Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution

by Susan Stryker

Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People,

The Riddle of Gender: Science, Activism, and Transgender Rights, science writer Deborah Rudacille

2001 paper “Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals and Transsexualism,” in which author Christine Johnson posits a causal link between the “reproductive, behavioral, and anatomical effects” of exposure to chemicals commonly found in pesticides and food additives and “the expression of gender identity and other disorders such as reproductive failure.” Rudacille links transgenderism to falling sperm counts among human males; to rising numbers of alligators with micropenises and hermaphroditic birds, fish, and amphibians; and to other anomalies purportedly associated with endocrine-disrupting chemicals in the environment.

People who feel the need to resist their birth-assigned gender or to live as a member of another gender have encountered significant forms of discrimination and prejudice, including religious condemnation. Because most people have great difficulty recognizing the humanity of another person if they cannot recognize that person’s gender, encounters with gender-changing or gender-challenging people can sometimes feel for others like an encounter with a monstrous and frightening unhumanness. That gut-level reaction can manifest as panic, disgust, contempt, hatred, or outrage, which may then translate into physical or emotional violence—up to and including murder—being directed against the person who is perceived as not-quite-human. One has to ask why the typical reaction to an encounter with nonprivileged forms of gender or embodiment is not more often experienced with wonder, delight, attraction, or curiosity. People who are perceived as not-quite-human because of their gender expression are often socially shunned and may be denied such basic needs as housing and employment. They may lose the support of their families. Within modern bureaucratic society, many kinds of routine administrative procedures make life very difficult for people who cross the social boundaries of their birth-assigned genders. Birth certificates, school and medical records, professional credentials, passports, driver’s licenses, and other such documents provide a composite portrait of each of us as a p...

Jennie Livingston’s film Paris Is Burning)

ethnically specific forms of gender that often get associated with the term transgender, but some of the more common ones in the North American context are “two-spirit” (a catchall term for various indigenous American genders), the Indian hijra, the Polynesian mahu, and the Latin American travesti.

Transsexual: This term is sometimes traced to the early-twentieth-century German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who wrote of seelischer transsexualismus, or “spiritual transsexualism,” by which he meant having feelings or emotions or aesthetic sensibilities usually attributed to the binary gender other than the one assigned at birth. For Hirschfeld, what came to be called transsexualism or transsexuality later in the twentieth century was encompassed within his definition of transvestitism (see below). A 1949 article in Sexology magazine by Dr. David O. Caldwell, titled “Psychopathia Transexualis,” described a person assigned female at birth who thought of himself as a man, but the word transsexual was not popularized until Dr. Harry Benjamin starting using it in the 1950s, in the aftermath of the spectacular publicity given to the 1952 surgical “sex change” of Christine Jorgensen.

As transgender religious scholar Virginia Ramey Mollenkott points out in Omnigender, her award-winning overview of religious attitudes toward sex/gender variance,

One organization that promotes acceptance rather than condemnation of gender diversity is the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and the Ministry at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California (clgs.org).

award-winning shows like Transparent to innovative series like the Wachowskis’ Sense8 to trans-youth reality shows like I Am Jazz—not to mention the wall-to-wall coverage of Caitlyn Jenner’s gender transition and mainstream print media outlets like Time and National Geographic running highly publicized cover stories on trans issues.

Thomas or Thomasine Hall was an indentured servant in Virginia in the 1620s who seems to have had an intersex anatomy, and who lived sometimes as a man and sometimes as a woman.

In the eighteenth century, numerous women and transmasculine people—most famously, Deborah Sampson—enlisted in the Revolutionary Army as men.

Joseph Lobdell, formerly known as Lucy Ann, author of The Female Hunter of Delaware and Sullivan Counties, became locally famous in upstate New York during the early years of the Republic not only as an excellent shot with a rifle but as a feminist advocate for marriage reform, before being d...

popular literary magazine, The Knickerbocker, even published a short fictional story in 1857 called “The Man Who Thought Himself a Woman,” which offered a sympathetic p...

historian Peter Boag’s book Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past notes that stories about cross-dressers are “ubiquitous” in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century newspapers (which are now easily accessible online in searchable digital formats)—

According to historian John D’Emilio, modern gay and lesbian communities weren’t possible until the middle of the nineteenth century, with the rise of modern industrial cities and their large working-class populations. It wasn’t until men could leave tight-knit rural communities, characterized by intimate and interlocking forms of familial and religious surveillance, that they had the opportunity to form different kinds of emotional and erotic bonds with other men.

It is important to recognize that we still know very little about the social history of cross-dressing or the public expression of transgender feeling in earlier periods. And yet, the same circumstances that supported the development of same-sex social worlds also would have applied to people who sought different ways to express their sense of gender. People assigned female at birth who could successfully present themselves as men had greater opportunities to travel and find work. People assigned male at birth who identified as women had greater opportunities to live as women in cities far removed from the communities where they had grown up. In practice, the distinctions between what we now call “transgender” and “gay” or “lesbian” were not always as meaningful back then as they have since become. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, homosexual desire and gender variance were often closely associated. One common way of thinking about homosexuality back then was as gender “inversion,” in which a man who was attracted to men was thought to be acting like a woman, and a woman who desired women was considered to be acting like a man.

Loreta Janeta Velazquez served in the Civil War as Confederate soldier Harry Buford.

First wave feminism is usually defined as the wave of reform that spanned the entire nineteenth century, beginning with late-eighteenth-century calls for female emancipation such as Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, gaining momentum with the Seneca Falls Convention on the rights of women in 1848, and culminating in the suffrage campaigns that won women in the United States the right to vote in 1919. Dress reform was an important focus of first wave feminist activism. Amelia Bloomer, for example, argued in the 1840s that long skirts and cumbersome undergarments were essentially a form of bondage that dragged women down, and she advocated that women wear pants-like clothing instead.

But since the end of the eighteenth century, science has gradually come to replace religion as the highest social authority, and since the middle of the nineteenth century medical science has played an increasingly central role in defining everyday life. It has often been used for very conservative social purposes—“proving” that black people are inferior to white people, or that females are inferior to males. Medical practitioners and institutions have the social power to determine what is considered sick or healthy, normal or pathological, sane or insane—and thus, often, to transform potentially neutral forms of human difference into unjust and oppressive social hierarchies. This particular operation of medicine’s social power has been especially important in transgender history.

Far too often, access to medical services for transgender people has depended on constructing transgender phenomena as symptoms of a mental illness or physical malady, partly because “sickness” is the condition that typically legitimizes medical intervention. It’s also important to recognize that many of the genital surgeries that became available to later generations of transgender people were developed by practicing on the bodies of enslaved black women who were subjected to medical experimentation, and that these procedures were used nonconsensually on the bodies of intersex youth.

In Austria, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs anonymously published a series of booklets in 1864–1865 under the collective title Researches on the Riddle of “Man-Manly” Love; in them he developed a biological theory to account for people such as himself, whom he called “Urnings,” and whom he described with the Latin phrase anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa (meaning “a female soul enclosed within a male body”). It was in correspondence with Ulrichs that the German-born Hungarian citizen Karl Maria Kertbeny first coined the term homosexual in 1869, which he also intended to connote same-sex love, minus the element of gender inversion to be found in the term “Urning.” Both men considered the respective conditions they described to be physical and inborn, and thus proper objects of medical inquiry. Ulrichs and Kertbeny also thought that because transgender/homosexual feelings had a biological basis, laws against their expression should be reformed in the name of a rational social order that reflected scientific truth. Their efforts represent early instances of social activism based on the idea that people we would now probably label gay or transgender were not by definition sinners or criminals but simply different kinds of people who were equally entitled to full participation in society. The logic of their arguments still informs many transgender and gay social justice efforts; more often than not, however, biological theories about gender variance and homosexuality are used to arg...

Richard von Krafft-Ebing, supplied a great many terms in the several editions of his influential medical compendium, Psychopathia Sexualis, first published in 1886. These included “antipathic sexual instinct” (disliking what one should find erotic based on one’s sex or gender), “eviration” (a deep change of character in which a male’s feelings and inclinations become those of a woman), “defemination” (a deep change of character in which a female’s feelings and inclinations become those of a man), and “metamorphosis sexualis paranoica” (the psychotic delusion that one’s body was transforming into another sex). Krafft-Ebing also wrote about “insanity among the Scythians” (an ancient nomadic people from the Eurasian steppes who sometimes practiced ritual genital modification as part of their religious observations) and mujerados, “male women” noted by the Spanish conquistadors during the colonization of the Americas, whom he believed had become feminized through excessive masturbation, leading to atrophy of the penis and testicles.

Albert Moll, wrote about conträre Geschlechtsempfindung (contrary sexual feeling) in 1891;

Max Marcuse, described a Geschlechtsumwandlungstreib (drive for sex tr...

British psychologist Havelock Ellis coined “sexo-aesthetic inversion” (wanting to look like the other sex) and later, in 1928, “Eonism,” which referred to the Chevalier D’Eon, a member of the court of Louis XVI who, at variou...

Magnus Hirschfeld coined transvestite, the only word of its kind to survive into contemporary usage.

concept of “sexual intermediaries,” the idea that every human being represented a unique combination of sex characteristics, secondary sex-linked traits, erotic preferences, psychological inclinations, and culturally acquired habits and practices. According to his calculations, there were more that forty-three million different combinations of characteristics, and therefore more than forty-three million kinds (or genders) of humans.

1897, Hirschfeld cofounded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, usually regarded as the first organization in the world to effectively devote itself to social reform on behalf of sexual minorities.

the first scientific journal on “sexual variants”—the Yearbook for Sexual Intermediaries, published between 1899 and 1923—

founding member of Sigmund Freud’s Psychoanalytic Society in 1908

In 1919, Hirschfeld founded the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, a combination of library, archive, lecture hall, and medical clinic, where he amassed an unprecedented collection of historical documents, ethnographies, case studies, and literary wor...

In 1928, he became the founding president of the World League...

1910 he had written The Transvestites, the first book-length treatment of...

Dorchen Richter. Richter underwent the first documented male-to-female genital transformation surgery in 1931,

Lilli Elbe, subject of the (historically inaccurate) novel and film The Danish Girl.

Eugen Steinach, the Austrian endocrinologist who first identified the morphology-shifting effects of the so-called sex hormones, testosterone and estrogen, in the 1910s,

Harry Benjamin, the German-born doctor who moved to the United States in 1913 and became the leading medical authority on transsexuality in the 1950s.

Adolf Hitler personally denounced Hirschfeld, who was a socialist as well as a gay man, as “the most dangerous Jew in Germany.”

Between 1930 and 1933 he visited New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Honolulu, the Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, China, Egypt, and Palestine, preaching his vision of politically progressive sexual science. In 1933, fascist vigilantes ransacked and destroyed Hirschfeld’s institute in Berlin; the most familiar photo of Nazi book burning depicts Hirschfeld’s library of materials on sexual diversity going up in flames, a bust of Hirschfeld himself clearly visible in the bonfire.

One of the “case studies” for Hirschfeld’s 1910 book on transvestites, a German American living in San Francisco, had first come to his attention after writing to a German feminist publication to suggest that mothers should raise their transgender children according to their “mental sex” rather than their “physical sex.”

Earl Lind, a self-described “androgyne” and “fairy” in New York who also used the names Ralph Werther and Jennie June, and who voluntarily underwent castration, published two autobiographical works, Autobiography of an Androgyne (1918) and The Female Impersonators (1922). Both were intended to “help the suffering androgyne.” The books’ publisher, Dr. Alfred Herzog, likewise said he brought them into print because “androgynism was not sufficiently understood” and that “therefore androgynes were unjustly made to suffer.”

a group of New York androgynes led by one Roland Reeves had formed “a little club” called the Cercle Hermaphroditos as early as 1895 on the basis of their self-perceived need “to unite f...

The Cercle Hermaphroditos was the first known informal organization in the United States to concern itself with what we might now call transgender social justice issues,

Dr. Mary Walker—one of the first women in the United States to earn a medical degree—was a Civil War–era surgeon, feminist, and dress reformer who often wore masculine attire and who was twice arrested for cross-dressing.

Murray Hall was a prominent operative in New York City’s Democratic Party political machine who lived, married, and—in the years before female suffrage—voted as a man for more than a quarter century.

Jack Garland, whose Californio family was politically prominent in San Francisco before the Anglo conquest in the 1840s, was frequently mentioned in northern California newspapers and served...

Alan Hart, an early pioneer in the use of X-rays to diagnose tuberculosis, was also the author of four published novels: Dr. Mallory, The Undaunted, In the L...

Houston-born Willmer Broadnax became a gospel-singing sens...

Pauli Murray, assigned female at birth in Baltimore in 1910, struggled with questions of gender identity in her youth, often passing as a teenage boy and even seeking hormonal masculinization in the 1940s, before reconciling herself to living as a masculine woman. She passed the California bar in 1945, became the state’s first black deputy attorney general, and, in 1950, authored the monumental study States’ Laws on Race and Color, which provided the underpinning evidence and arguments for the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision on school desegregation. Murray’s writing on race and gender has b...