by Evelyn Bailey
This month Shoulders to Stand On continues with the history of Transgender men and women as they come to the fore in the 20th century.
From 1900–1914, a cross-dressing Carnival Crewe in the North of England was recorded by filmmakers Mitchell and Kenyon, in which all the men dressed as women and judging by the crowd’s reaction, it was found perfectly acceptable.
In 1910 Magnus Hirschfeld coined the term “transvestite” which referred to the sexual interest in cross-dressing. Hirschfeld’s group of transvestites consisted of both males and females, with heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, and asexual orientations. Freud, Benjamin and Hirschfeld had begun to observe gender variant behaviours that gave birth to a variety of psychological theories to explain what they saw and were told. (A topic for another column!)
In England, the British Parliament passed the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act in which four “classes” of mental deficiency were defined. The fourth of these classes was named Moral Defectives. Criminal or vicious personalities, unmarried mothers, homosexuals and transgender people were all absorbed into this category!
In a dictionary of criminal slang published in Portland, Oregon, in 1914, the word “faggot” is first seen as applied to the GLBT community, with the usage example, “All the fagots (sissies) will be dressed in drag at the ball tonight.” A shortened version, “fag,” is adopted as a British colloquialism for cigarette, and is later (1923) also adopted in print as an epithet for gay and transgender practices, which at that time were all thought to be interlinked. Also during the first World War, which began in 1914, transvestites were being regularly shot or charged as spies or cowards.
Rare first-person testimony about the early-20th-century life of a transgender person was written by Jennie June (born in 1874 as Earl Lind). Jennie wrote The Autobiography of an Androgyne (1918) and The Female Impersonators (1922), memoirs that provide a realistic picture of the world of a transgender person. June described herself as a “fairie” or “androgyne”, an individual, she said, “with male genitals”, but whose “physical constitution” and sexual life “approach the female type”.
Norman Haire, an Australian medical practitioner and sexologist who has been called “the most prominent sexologist in Britain” between the wars, reported that in 1921, Dora R. of Germany, under the care of Magnus Hirschfeld, began surgical transition from 1921, ending in 1930 with a successful genital reassignment surgery. In 1930, Magnus Hirschfeld supervised the second genital reassignment surgery MTF to be reported in detail in a peer-reviewed journal on Lili Elbe of Denmark.
The German term “Transsexualismus” was introduced by Hirschfeld in 1923. In 1949, the neo-Latin term “psychopathia transexualis” and English “transexual” were introduced by D. O. Cauldwell who subsequently also used the term “trans-sexual” in 1950 to refer to those who desired a change of physiological sex. Transexual was included for the first time in the DSM-III in 1980 where it was located under Disorders Usually First Evident in Infancy, Childhood or Adolescence.
Today in the latest version, DSM-5, it is included under the diagnosis Gender Dysphoria, a condition in which someone is intensely uncomfortable with their biological gender and strongly identifies with, and wants to be, the opposite gender.
Pre World War II, Aversion Therapy is first used to eliminate homosexuality and later is used on transgender people. Nazis abuse, murder and sterilize transgender people. Electroshock treatment was commonly used on transgender patients. Nazi Germany continued the inhumane treatment of homosexuals and gender variant individuals. The pink triangle was one of the Nazi concentration camp badges, used to identify male homosexual prisoners and other sex offenders.
From the 1940s until his death, Billy Tipton (born in 1914 as Dorothy Lucille Tipton) was a notable American jazz musician and bandleader who lived as a man in all aspects of his life. His own son did not know of his past until Tipton’s death. In 1945, in England, Sir Harold Gillies and his colleague Ralph Millard carry out the world’s first sex change of a woman into a man on the young aristocrat Michael Dillon. Gillies later performed surgery on the United Kingdom’s first male-to-female transsexual – Roberta Cowell in 1951
Virginia Prince, a transgender person who began living full-time as a woman in San Francisco in the 1940s, worked closely with Alfred Kinsey to bring the needs of transgender people to the attention of social scientists and sex reformers.
In 1952 a handful of other transgender people in Southern California launched Transvestia: The Journal of the American Society for Equality in Dress, which published two issues. In 1960 Virginia Prince began another publication, also called Transvestia, that discussed transgender concerns. In 1962, she founded the Hose and Heels Club for cross-dressers, which soon changed its name to Phi Pi Epsilon, a name designed to evoke Greek-letter sororities and to play on the initials FPE, the acronym for Prince’s philosophy of “Full Personality Expression”.
Christine Jorgensen, a World War II-era GI, created an international sensation when in 1952 she was the first widely known person to have sex reassignment surgery — in this case, male to female. She had not sought publicity, but publicity gave her an opening to light a small candle on behalf of those who shared her entrapment in the wrong gender. She was denied a marriage license in 1959 when she attempted to marry a man, and her fiance lost his job when his engagement to Christine became public knowledge.
From 1960 on, we see the transgender and gender variant community begin their own civil rights movement. As always it began small and grew. Today the trans* movement is increasingly visible and thriving.
Over the past several months I, as a cisgendered woman, have learned a great deal about gender variant history. The history of oppression for anyone or any group is consistently based on fear and an unwillingness to tolerate differences. As we look at the next half century plus of transgender and gender variant history, we see the same negative reactions to people who are different over and over again. Shoulders To Stand On affirms and is proud of the men and women of the gender variant community who have chosen to be visible, in order for all to be free to be who they are.