Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution

by Susan Stryker

In late 1959, a little event with big implications for transgender political history started to unfold in Los Angeles, when Virginia Prince pursued a friend’s suggestion that she begin a personal correspondence with an individual on the East Coast. This third person, who self-represented as a lesbian, had expressed a desire through their mutual acquaintance to be put in written contact with Prince. Prince subsequently received a photograph from her East Coast correspondent (whom neither she nor her friend had ever met face to face) of two women being sexual with one another, which bore the caption “Me and You.” Prince’s correspondent invited her to “ask anything,” and, as the intimacy of the correspondence deepened, Prince sent a letter describing a lesbian sexual fantasy involving the two of them. Prince’s correspondent, it soon turned out, was another male cross-dresser, one who happened to be under surveillance by federal postal authorities for soliciting and receiving obscene materials, and whose personal mail was being examined surreptitiously by the government as part of an ongoing criminal investigation. In 1960, postal inspectors questioned Prince and ultimately decided, on the basis of this incident, to prosecute her for the crime of distributing obscenity through the US mail.