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
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