying his sweetheart.

The other character, a radiologist named Sandy Farquhar, is a gay man who has been harassed and tormented, driven from job to job becuase of what he is. Farquhar resembled Hart physically — short and thin, wearing glasses. Small and frail from childhood, Farquhar considers himself to be “the possessor of a defective body” from which he wishes to escape — a typical transsexual sentiment. Another novel, In the Lives of Men, contains a gay male character with a missing arm. Could Hart’s feeling about his own body be encoded in these characters?

Serious medical and legal efforts in the United States were done only on an individual basis. But the story in Europe was a different matter, especially in Germany. The efforts of one man stand out as being especially significant.

Magnus Hirschfeld was a German sexologist in the early 20th Century, the first man to systematically describe and work with what we now call transvestites, transsexuals, and transgenderists. He considered TS/TG persons to be a form of intersex, indeed he also considered homosexual persons to be on this same intersex or “sexual intermediates” continuum. Working with surgeons in Berlin through his “Institute for Sexual Science” (Institut füer Sexualwissenschaft) one might say that he established and operated the world’s first, modern medical, gender clinic. The Institute was founded in 1919 and closed down by the Nazis in 1933. The institute provided comprehensive medical and educational services dealing with sexuality; birth control, sex education, safe sex techniques, gay & lesbian support groups, and counseling.

Hirschfeld was an openly gay man who visited the gay and transgender bars and nightclubs of Berlin. His nickname in the gay community was “Aunt Magnesia”. The rise of the Nazis forced him, as an openly gay jew, to leave Germany in 1930, never to return. He died in Paris in 1935.

Hirschfeld coined the term transvestite in 1915, and transsexualism in 1923, 40 years before Benjamin popularized the term and 25 years before Cauldwell used the term. Hirschfeld and Harry Benjamin met in 1907, when Benjamin was still a medical student. Thus, Magnus Hirschfeld really deserves the appalation of “The Father of modern Transsexualism.”

One of Hirschfeld's clients was Lili Elbe. Lili Elbe was born Einar Wegener in 1886, began part time transition while living with her life long companion Gerda Wegener in the ‘teens, and had surgery and full time transition in early 1930. Her marriage to Gerda was invalidated by the King of Denmark in October of 1930. She died only months after her fifth operation, an operation that she hoped would allow her to have intercourse with the man to whom she was engaged to be married... Her story is told in frank and loving terms in her book, Man Into Woman, edited by Niels Hoyer, 1933.

Both Lili and her partner, and legal wife before her surgery, Gerda Wegener, were well known painters and illustrators. But Gerda had far better commercial success and is still recognized today as one of the leading Art Deco artists of the early twentieth century. Her book and magazine illustrations included both high fashion, acceptable in the most polite society, and lesbian and straight erotica. Lili was one of Gerda’s favorite models, wearing women’s high fashion or nude. As a fashion designer in Paris, Gerda was influential in setting fashion trends. It is amusing to consider that the 1920’s small breasted feminine ideal may have been influenced by Lili’s figure.

Lili lived a double life for nearly two decades, in her 20s & 30s... often attending parties, balls, and socials as Lili. Although her closer friends were aware of this double life most aquaintences were not. Lili entertained visitors at her apartment, presenting as Lili for days at stretch. Lili gained many admirers due partly to her vivacious personality, when presenting as Lili, and her modeling for Gerda’s art. She even received an offer of marriage from a minor nobleman some years before her surgery. However, Lili was legally then male and already married to Gerda... facts not known to her suiter. After surgery, legal sex change, and marriage invalidation, an old friend and long time admirer, offered for her hand.

Lili wrote of herself as intersexed. But it is unclear exactly of what type. She wrote of having internal female organs, though this is doubtful. She certainly had feminine body and facial features that allowed her to pass as a young woman better than she passed as a man. When presenting in public as a man she was taken for a young woman masquerading as a man in trousers! Doctors consulted in her early adulthood declared her to be a normal male inspite of the feminine figure and hypogonadism. Hormonal assays taken just before her first surgery indicated more female than male hormones present. It is possible that she had 47,XXY sex chromosome karyotype (Klinefelter’s Syndrome) an intersex condition not medically recognized until 1942.

Lili was under the care of Dr. Warnekros of the Dresden Women’s Clinic. Warnekros was a pioneering gynecologist. All of Lili’s surgeries were of a very experimental nature. Her first surgery removed her male genitals. This first surgery was performed in Berlin after Lili was examined by the famous pioneering sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld. Her second surgery, performed by Warnekros, was to transplant healthy ovaries into her abdomen. A third operation, purpose unspecified, was performed a short time later. An emergency surgery was performed some weeks later, in response to severe abdominal pain, that probably was the removal of the rejected ovaries. Earlier reviews of Lili’s case in transsexual research literature left one with the impression that she died as a result of complications from the failed ovarian transplant... However... her reported death was not until over a year and a half later... three months after her fifth operation intended to allow her to “be a mother”, though probably was viginoplasty.

Several other transsexual operations were performed in Germany during this time by Felix Abraham, M.D. Dr. Abraham is believed to have involved with the first modern, complete, MTF Sex Reassignment surgery in 1931. He worked at the Institut füer Sexualwissenschaft. He published the first article on Sex Reassignment Surgery; “Genital Reassignment of Two Male Transvestites”

With the forced closure by Nazis of the Institut füer Sexualwissenschaft in 1933, medical options for transgendered people became extremely limited. Until 1948, essentially no physician assisted transgendered people. Transgendered people still transitioned, lived out their lives as best as they could. In the United States the example of Billy Tipton is fairly representative.

In high school, in Oklahoma, Billy referred to himself as “Tippy Tipton” and years later named one of his dogs “Tippy”... Given that his birth name was Dorothy, a popular name in the early 20th Century due to the success of Baum’s Oz books. Could Billy have been making an inside joke on both his last name and the name “Tip”, the masculine name for Princess Ozma, during her childhood spent magically transformed into a boy to hide her away? Could Billy have identified with the fictional transsexual character, Princess Ozma of Oz, that befriended his namesake, Dorothy Gale of Kansas?

Billy Tipton was careful to leave as little legal documents as possible. He finished high school, but failed to request graduation documents, as though already planning to leave his female birth identity behind. Early in his career, even when most of his friends still knew that he was female bodied, he obtained legal documents listing him as male... again indicating that he planned to live his entire life as a man.

Billy Tipton was a minor, but well respected, jazz musician and traveling entertainer before settling down as an entertainment agent in Spokane, Washington. Mr. Tipton was born female but from the age of 19, in the year 1933, lived as a man, marrying five women, adopting and fathering three boys. The first wife knew of his transgender status... the rest did not. Though he lived his life as a man from 1933 until his death in 1989, he never sought medical services, shunning doctors completely, staying deep stealth, even to the point where it contributed to his death.

The Lost Years

With the closing of the “Institute for Sexual Science“ (Institut füer Sexualwissenschaft) and the death of Magnus Hirschfeld transgender people were left with out a medical champion from 1935 until 1948, when Harry Benjamin began to see patients in the United States. However, transgendered people still existed and lived out there lives as best as could be done.

Europe under siege or occupation by NAZI Germany was a very dangerous place for transgendered people. Obviously transgendered MTF were especially at risk as they were swept into concentration camps along with gay men who had been prosecuted under Paragraph 175. Once in the camps, they were treated very harshly, forced to wear the pink triangle as a symbol of a little girl’s dress. Surprisingly, the reason for the NAZI hatred of gay men was that they were considered race traitors, wasting precious Aryan sperm, when they should be impregnating Aryan women to give children for the Master Race. It was possible, at least in the early years, to win release from the camps if one could “prove” one had been rehabilitated by hard manly labor. The method of proving oneself involved having intercourse with a female prostitute. One camp commander boasted that he could tell which prisoners could be rehabilitated from the very beginning.... as some were just never going to be real men. Thus, feminine gay men and primary MTF transgendered people were the ones who suffered first and longest, if they survived the brutal treatment and starvation. Longest, since after the Allies liberated the camps, those convicted under Paragraph 175 were still incarcerated as criminals. The end of the war did not bring freedom to gays and transgendered people.

One of the treatments the NAZIs tested on the feminine gay men and MTF prisoners was injections of the recently available male hormones. The effects on the MTF must have been devastating. Jews, picked at random were also exposed to exogenous sex hormones to study the effects. Women were masculinized by male hormones, treated as experimental animals. Men were castrated and given female hormones. These were not transgendered people. However, these experiments led to the false belief that the NAZIs had allowed transsexual medical treatment to continue after the party took power.

The NAZIs were not alone in committing atrocities on gays and transgendered people during these years. The availability of sex hormones after their introduction in 1938 led to “treatments” for gay, lesbian, and transgender / intersex people using cross sex and same sex hormones depending on the favorite theory then in vogue. In some cases the law forced those who had been convicted of “sex crimes,” being caught with their lover, to undergo such hormonal treatments. One famous gay man was British cryptographer and mathematician Alan Turing, who was forced to receive shots for two years.

Although there was not a champion to help transgender people with medical treatment, transsexuals did find that they could use these newly available sex hormones. In the case of physicians, they could prescribe them for themselves. Dr. Alan Hart who had transitioned in 1917 is likely to have prescribed masculinizing hormones for himself, as he was described as having a beard and an “unusual voice.” Dr. Ewan Forbes-Semphill was another that was known to have prescribed male hormones for himself.

Many other transgender people went without medical aid completely. A good example is Billy Tipton.

From 1933 to 1952, from the closing of the Instutute in Berlin to Christine Jorgensen’s surgery in Denmark, no surgical aid was known to have occurred. Two decades were lost due to the horror of NAZI intolerance.

The Gay, Lesbian, and Feminist Backlash

The modern era of the gay & lesbian rights movement is usually marked as starting on a hot July evening at the Stonewall Inn in New York City’s Greenwich Village. The New York police, as many city police departments across the United States did, made period raids on sexual minority bars to harass and arrest the patrons. On this particular night, transgendered woman, Sylvia Rivera, resisted arrest, touching off a riot that continued for three nights running.

In the next year, three transgendered people, Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, and Angela Keyes Douglas would play pivotal roles in organizing the emergent Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance. The goal of the Gay Liberation Front was complete acceptance of sexual diversity and expression. But by 1971 the gay men’s community had returned to the assimilations strategy as the lesbians, in 1973, turned to separatism and radical feminism. There seemed to be no room for transgendered people in either camp.

In 1971, the GAA wrote and introduced a bill to the New York City Council that was the first omnibus anti-discrimination bill to protect homosexual people. However, inspite of early and avid support of the GAA by transgendered people the bill completely ignored transgendered people. Silvia Rivera, disgusted by the betrayal, said to the leaders of the GAA, “It’s not us that they are afraid of — its you! Get rid of us. Sell us out. Make us expendable. Then you’re at the front lines. Don’t you understand that?” This marked the first serious betrayal, but certainly not the last.

Disillusioned by the GAA’s betrayal of transgendered people, Angela Douglas formed the Transsexual Activist Organization along the same lines as the GAA, with some of the loftier ideals of the GLF. She began publishing MoonShadow, a quirky newsletter for and about transgendered people and the struggle for legal rights.

In early 1970’s, Beth Elliott was active in a number of organizations including the Alice B. Toklas Gay Democratic Club, which she co-founded, the Board of Directors of the California Committee for Sexual Law Reform working to repeal California’s anti-sodomy laws, and the Daughters of Bilitus. The Daughters of Bilitus had been a pioneering lesbian organization during the 1950s and ‘60s, but was losing membership in the ‘70s as the lesbian community turned to more radical organizing. In ‘73 Ms. Elliott was asked to stand for election as the Vice-President of the San Francisco chapter of the Daughters of Bilitus. Late in her term of office her transgender status became a point of contention at the West Coast Lesbian Conference, where she was outed and vilified for being a MTF transsexual. The complaint was that Beth Elliott had insinuated herself into a position of power over women as a patriarchal man, a propagandist ploy that was to become common when attacking other transgendered people . At the conference she was forced to stop her music concert due to the catcalls from the audience by women that knew nothing more about her than that she was transsexual. She was required to sit through a popular vote of the attendees to determine whether they would let her finish her set. In the weeks and months to follow she was further vilified and even betrayed by women who had once called her friend. The treatment she received led her to become “stealth” for many years after.

In July of 1973, during a “Gay is Good” rally, Sylvia Rivera was followed on the stage by lesbian separatist Jean O’Leary. She denounced transgender people as men who, by “impersonating women”, were exploiting women for profit. It was the beginning of a series of such high profile transphobic attracts from the lesbian community.

In 1977, at the height of the Right Wing / Anita Bryant anti-gay rights backlash, the lesbian feminist separatist movement was busy attacking an even smaller community that only wanted to work within the lesbian community, lesbian identified transsexual women. Central to the conflict in ‘77 was transsexual recording engineer, Sandy Stone, working at Olivia Records.

Sandy Stone was a recording engineer for A&M Records before her transition. Olivia Records needed a recording engineer with skills and experience to help their fledgling all women’s recording studio. They found it in Sandy Stone. She recorded a number of their early albums, training other women on proper recording and mixing technique. When word got around that Olivia had a transsexual in the company, lesbian separatists threatened a boycott of Olivia products and concerts. Olivia Records was on the edge of profitability. A boycott would destroy them. Olivia supported Stone at first but eventually crumpled beneath the separatists demands, asking for Sandy’s resignation.

Angela Douglas became upset at the vitriolic, absurd, and transphobic comments broadcast on listener sponsored station KPFA in Berkeley, California and letters published in the feminist journal Sister. She wrote a very tongue-in-cheek satirical letter to the editor of Sister, the night before the 1977 San Francisco Gay Pride Parade.

The next day, at the Parade, a “gender bending” MTF individual handed out fliers that was written in protest of the Parade Committee’s policy of exclusion of “Drag Queens, Transvestites, and Transsexuals” . The policy was formulated in the hope of heading off the media which tended to focus on the flamboyant, instead of the very serious issues of Gay & Lesbian community pride and efforts to fight homophobia in society. However, transphobia had operated in the Parade Committee to equate transgendered people with “flamboyant” social unacceptability and political liability.

After the parade, Angela Douglas wrote a short essay with photos for the Berkeley Barb, in which she decried the efforts to exclude transgendered people. She asked if there shouldn’t be a counter parade by transgendered people, to be held on Halloween, a day that one is supposed to be flamboyant!

Two years later Janice Raymond in The Transsexual Empire, wrote of the events of 1977, casting Ms. Stone as an agent of the “Patriarchy” and “divisive”. The letter that Angela Douglas wrote as satire was quoted out of context, as an example of transsexual hatred of women, by Raymond. Her quoting out of context a letter written by Douglas was tantamount to intellectual dishonesty, with scholarly repercussions.

Janice Raymond was a professor at the University of Massachusetts. She is infamous for having written her doctoral thesis attacking transsexuality, denying its medical reality, and for viciously attacking individual transsexuals, notably Sandy Stone and Angela Keyes Douglas in her book, based on her dissertation. The book uses insensitive and transphobic language throughout, while vilifying feminine MTF transsexuals as tools of patriarchy for upholding stereotypes of women, and vilifying androgynous lesbian identified MTF transsexuals for being tools of patriarchy, fifth columnists infiltrating women's’ space and “raping women's’ bodies”, a typical ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ trap. She dismisses FTM transsexuals as deluded and misguided lesbians, afraid of the label “homosexual”. Her thesis rests entirely on arguments that sex/gender identity are fixed within the genitals at birth, an essentialist theory that excludes the possibility of transsexuals being a form of intersex, a topic which Raymond never addresses.

The book, while it did not create the transphobic attitude in the lesbian community, did tap into and ‘validated’, at least for the transphobes themselves, the discrimination they practiced. Thus, what began in the ‘70s, occasional attacks on individual transsexual women, became institutionalized discrimination against all transsexuals in the ‘80s.

The Transsexual Empire, was not the most damaging writing that Raymond penned. Far worse was a United States federal government commissioned study in the early 1980’s on the topic of federal aid for transsexual people seeking rehabilitation and health services. This paper, not well publicized, effectively eliminated federal and some states aid for indigent and imprisoned transsexuals. It had a further impact on private health insurance which followed the federal government’s lead in disallowing services to transsexual patients for any treatment remotely related to being transsexual, including breast cancer or genital cancer, as that was deemed to be a consequence of treatment for transsexuality.

Ms. Raymond is closely associated with another noted transphobic writer, Mary Daly, who described transsexuals as “Frankenstien’s Monsters” in her book GynEcology.

Transgender participation continued to be controversial in the Gay & Lesbian Community. Transsexuals taking leadership positions in the community were especially subject to attack.

Ms. Carol Katz was on the Christopher Street West Gay Pride Parade and Festival Committee, serving as Security Coordinator from ‘79 through ‘81. However her position on the board was a controversial one as many gays and especially lesbians objected to the presence of a transsexual. She recruited a number of transgendered people, both FTM and FTM to work as volunteer parade monitors and festival security each year . Her background in law enforcement facilitated greater cooperation between the Committee and local law enforcement organizations, LAPD and the LA County Sheriff’s Department.

In 1980 Ms. Katz was asked to serve as Security Co-ordinator for the “Women Take Back The Night March” in Hollywood. She agreed to help. However... lesbian feminist separatists threatened to boycott the march. Carol offered to step down in the interests of the larger community, with some private bitterness. The Committee accepted her resignation. But at the very last minute, due to overwhelming details in doing the job without her... and perhaps a realization that it was wrong to push her out of her participation... the committee asked her to take back the job the very day of the march. The controversy over Ms. Katz’es leadership role lead to the effective banning of broad transgender community participation in event planning and execution, though transgendered people did march that night .

It should be noted that the memory of the gay & lesbian community is short, as demonstrated by the efforts of the transgender community in Los Angeles to win inclusion in the Parade and Festival in 1995; Transman, Jacob Hale faced a Festival committee that believed transgendered people had never been participants before. The work of the transgendered community in ‘79-’81 had been completely forgotten, erased by the silence of the 1980’s.

In 1991 Nancy Burkholter was ejected from the Michigan Wymyns’ Music Festival at 1:00am by security staff suspicious that she was transsexual. She had done nothing to warrant eviction. She was forced to find transportation back to town to fly home, a holiday trip ruined by transphobia.

Unknown to the transsexuals who had been quietly attending the festival for years was an unpublished policy of the festival organizers that transsexuals were not welcome “on the land”. The policy was written out in the material for the next year that only “Wymyn Born Wymyn” may attend. The language was clearly designed to exclude transsexuals while avoiding debates regarding whether MTF transsexuals were “Wymyn”.

The next year, in 1992 TransActivist Anne Ogborn began organizing a protest to be held at the Festival, unable to go herself, she enlisted Davina Anne Gabrielle to attend. Davina and non-transsexual woman, Janis Hollingsworth handed-out buttons to women reading “I might be transsexual” at a table to enlist festival attendees in a dialog over the transsexual inclusion. Davina was ejected from “the land” in accordance with the written policy.

In 1993, the transgender community pitched CampTrans outside the main entrance. Jessica Xavier, Leslie Feinberg, among others attended to protest the Festivals’ “Wymyn Born Wymyn Only” policy. “Woman Born Transsexual” read a new button worn by CampTrans inmates. At the camp, workshops and concerts were presented as an alternative to the Festival. A number of women came out of the festival to participate in discussions. Notable was the participation of younger lesbians, especially members of The Lesbian Avengers. TransActivist volunteers stood outside the gate taking a poll of the festival attendees attitudes toward transsexual inclusion at the festival. The poll revealed division on the issue, but the majority of the women attending indicated that they would welcome transsexual women.

Participation in CampTrans energized the transgender community to become active once again, after the community’s silent withdrawal from the larger gay & lesbian community the previous decade.

National and local transgender activist worked for months to gain inclusion in the 1993 March On Washington. Transgender volunteers aiding in organizing the March, notably Jessica Xavier, worked with March organizers for months trying to gain inclusion in the name of the March. There was a ‘divide and conquer’ politicking by transphobic gays & lesbians that pitted bisexuals against transgenders. They told the bisexual community members who were also working toward official inclusion that it was either transgender or bisexual, but not both. To their credit the bisexual members did not buy into the ploy. However, the issue of inclusion was still couched in such terms by the foes of transgender inclusion. When the issue was put to a vote by the organizing committee the bisexuals won inclusion easily. The vote for inclusion of transgender was divided. There were actual cheers from the gay and lesbian community when the committee announced their decision to exclude transgender which deeply dismayed the transgender community volunteers.

A new pattern emerged in the mid 1990’s. The generation that had grown up since Stonewall welcomed transgender people without reservation, perhaps even with a tinge of adulation for their contribution to the struggle for Queer Rights. The older generation, those who had struggled just after stonewall, those who had read The Transsexual Empire when it was new, had not changed their minds significantly. Those that had been accepting during the 1970s remained so, those that had been sitting on the fence now came down on transgender inclusion. But those who had adamantly opposed trans-inclusion in the ‘70s still fought against it in the ‘90s. In 1994 The Transsexual Empire was reprinted and used as a textbook in feminist classes once again.

In 1994 CampTrans was pitched again with Riki Anne Wilchins taking a leading role. The turn out was smaller than expected. It was not due to a feeling of failure, but rather a feeling that the issue of transgender inclusion in “wymyn only space” was being by-passed by larger and more important issues.

Also occurring in 1994 was the Gay Games. When transgendered people wished to participate they discovered similar transphobic attitudes that the International Olympic Committee held . The Games organizers refused to allow transgendered people to participate except under very restrictive rules, namely that had to prove that they had had surgery or at least lived two years full time, with hormones, in their gender of identity. Bi-gendered individuals were completely excluded. This reliance on rules that on the surface seem to come direct from the HBIGDA Standards of Care, offended the transgendered community.

Transsexual Menace of New York organized to protest the restrictive and discriminatory rules. In street protests the group held up a banner that read, “Gay Games to transgendered: DROP DEAD!!” The uproar and embarrassment forced the organizers to drop the rules and allow unrestricted participation.

Some gay columnists were calling the events the “transgender Stonewall”, comparing 1994’s protests to ‘the gay riots of 1969’, totally ignoring the historic irony that Stonewall itself was started and fought by transgendered people. This lack of historic recognition sparked another protest in New York, demanding inclusion in planned events to mark 25 years since Stonewall.

In 1994 the issue of discrimination against sexual minorities became the biggest issue. The gay & lesbian community was working towards passing a bill in Congress, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA);. Transgender activists worked with the gay & lesbian community and the bill’s sponsors in Congress on inclusive language for the bill, only to discover that the language was removed before the bill was introduced. When the issue was researched by Phyllis Frye, she discovered that the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) had objected to the language. Once again transphobia in the gay community had resurfaced as betrayal.

The betrayal of the HRC was echoed at the local level. In 1995, transactivists in Oregon worked with gay & lesbian activist with the Right To Privacy Political Action Committee (RTP) for a state version of ENDA. Once again language was changed at the last minute, behind the back of the transgender community. Later, RTP board members denied this fact when charged by transactivists. However, transsexual law student and legislative intern, JoAnna McNamara was in the meetings that were held with RTP and the bill’s sponcors. RTP representitives did not know that Ms. McNamara was transsexual, who later provided information to the local gay press regarding the betrayal.

The transgender community lobbied the HRC and other organizations to amend the language to include transgender and gender variant gay & lesbian protection. Each year saw organizations that had previously supported the bill, drop its support. Each year of the second half of the ‘90s saw organizations officially add transgender to their mission statement. Each year saw what started as inclusive lip service become real support.

In 1998. the Gay Games was held in the Nederland's. Ironically, while transsexual pop singing star Dana International performed at the opening festivities, the transgender community protested the re-instatement of the same restrictive rules that had excluded some transgendered people in New York four years earlier. However, European officials of the Games were unmoved.

In 1999, five years after the disagreement between the HRC and the transgender community over inclusion in ENDA surfaced the controversy continued, one of the bill’s Congressional sponsors, openly gay Representative, Barney Frank, played the “Bathroom Card”, saying that employers will not accept transgender people as employees since they won’t be able to convince their other employees to tolerate transgender people in the restrooms. This was quickly denounced by transgender activists as truly expressing transphobia, though Frank had earlier voiced his concern regarding violence and discrimination against transgender people in the wake of the death of Tyra Hunter, pointing out the irony as the “Shower Card” was used against the gay & lesbian community in its fight to gain the right to serve in the armed forces earlier in the decade .

In 1999, at the close of the 20th Century, the gay & lesbian community was still divided over transgender inclusion. Camp Trans was once again pitched in front of the gate of the Michigan Wimmins’ Music Festival. This time post operative male to female transsexuals were allowed ‘on the land’, but pre-operative MTF women and post-operative FTM men were not. The issue had now come down to possession of a penis. Although they were now allowed on the land, vocal transphobic lesbian separatists menaced transsexual women, while members of The Lesbian Avengers supported them.

At the end of the 20th Century, the Transgender Question in the gay and lesbian community was still unsettled, and unsettling for the majority.

ACLU Transsexual Rights Committee...

Organized within the Southern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the committee was active from 1980 to about ’83. It was founded by Joanna Clark (AKA Sister Mary Elizabeth), Jude Patton, Carol Katz, Joy Shaffer, Kay Brown, Diane Saunders, and Susan McGrievy (though not TS she acted as legal counsel).

The committee had some minor success in getting the military and VA to recognize our needs. It got some major improvements in prison treatment. California has a special wing of one prison for pre-op TS. The inmates are officially called Category B inmates instead of male. The inmates call themselves “B Cats.” Post-op TS are put into the regular population that agrees with their re-assigned sex. Another improvement was in Vocational Rehabilitation. They now recognize TS needs as a barrier to normal employment. The committee forced a researcher on the east coast to stop his unethical treatment of TS. The committee’s biggest hope had been to get a law passed that would require insurance companies to cover TS medical needs. While some legislators agreed to introduce the bill was killed in committee.

At the same time Jude Patton and Joanna Clark were working with a TS a clinic in Southern California. It became the first program to include transsexuals in the evaluation committee. This was the first time that we had had any say in our own treatment.

Joy became the a TS doctor, opening the first medical clinic run by and for TS/TG people. Joanna is now the head of the largest online AIDS information and education organization. She also kept a TS information organization, J2CP, alive until it could be passed on to other hands. Jude Patton, at the Second Conference, received a “Life Time Achievement Award” from FTM International, the biggest FtM TS organization, in front of 500 TS men from around the world. Candice Brown became one of the facilitators of the TS support group in LA. A role she repeated in Portland. Candice has continued her activism on and off, as well as writing in TS journals. Most of that original committee were prominent figures in the TS community at some point.