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Others of My Kind: Transatlantic Transgender Histories
From the turn of the twentieth century to the 1950s, a group of transgender people on both sides of the Atlantic created communities that profoundly shaped the history and study of sexuality. By exchanging letters and pictures among themselves they established private networks of affirmation and trust, and by submitting their stories and photographs to medical journals and popular magazines they sought to educate both doctors and the public.
Others of My Kind draws on archives in Europe and North America to tell the story of this remarkable transatlantic transgender community. This book uncovers threads of connection between Germany, the United States, and the Netherlands to discover the people who influenced the work of authorities like Magnus Hirschfeld, Harry Benjamin, and Alfred Kinsey not only with their clinical presentations, but also with their personal relationships. It explores the ethical and analytical challenges that come with the study of what was once private, secret, or unacceptable to say.
With more than 170 colour and black and white illustrations, including many stunning, previously unpublished photographs, Others of My Kind celebrates the faces, lives, and personal networks of those who drove twentieth-century transgender history.
Others of My Kind draws on archives in Europe and North America to tell the story of this remarkable transatlantic transgender community. This book uncovers threads of connection between Germany, the United States, and the Netherlands to discover the people who influenced the work of authorities like Magnus Hirschfeld, Harry Benjamin, and Alfred Kinsey not only with their clinical presentations, but also with their personal relationships. It explores the ethical and analytical challenges that come with the study of what was once private, secret, or unacceptable to say.
With more than 170 colour and black and white illustrations, including many stunning, previously unpublished photographs, Others of My Kind celebrates the faces, lives, and personal networks of those who drove twentieth-century transgender history.
400 pages, Paperback
First published August 15, 2020
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March 31, 2024
The book is a collection of articles that accompanied an exhibit about a group of transgender people who communicated with each other creating a transatlantic transgender community in the 1950s. It is a fascinating addition to early transgender history.
Referring to a cache of intimate photos held at the Art Gallery of Ontario that depict cross-dressers in a compound in New York called Casa Susana in the 1950s and 1960s, Elspeth Brown notes the importance of ‘the relationship of image making to the formation of queer, trans and cross-dressing communities from the 1950s to today.’ [16] 30
In the middle of the 1950s, the Netherlands was one of the few places in the world were trans people could obtain gender affirming surgery. [19] there were various different surgical techniques employed at this time, and access was restricted; only a happy few could afford surgery, which remained a far off dream for members of oppressed minorities, such as the poor and colonized. But it did mark the early beginnings of a long and rich history of transgender care in the Netherlands. Since the operations were my life eight carried out in secrecy, Alex only found one or two textual sources referring to them, which left him with more questions than answers. [20] 35
In New York, we also find Bernard S. Talmey, like Benjamin a German immigrant to the United States, a Doctor Who published the first American article about transvestites in 1914. Both Talmey and Benjamin another trans individual from New York, who was described in Talmey’s 1914 article as his ‘first patient’; we now know that this was Otto Spengler. New York was also where we placed another individual who moved between Germany, New York, and San Francisco: a German immigrant to the United States described in the medical literature as John O. and known at least privately to in San Francisco as Jenny, whose letters to Magnus Hirschfeld published in 1910 in Die Transvestiten (The transvestites), a word that he applied to people we would today call transgender, and the etymology of which is described in more detail in the concluding chapter. 39-40
The case of German-American immigrant Otto Spengler is instructive. Spengler was first described, without being named, in a 1914 article by Bernard S. Talmey in the New York Medical Journal. [1. B.S. Talmey. “Transvestism: A Contribution to the Study of the Psychology of Sex,” New York Medical Journal 99 (January to June 1914): 362-8] 41
It is important to remember that most trans people live very private lives and left view are very scattered archival traces. We purposely chose to focus on people who did not seek fame but nonetheless made a significant impact through their determination to educate medical authorities or supportive communities. 51
They either saw each other out (as was the case with several people whom Otto Spengler found in corresponded with) or they were put in touch by doctors. These communities were sometimes quite intimate, as was the case in 1950 San Francisco, where many transitioning individual saw out and found a sympathetic ear in the living room of Louise Lawrence. Trans women in particular shared information about sympathetic doctors, surgical techniques, and the new challenges of fashion, hairstyling, and make up. 52
For surgeons this mutual transfer of knowledge was less important: they generally relied on the diagnosis that psychiatrist had already made. In some cases, as Alex will detail, they simply did what trans people asked them to do. This was true of Dr. Georges Burou, who perfected surgical techniques in the 1950s that helped between 800 and 1000 trans women who found their way to his clinic in Casablanca. [32. As far as we know, Burou did not keep careful records. This is an estimate derived from personal communications, detailed in J. Joris Hage, Refaat B. Karim and Donald R. Sr. Laub, “On the Origin of Pedicled Skin Inversion Vaginoplasty: Life and Work of Dr. Georges Burou of Casablanca,” Annals of Plastic Surgery 59, no.6 (2007): 723-9, esp. 725] 53
As Emily Skidmore’s research on transcend the United States reveals, there are countless stories of trans men having been discovered only by accident after living almost entire public lives as men. [38. Emily Skidmore, True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn o the Twentieth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2017)] Aaron Devor and Nichola Matte have explained that it was only after 1964, when Reed Erickson, a very wealthy trans man, began overseeing millions of dollars of philanthropic spending to finance research into transexual medicine that any significant attention was paid to the medical concerns of trans men. [39. See Aaron H. Devor and Nicholas Matte, “One Inc. and Reed Erickson: The Uneasy Collaboration of Gay and Trans Activism, 1964-2003,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10, no.2 (2004): 179-200; Aaron Devor and Nicholas Matte, “Building a Better World for Transpeople: Reed Erickson and the Erickson Educational Foundation,” International Journal of Transgenderism 10, no.1 (2007): 47-68. The Erickson Educational Foundation made most of Harry Benjamin's later work possible, but as Abram Lewis argues, recognition of Erickson's contribution came late and part because of his drug use and his interest in new age spirituality. Abram J. Lewis, “I Am 64 and Paul McCartney Doesn’t Care’: The Haunting of the Transgender Archive and the Challenges of Queer History,” Radical History Review 120 (2014): 13-34] 56
As far as we have been able to determine, the first person of colour to access gender firming surgery in Europe or North America was Delisa Newton in the United States, [43] but her surgical transition likely occurred around 1964, later than the focus of the American accounts we explore. [44. As with other areas of trans history, it is often trans people themselves or doing the most important intrepid digging. See the discussion in the blog: Monica Roberts, “TransGriot: Who Was the First African-American Transwoman?,” TransGriot (blog) 26 May 2009, accessed 28 June 2019, https://transgriot.blogspot.com/2009/.... For a pioneer and study of black trans history, see C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota press, 2017)] 58
An exception can be found in Das 3. Geschlecht, [3] a magazine aimed at ‘transvestites’ in Germany. 76
Beginning in 1924, the publishing house owned by the homosexual published and activist Friedrich Radszuweit published a supplement to the lesbian magazine Die Freundin (The girlfriend) devoted to ‘transvestites.’ Between 1930 and 1932, Radzuweit’s company published the first transvestite magazine in the world to be offered for sale: Das 3. Geschlecht. 78
Radszuweit was not primarily interested in providing visual evidence for scientific theories, or if so, only to the extent that science helped to popularize and stabilize a new form of identity. Rather, he was interested in establishing a medium for transvestites to construct their own identities and to organize themselves into groups. Imagery was central to both of these goals. 80
Joanne Meyerowitz, Susan Stryker, and others have pointed out that Benjamin provided a link between Hirschfeld and Kinsey and that the openness to gender-affirming surgeries that he had acquired while still in Berlin inspired him to cooperate with Kinsey’s project of cataloguing all aspects of human sexual variation. [11] 143
As we will see, Kinsey did not find ‘transsexuality’ as a subject of scientific investigation; individuals who wanted to be investigated found him. 145
As Gill Frank and Lauren Gutterman have argued, well into the 1970s and to some degree up to the present, ‘the messier realities of trans peoples’ lives, including queer desires or gender queer identities, needed to be smoothed out for them to be accepted by physicians and a wider public. [19] 147
Harry Oosterhuis’s study of Richard von Krafft-Ebing is a model of this approach, since he reveals the ‘dialogical’ process through which one of the first sexologists reached his conclusions. Oosterhuis argues that despite the fact that Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, first published in 1886, began as a list of sexual pathologies and thus ‘enabled medical treatment and other forms of restraint…it also opened up the possibility for the individuals involved to speak out, to find a voice, and to be acknowledged,’ [21] making ‘both patients and doctors…agents of culture at large.’ [22] 148
Sensitivity to the desires and needs of patients became a hallmark of sexological research, at least in Germany, where Magnus Hirschfeld’s founding of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin in 1919 was motivated not only by the pursuit of medical knowledge but also by the larger effort to advocate for legal reform and social tolerance for sexual minorities. 148
In 1899, he [Hirschfeld] began to publish the results of his Psycho-biological Questionnaire, an approach to gathering information about sexual behaviour that eventually gathered information from about 10,000 individuals and was later emulated (with little attribution) by Alfred Kinsey. [24. An analysis of some of the questionnaires can be found in Hirschfeld’s medical journal, the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen, but the originals were mostly destroyed when the institute was plundered by Nazi students on 9 May, 1933…] 149
But the point is that none of these men discovered sexual diversity. Sexually diverse individuals instead sought out those who might help them, and the patients themselves taught these men what their personal experiences might mean for our larger understands of the spectrum of human sexual and gender experience. 156
The earliest description we have found of the personal networks that began to form between self-described transvestites in the United States appears in a 1914 article by New York gynaecologist Bernard S. Talmey, in the New York Medical Journal. [39. B.S. Talmey, “Transvestism: A Contribution to the Study of the Psychology of Sex,” New York Medical Journal 99 (Jan-June 1914): 362-8. The account is reprinted, with some edits and exclusions in: Bernard S. Talmey, Love: A Treatise on the Science of Sex-Attraction. For the Use of Physicians and Students of Medical Jurisprudence, 4th rev.ed. (New York: Eugenics Publishing Company, 1919), 297-309] Talmey describes an exchange of letters between five transvestites (one German, three American, and one British) in the first decade of the twentieth century. 156
The self-consciously middle-class German likely did not run in the same social circles as those who had formed the secret club Cercle Hermaphroditos and met in a room above the ‘fairy’ bar Paresis Hall, where they stores their female clothing and hid from New York’s laws against cross-dressing in public. [69. On the Cercle, see Jonathan Ned Katz, “Earl Lind: The Cercle Hermaphroditos, c.1895,” OutHistory.org, accessed 4 July 2019, http://outhistory.org/exhibits/show/e...] 164
In a 1937 article that Viereck wrote under the pseudonym Donald Further Wickets, he describes how Mary Weston, shot-put record holder for Great Britain, late became Mark Weston. [80. Donald Further Wickets, “Can Sex in Humans be Changed?” Physical Culture, January 1937, 16-17, 83-5. For a general biography of Vierock, see Martin J. Manning “Viereck, George Sylvester,” in Encyclopedia of Media and Propaganda in Wartime America, ed., Martin J. Manning and Clarence R. Wyatt, vol.1 (Santa Barbara, Denver, and Oxford: ABC-CLIO, 2011), 483] 166
As Donna Drucker, Elizabeth Stephens, and Peter Coyle have argued, Kinsey’s self-perception was as a taxonomist-a gatherer of masses of data that could that be categorized and analyzed. [96] 171
By the time Kinsey died in 1956, there was only a handful of publicly acknowledged transsexuals in the United States. These individuals undoubtedly represented a tiny fraction of trans Americans. We can guess this because Christine Jorgensen and others who had undergone public transitions received hundreds of letters from desperate people (Jorgensen alone received ‘some twenty thousand’ letters) [109] 173
But by the time of his death in 1956, Kinsey had only one hundred histories of trans women and eleven trans men, and he knew of only ten cases where surgery had been performed (only one more than Carla had reported six years earlier). [110. Meyerowitz, “Sex Research at the Borders of Gender,” 80] 174
As she [Carla] was still recovering from the gender-affirming surgery she received at the University of California Hospital on 30 December 1953, she wrote to Benjamin complaining that ‘the newspapers have somehow got hold of the fact that I have had this surgery.’ [123] 182
In the nine-page autobiography that Carla composed for Harry Benjamin, she outlines a troubled childhood and a difficult young adulthood. [133] In this document, she cites her birthdate as 13 January 1910, but census data (and subsequent pronouncements of her age) make it clear that she was actually born in 1905 in Casper, Wyoming. [134] 185
On 19 August 1953, the San Francisco Examiner reported on Carla’s desperate act under the headline “Sex Operation on Self Fails.” 187
But her self-surgery was certainly known in the trans circles of the day. [142. In an interview with Susan Stryker, Don Lucas (a founding member of the San Francisco chapter of the Mattachine Society), names Carla as one of at least two individuals who had performed self-surgery. “Don Lucas Interview: Recorded at Lucas’s Home in San Francisco,” 13 June 1997: http://www.glbthistory.org] She later tried to dissuade others from following her example, and she refused requests that she help them do so, on the grounds that she had herself almost bled to death. [143. Erksine to Benjamin, 5 Oct 1953, KILSC-HB, Box 4, Ser.IIC] 188
As Carla’s description of this episode demonstrates, trans people craved medical protection from this harassment (they would have been thrilled to have access to the kind of medical authorization that Magnus Hirschfeld’s ‘transvestite passes’ provided), and they quickly recognized that genital surgery could offer some security. 194
Through archival research in the collection of Harry Benjamin and the Dutch psychiatrist Coen van Emde Boas, I traced a network that was formed between these two key figures-the latter in cooperation with Frederik Hartsuiker, who was the first Dutch psychiatrist involved. In the mid-1950s, for a year and a half, the Netherlands replaced Denmark as the place of refuge for trans women (mostly American) seeking gender-affirmation surgery. My guess is that around ten foreign trans women had operations in Holland. 299
Due to a lack of support from medical authorities, the route to the Netherlands stopped in 1955, to be followed by Casablanca as the new destination for trans women who wanted surgery. 230
Testosterone was identified as the crucial male sex hormone in 1935. Its use as a medical drug only became available in the 1950s, in particular for intersex patients and cisgender men who lacked male hormones. Unlike the female sex hormone estrogen, which was available in tablets and therefore relatively easy for trans women to acquire and consume, testosterone had to be injected intramuscularly…After having performed defeminizing surgeries in Berlin in 1912, Richard Mühsam noted that trans men were also more likely to seek surgery than trans women in the early twentieth century. Unlike trans women, who could surgically self-castrate with a reasonable change of survival, trans men required a doctor’s assistance to remove breasts or the uterus. [4] 231
We know that the trans man who was operated on in 1959 in Arnhem (see the final section of this chapter) had been on hormonal treatment for some years. 231
“EX-GI becomes Blonde Beauty” was the big headline on the front page of the New York Daily News on December 1, 1952. 243
As already mentioned, in the United States this procedure was viewed as mutilation and was legally prohibited on the grounds (‘mayhem’). This judicial status, which had come about after the decision in a 1949 legal case of a trans woman seeking medical care, blocked further gender-affirmation surgery in the United States for years to come. According to Susan Stryker, only a few dozen operations secretly performed by urologist Elmer Belt in Los Angeles. [35] 258
The stance of the treating physicians in the Netherlands with regard to secrecy was related to what had happened in the case of Tamara Rees. Rees is considered to be the third American transgender woman after Christine Jorgensen to have received gender confirmation surgery, the second being Charlotte McLeod. [41] 260
After surgical procedures became impossible in Copenhagen and Amsterdam, a new location coincidentally emerged: Casablanca, where the French gynaecologist Georges Burou had his Clinique du Parc. 273
In 1956, someone called on him with a desperate cry for help to change male genitalia into female, Burou, who had a passion for inventions and was totally unaware of previous such work in the world [68] develop the technique of the penis inversion: turning the skin of the penis inside out to create a hole and make a vagina. This turned the procedure into a one-stage operation-a big step forward from the four stages that were used up until then: castration, penectomy reconstruction, and creation of an artificial, shallow vagina. [69] Burou’s technique turned out to be the gold standard technique for vaginoplasty and still use today…
For trans people, the crucial distinction between access and care from one of the doctors in the network of the Danes, Americans, and Dutchman and coming to Burou’s practice was that with Burou they could get immediate surgery. No screenings, no diagnosis, no talks with psychiatrist to try to convince them of the urgency. 274
He gave trans women full autonomy over their own decisions, including the financial, psychological, emotional, and medical risks that came along with surgery.
Trans women knew how to find Burou; news travelled fast in the right circles. One of his first patients was Coccinelle, the famous star of the French drag clubs. Soon, patients started to arrive from all over the world, including possibly a few dozen from the Netherlands. They handed a note with the clinic’s name to a taxi driver-that was enough information. Payment was due upon arrival at the clinic: an amount ranging from 2000 to 5000 dollars, [22] preferably in French francs, American dollars, or travellers’ cheques. 275
Referring to a cache of intimate photos held at the Art Gallery of Ontario that depict cross-dressers in a compound in New York called Casa Susana in the 1950s and 1960s, Elspeth Brown notes the importance of ‘the relationship of image making to the formation of queer, trans and cross-dressing communities from the 1950s to today.’ [16] 30
In the middle of the 1950s, the Netherlands was one of the few places in the world were trans people could obtain gender affirming surgery. [19] there were various different surgical techniques employed at this time, and access was restricted; only a happy few could afford surgery, which remained a far off dream for members of oppressed minorities, such as the poor and colonized. But it did mark the early beginnings of a long and rich history of transgender care in the Netherlands. Since the operations were my life eight carried out in secrecy, Alex only found one or two textual sources referring to them, which left him with more questions than answers. [20] 35
In New York, we also find Bernard S. Talmey, like Benjamin a German immigrant to the United States, a Doctor Who published the first American article about transvestites in 1914. Both Talmey and Benjamin another trans individual from New York, who was described in Talmey’s 1914 article as his ‘first patient’; we now know that this was Otto Spengler. New York was also where we placed another individual who moved between Germany, New York, and San Francisco: a German immigrant to the United States described in the medical literature as John O. and known at least privately to in San Francisco as Jenny, whose letters to Magnus Hirschfeld published in 1910 in Die Transvestiten (The transvestites), a word that he applied to people we would today call transgender, and the etymology of which is described in more detail in the concluding chapter. 39-40
The case of German-American immigrant Otto Spengler is instructive. Spengler was first described, without being named, in a 1914 article by Bernard S. Talmey in the New York Medical Journal. [1. B.S. Talmey. “Transvestism: A Contribution to the Study of the Psychology of Sex,” New York Medical Journal 99 (January to June 1914): 362-8] 41
It is important to remember that most trans people live very private lives and left view are very scattered archival traces. We purposely chose to focus on people who did not seek fame but nonetheless made a significant impact through their determination to educate medical authorities or supportive communities. 51
They either saw each other out (as was the case with several people whom Otto Spengler found in corresponded with) or they were put in touch by doctors. These communities were sometimes quite intimate, as was the case in 1950 San Francisco, where many transitioning individual saw out and found a sympathetic ear in the living room of Louise Lawrence. Trans women in particular shared information about sympathetic doctors, surgical techniques, and the new challenges of fashion, hairstyling, and make up. 52
For surgeons this mutual transfer of knowledge was less important: they generally relied on the diagnosis that psychiatrist had already made. In some cases, as Alex will detail, they simply did what trans people asked them to do. This was true of Dr. Georges Burou, who perfected surgical techniques in the 1950s that helped between 800 and 1000 trans women who found their way to his clinic in Casablanca. [32. As far as we know, Burou did not keep careful records. This is an estimate derived from personal communications, detailed in J. Joris Hage, Refaat B. Karim and Donald R. Sr. Laub, “On the Origin of Pedicled Skin Inversion Vaginoplasty: Life and Work of Dr. Georges Burou of Casablanca,” Annals of Plastic Surgery 59, no.6 (2007): 723-9, esp. 725] 53
As Emily Skidmore’s research on transcend the United States reveals, there are countless stories of trans men having been discovered only by accident after living almost entire public lives as men. [38. Emily Skidmore, True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn o the Twentieth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2017)] Aaron Devor and Nichola Matte have explained that it was only after 1964, when Reed Erickson, a very wealthy trans man, began overseeing millions of dollars of philanthropic spending to finance research into transexual medicine that any significant attention was paid to the medical concerns of trans men. [39. See Aaron H. Devor and Nicholas Matte, “One Inc. and Reed Erickson: The Uneasy Collaboration of Gay and Trans Activism, 1964-2003,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10, no.2 (2004): 179-200; Aaron Devor and Nicholas Matte, “Building a Better World for Transpeople: Reed Erickson and the Erickson Educational Foundation,” International Journal of Transgenderism 10, no.1 (2007): 47-68. The Erickson Educational Foundation made most of Harry Benjamin's later work possible, but as Abram Lewis argues, recognition of Erickson's contribution came late and part because of his drug use and his interest in new age spirituality. Abram J. Lewis, “I Am 64 and Paul McCartney Doesn’t Care’: The Haunting of the Transgender Archive and the Challenges of Queer History,” Radical History Review 120 (2014): 13-34] 56
As far as we have been able to determine, the first person of colour to access gender firming surgery in Europe or North America was Delisa Newton in the United States, [43] but her surgical transition likely occurred around 1964, later than the focus of the American accounts we explore. [44. As with other areas of trans history, it is often trans people themselves or doing the most important intrepid digging. See the discussion in the blog: Monica Roberts, “TransGriot: Who Was the First African-American Transwoman?,” TransGriot (blog) 26 May 2009, accessed 28 June 2019, https://transgriot.blogspot.com/2009/.... For a pioneer and study of black trans history, see C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota press, 2017)] 58
An exception can be found in Das 3. Geschlecht, [3] a magazine aimed at ‘transvestites’ in Germany. 76
Beginning in 1924, the publishing house owned by the homosexual published and activist Friedrich Radszuweit published a supplement to the lesbian magazine Die Freundin (The girlfriend) devoted to ‘transvestites.’ Between 1930 and 1932, Radzuweit’s company published the first transvestite magazine in the world to be offered for sale: Das 3. Geschlecht. 78
Radszuweit was not primarily interested in providing visual evidence for scientific theories, or if so, only to the extent that science helped to popularize and stabilize a new form of identity. Rather, he was interested in establishing a medium for transvestites to construct their own identities and to organize themselves into groups. Imagery was central to both of these goals. 80
Joanne Meyerowitz, Susan Stryker, and others have pointed out that Benjamin provided a link between Hirschfeld and Kinsey and that the openness to gender-affirming surgeries that he had acquired while still in Berlin inspired him to cooperate with Kinsey’s project of cataloguing all aspects of human sexual variation. [11] 143
As we will see, Kinsey did not find ‘transsexuality’ as a subject of scientific investigation; individuals who wanted to be investigated found him. 145
As Gill Frank and Lauren Gutterman have argued, well into the 1970s and to some degree up to the present, ‘the messier realities of trans peoples’ lives, including queer desires or gender queer identities, needed to be smoothed out for them to be accepted by physicians and a wider public. [19] 147
Harry Oosterhuis’s study of Richard von Krafft-Ebing is a model of this approach, since he reveals the ‘dialogical’ process through which one of the first sexologists reached his conclusions. Oosterhuis argues that despite the fact that Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, first published in 1886, began as a list of sexual pathologies and thus ‘enabled medical treatment and other forms of restraint…it also opened up the possibility for the individuals involved to speak out, to find a voice, and to be acknowledged,’ [21] making ‘both patients and doctors…agents of culture at large.’ [22] 148
Sensitivity to the desires and needs of patients became a hallmark of sexological research, at least in Germany, where Magnus Hirschfeld’s founding of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin in 1919 was motivated not only by the pursuit of medical knowledge but also by the larger effort to advocate for legal reform and social tolerance for sexual minorities. 148
In 1899, he [Hirschfeld] began to publish the results of his Psycho-biological Questionnaire, an approach to gathering information about sexual behaviour that eventually gathered information from about 10,000 individuals and was later emulated (with little attribution) by Alfred Kinsey. [24. An analysis of some of the questionnaires can be found in Hirschfeld’s medical journal, the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen, but the originals were mostly destroyed when the institute was plundered by Nazi students on 9 May, 1933…] 149
But the point is that none of these men discovered sexual diversity. Sexually diverse individuals instead sought out those who might help them, and the patients themselves taught these men what their personal experiences might mean for our larger understands of the spectrum of human sexual and gender experience. 156
The earliest description we have found of the personal networks that began to form between self-described transvestites in the United States appears in a 1914 article by New York gynaecologist Bernard S. Talmey, in the New York Medical Journal. [39. B.S. Talmey, “Transvestism: A Contribution to the Study of the Psychology of Sex,” New York Medical Journal 99 (Jan-June 1914): 362-8. The account is reprinted, with some edits and exclusions in: Bernard S. Talmey, Love: A Treatise on the Science of Sex-Attraction. For the Use of Physicians and Students of Medical Jurisprudence, 4th rev.ed. (New York: Eugenics Publishing Company, 1919), 297-309] Talmey describes an exchange of letters between five transvestites (one German, three American, and one British) in the first decade of the twentieth century. 156
The self-consciously middle-class German likely did not run in the same social circles as those who had formed the secret club Cercle Hermaphroditos and met in a room above the ‘fairy’ bar Paresis Hall, where they stores their female clothing and hid from New York’s laws against cross-dressing in public. [69. On the Cercle, see Jonathan Ned Katz, “Earl Lind: The Cercle Hermaphroditos, c.1895,” OutHistory.org, accessed 4 July 2019, http://outhistory.org/exhibits/show/e...] 164
In a 1937 article that Viereck wrote under the pseudonym Donald Further Wickets, he describes how Mary Weston, shot-put record holder for Great Britain, late became Mark Weston. [80. Donald Further Wickets, “Can Sex in Humans be Changed?” Physical Culture, January 1937, 16-17, 83-5. For a general biography of Vierock, see Martin J. Manning “Viereck, George Sylvester,” in Encyclopedia of Media and Propaganda in Wartime America, ed., Martin J. Manning and Clarence R. Wyatt, vol.1 (Santa Barbara, Denver, and Oxford: ABC-CLIO, 2011), 483] 166
As Donna Drucker, Elizabeth Stephens, and Peter Coyle have argued, Kinsey’s self-perception was as a taxonomist-a gatherer of masses of data that could that be categorized and analyzed. [96] 171
By the time Kinsey died in 1956, there was only a handful of publicly acknowledged transsexuals in the United States. These individuals undoubtedly represented a tiny fraction of trans Americans. We can guess this because Christine Jorgensen and others who had undergone public transitions received hundreds of letters from desperate people (Jorgensen alone received ‘some twenty thousand’ letters) [109] 173
But by the time of his death in 1956, Kinsey had only one hundred histories of trans women and eleven trans men, and he knew of only ten cases where surgery had been performed (only one more than Carla had reported six years earlier). [110. Meyerowitz, “Sex Research at the Borders of Gender,” 80] 174
As she [Carla] was still recovering from the gender-affirming surgery she received at the University of California Hospital on 30 December 1953, she wrote to Benjamin complaining that ‘the newspapers have somehow got hold of the fact that I have had this surgery.’ [123] 182
In the nine-page autobiography that Carla composed for Harry Benjamin, she outlines a troubled childhood and a difficult young adulthood. [133] In this document, she cites her birthdate as 13 January 1910, but census data (and subsequent pronouncements of her age) make it clear that she was actually born in 1905 in Casper, Wyoming. [134] 185
On 19 August 1953, the San Francisco Examiner reported on Carla’s desperate act under the headline “Sex Operation on Self Fails.” 187
But her self-surgery was certainly known in the trans circles of the day. [142. In an interview with Susan Stryker, Don Lucas (a founding member of the San Francisco chapter of the Mattachine Society), names Carla as one of at least two individuals who had performed self-surgery. “Don Lucas Interview: Recorded at Lucas’s Home in San Francisco,” 13 June 1997: http://www.glbthistory.org] She later tried to dissuade others from following her example, and she refused requests that she help them do so, on the grounds that she had herself almost bled to death. [143. Erksine to Benjamin, 5 Oct 1953, KILSC-HB, Box 4, Ser.IIC] 188
As Carla’s description of this episode demonstrates, trans people craved medical protection from this harassment (they would have been thrilled to have access to the kind of medical authorization that Magnus Hirschfeld’s ‘transvestite passes’ provided), and they quickly recognized that genital surgery could offer some security. 194
Through archival research in the collection of Harry Benjamin and the Dutch psychiatrist Coen van Emde Boas, I traced a network that was formed between these two key figures-the latter in cooperation with Frederik Hartsuiker, who was the first Dutch psychiatrist involved. In the mid-1950s, for a year and a half, the Netherlands replaced Denmark as the place of refuge for trans women (mostly American) seeking gender-affirmation surgery. My guess is that around ten foreign trans women had operations in Holland. 299
Due to a lack of support from medical authorities, the route to the Netherlands stopped in 1955, to be followed by Casablanca as the new destination for trans women who wanted surgery. 230
Testosterone was identified as the crucial male sex hormone in 1935. Its use as a medical drug only became available in the 1950s, in particular for intersex patients and cisgender men who lacked male hormones. Unlike the female sex hormone estrogen, which was available in tablets and therefore relatively easy for trans women to acquire and consume, testosterone had to be injected intramuscularly…After having performed defeminizing surgeries in Berlin in 1912, Richard Mühsam noted that trans men were also more likely to seek surgery than trans women in the early twentieth century. Unlike trans women, who could surgically self-castrate with a reasonable change of survival, trans men required a doctor’s assistance to remove breasts or the uterus. [4] 231
We know that the trans man who was operated on in 1959 in Arnhem (see the final section of this chapter) had been on hormonal treatment for some years. 231
“EX-GI becomes Blonde Beauty” was the big headline on the front page of the New York Daily News on December 1, 1952. 243
As already mentioned, in the United States this procedure was viewed as mutilation and was legally prohibited on the grounds (‘mayhem’). This judicial status, which had come about after the decision in a 1949 legal case of a trans woman seeking medical care, blocked further gender-affirmation surgery in the United States for years to come. According to Susan Stryker, only a few dozen operations secretly performed by urologist Elmer Belt in Los Angeles. [35] 258
The stance of the treating physicians in the Netherlands with regard to secrecy was related to what had happened in the case of Tamara Rees. Rees is considered to be the third American transgender woman after Christine Jorgensen to have received gender confirmation surgery, the second being Charlotte McLeod. [41] 260
After surgical procedures became impossible in Copenhagen and Amsterdam, a new location coincidentally emerged: Casablanca, where the French gynaecologist Georges Burou had his Clinique du Parc. 273
In 1956, someone called on him with a desperate cry for help to change male genitalia into female, Burou, who had a passion for inventions and was totally unaware of previous such work in the world [68] develop the technique of the penis inversion: turning the skin of the penis inside out to create a hole and make a vagina. This turned the procedure into a one-stage operation-a big step forward from the four stages that were used up until then: castration, penectomy reconstruction, and creation of an artificial, shallow vagina. [69] Burou’s technique turned out to be the gold standard technique for vaginoplasty and still use today…
For trans people, the crucial distinction between access and care from one of the doctors in the network of the Danes, Americans, and Dutchman and coming to Burou’s practice was that with Burou they could get immediate surgery. No screenings, no diagnosis, no talks with psychiatrist to try to convince them of the urgency. 274
He gave trans women full autonomy over their own decisions, including the financial, psychological, emotional, and medical risks that came along with surgery.
Trans women knew how to find Burou; news travelled fast in the right circles. One of his first patients was Coccinelle, the famous star of the French drag clubs. Soon, patients started to arrive from all over the world, including possibly a few dozen from the Netherlands. They handed a note with the clinic’s name to a taxi driver-that was enough information. Payment was due upon arrival at the clinic: an amount ranging from 2000 to 5000 dollars, [22] preferably in French francs, American dollars, or travellers’ cheques. 275
August 1, 2025
Little about trans men. Lazy.
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