Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution

by Susan Stryker

In her book How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States, Joanne Meyerowitz describes how the staff and clients of the Langley Porter Psychiatric Clinic at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), played an important role in building up networks among trans women seeking medical assistance for their gender transitions. Under the direction of Karl Bowman, a former president of the American Psychiatric Association, the Langley Porter Clinic became a major center of research on variant sexuality and gender in the 1940s and 1950s—in sometimes ominous ways. During World War II, Bowman conducted research on homosexuality in the military, using as test subjects gay men whose sexuality had been discovered while they were serving in uniform, who were being held in a military psychiatric prison at the Treasure Island Naval Base in San Francisco Bay. After the war, he was the principal investigator for a statewide project funded by the California Sex Deviates Resear...

Magnus Hirschfeld’s The Transvestites, “Case 13” consists of letters, written in 1909, from a person known variously as Jenny, Johanna, and John, who was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and who later moved to the United States.

In spite of her open disdain for gay people, her frequently expressed negative opinion of transsexual surgeries, and her conservative stereotypes regarding masculinity and femininity, Prince (who began living full-time as a woman in 1968) has to be considered a central figure in the early history of the contemporary transgender political movement.

In 1952, Prince and a group of transvestites who met regularly in Long Beach published an unprecedented newsletter—Transvestia: The Journal of the American Society for Equality in Dress—which they distributed to a mailing list consisting largely of Lawrence’s correspondents. This little mimeographed publication, which existed for only two issues, is arguably the first overtly political transgender publication in US history. Even its subtitle seems deliberately intended to evoke the dress reform activism of nineteenth-century first wave feminism. The periodical made a plea for the social toleration of transvestitism, which it was careful to define as a practice of heterosexual men, distinct from homosexual drag.

Christine Jorgensen burst onto the scene on December 1, 1952. Jorgensen, assigned male at her birth to Danish American parents in the Bronx in 1926, made international headlines with news of her successful genital transformation surgery in Copenhagen.

In a year when hydrogen bombs were being tested in the Pacific, war was raging in Korea, England had crowned a new queen, and Jonas Salk was working on the polio vaccine, Jorgensen was the most written-about topic in the media in 1953.

Christine Jorgensen was originally identified in the media as a “hermaphrodite,” or intersex person, with a rare physical condition in which her “true” femaleness was masked by an only apparent maleness. But she was soon relabeled a “transvestite,” in that older sense developed by Hirschfeld, in which the term referred to a wider range of transgender phenomena than it does today. That difference in usage results largely from the efforts of Virginia Prince in the 1950s and 1960s, partly in response to Jorgensen, to redefine transvestitism as a synonym for heterosexual male cross-dressing. Harry Benjamin simultaneously started promoting the word transsexual to distinguish people such as Jorgensen, who sought surgical transformation, from people such as Prince, who did not.

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.

How do you know if that person you met online really is, for example, an eighteen-year-old aspiring female pop vocalist from Portland rather than a balding forty-year-old accountant from Akron, when you have little way of knowing how the self-image that person presents online relates to the way he or she walks around in the world? What does “really” really mean, when you might never meet face to face anyway?

What is at stake is not just what conventionally counts as political activity within modern society (such as staging protest rallies, committing acts of civil disobedience, organizing workers, passing laws, registering voters, or trying to change public opinion) but also the very configurations of body, sense of self, practices of desire, modes of comportment, and forms of social relationships that qualify one in the first place as a fit subject for citizenship.

the state’s actions often regulate bodies, in ways both great and small, by enmeshing them within norms and expectations that determine what kinds of lives are deemed livable or useful and by shutting down the spaces of possibility and imaginative transformation where people’s lives begin to exceed and escape the state’s uses for them. This is a deep, structural problem within the logic of modern societies, which essentially perform a cost-benefit analysis when allocating social resources. People are expected to work in the ways demanded by the state—paying taxes, serving in the military, reproducing a population that will serve as the nation’s future workforce, and performing socially useful services. Those who don’t or can’t function this way—whether through physical impairment, denial of opportunity, or personal choice—have a harder time sustaining themselves and justifying their very existence. Their situations—being black or female or disabled or queer—are not deemed to be valuable or worthy in their own right. Transgender lives are similarly devalued; they are considered neither useful nor happy lives to live, nor are they seen as offering any kind of value to society by virtue of their transness.

It links particularly closely to the recurrent “lavender scares” of the period, in which gays were witch-hunted out of positions in government, industry, and education, based on the paranoid belief that such “perverts,” besides being of dubious moral character, posed security risks because their illegal “lifestyle” made them vulnerable to blackmail or exploitation by enemies of the state.

To whatever extent they failed to pass flawlessly as a cisgender person, their very presence in public space was criminalized, and they were at greater risk of extralegal violence from the police and some members of the public. Those without political connections, money, or racial privilege were especially vulnerable.

Several transgender-themed mass market paperback books were published in the 1950s, most of them trying to cash in on the Christine Jorgensen craze. These included the 1953 intersex saga Half, by Jordan Park, and a reissue of the 1933 Man into Woman, Niels Hoyer’s biography of the Danish painter Lilli Elbe.

ONE magazine, published by the Los Angeles homophile organization ONE, starting in 1952; ONE has the distinction of being the first pro-gay publication to be sold openly at newsstands.

H. Lynn Womack, a former Georgetown University professor turned gay erotica publisher, successfully sued the postmaster general in 1961 for confiscating copies of his homoerotic Grecian Guild body-builder magazines.

1964, however, Sanford Aday and Wallace de Ortega Maxey, two mail-order publishers of soft-core “sleaze paperbacks” (including transgender titles such as 1958’s The Lady Was a Man),

Alfred Kinsey’s best-selling reports on male and female sexuality (published in 1948 and 1953,

Transvestia magazine, which turned out to be the first long-running transgender-oriented periodical in the United States. Launched in 1960 and published several times a year into the 1980s, Transvestia revived the short-lived publication of the same name that Prince and her circle of cross-dressing friends had published in 1952. Like the homophile literature it closely resembled, Prince’s Transvestia excluded explicit sexual content and focused on social commentary, educational outreach, self-help advice, and autobiographical vignettes drawn from her own life and the lives of her readers. The magazine significantly shifted the political meaning of transvestitism, moving it away from being the expression of a criminalized sexual activity and toward being the common denominator of a new (and potentially political) identity-based minority community.

In 1961, she convened a clandestine meeting in Los Angeles of several local Transvestia subscribers—instructing them all, unbeknownst to one another, to rendezvous at a certain hotel room, each carrying a pair of stockings and high heels concealed in a brown paper bag. Once the men were assembled, Prince instructed them all to put on the shoes she had asked them to bring—simultaneously implicating all of them in the stigmatized activity of cross-dressing and thereby forming a communal (and self-protective) bond. This group became known as the Hose and Heels Club and began meeting regularly. In 1962, once Prince’s legal troubles were behind her, her community-organizing efforts kicked into high gear. She transformed the Hose and Heels Club into the “Alpha Chapter” of a new national organization, the Foundation for Personality Expression (FPE), which she modeled on the collegiate sorority system and which soon had several chapters across the country. Prince used FPE, later known as the Society for the Second Self, or Tri-Ess, as a platform to promote her personal philosophy about gender, which she outlined in books such as How to Be a Woman Though Male and The Transvestite and His Wife.

“Miss Major” came out as trans as a teenager in the late 1950s in Chicago.

The membership restrictions of FPE, and the form and content of its meetings, demonstrate a familiar pattern in minority identity politics in US history: it is often the most privileged elements of a population affected by a particular civil injustice or social oppression who have the opportunity to organize first. In organizing around the one thing that interferes with or complicates their privilege, their organizations tend to reproduce that very privilege. This was certainly true of FPE, which was explicitly geared toward protecting the privileges of predominantly white, middle-class men who used their money and access to private property to create a space in which they could express a stigmatized aspect of themselves in a way that didn’t jeopardize their jobs or social standing.

John Rechy, born in 1934 in El Paso, Texas, is the author of more than a dozen books, many of which revolve around his youthful involvement in the world of male hustlers. City of Night,

Looking at Chuck and Miss Destiny—as she rushes on now about the Turbulent Times—I know the scene: Chuck the masculine cowboy and Miss Destiny the femme queen: making it from day to park to bar to day like all the others in that ratty world of downtown L.A. which I will make my own: the world of queens technically men but no one thinks of them that way—always “she”—their “husbands” being the masculine vagrants—fleetingly and often out of convenience sharing the queens’ pads—never considering theyre involved with another man (the queen), and only for scoring (which is making or taking sexmoney, getting a meal, making a pad)—he is himself not considered “queer”—he remains, in the vocabulary of that world, “trade.”

Mack Friedman’s Strapped for Cash: A History of American Hustler Culture, published in 2003. Hubert Selby Jr. delivers an emotionally devastating portrait of working-class queer sexuality in post–World War II America in his Last Exit to Brooklyn (first published in 1964), which integrates the story of a trans character, Georgette, into the overarching story of life in a gritty urban neighborhood.

In a 2005 interview, John Rechy, author of City of Night and other classic mid-twentieth-century novels set in the gritty urban underworlds where sexual outlaws and gender nonconformists carved out spaces they could call their own, spoke of a previously undocumented incident in May of 1959, when transgender and gay resentment of police oppression erupted into collective resistance. According to Rechy, it happened at Cooper Do-Nut, a doughnut and coffee hangout that stayed open all night on a rough stretch of Main Street in Los Angeles

Police cars regularly patrolled the vicinity and often stopped to question people in the area for no reason at all. The police would demand identification—which, for trans people whose appearance might not match the name or gender designation on their IDs, often led to arrest on suspicion of prostitution, vagrancy, loitering, or many other so-called nuisance crimes. On that night in May 1959, when the police came in and arbitrarily started rounding up the drag queens milling around Cooper’s, they and others on the scene spontaneously resisted arrest en masse. The incident started with customers throwing doughnuts at the cops and ended with fighting in the streets, as squad cars and police wagons converged at the site to make arrests. In the ensuing confusion, many people who had been arrested, including Rechy, managed to escape.

A similar though nonviolent incident took place in Philadelphia in 1965 at Dewey’s, a lunch counter and late-night coffeehouse

In April 1965, Dewey’s started refusing to serve young customers who wore what one gay newspaper of the day euphemistically described as “nonconformist clothing,” claiming that “gay kids” were driving away other business. Customers rallied to protest, and on April 25, more than 150 patrons were turned away by the management. Three teenagers refused to leave after being denied service in what appears to be the first act of civil disobedience over antitransgender discrimination; they, along with a gay activist who advised them of their legal rights, were arrested and subsequently found guilty on misdemeanor charges of disorderly conduct.

Historian Marc Stein, in City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945–1972, tells how the Janus Society, Philadelphia’s main gay and lesbian organization at the time, issued the following statement in its newsletter after the events of May 2, 1965:

All too often, there is a tendency to be concerned with the rights of homosexuals as long as they somehow appear to be heterosexual, whatever that is. The masculine woman and the feminine man often are looked down upon… but the Janus Society is concerned with the worth of an individual and the manner in which she or he comports himself. What is offensive today we have seen become the style of tomorrow, and even if what is offensive today remains offensive tomorrow to some persons, there is no reason to penalize non-conformist behavior unless there is direct anti-social behavior connected with it.

The 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria Riot in San Francisco’s seedy Tenderloin neighborhood was similar to the incidents at Cooper Do-Nut and Dewey’s.

Compton’s, a twenty-four-hour cafeteria at the corner of Turk and Taylor Streets, was buzzing with its usual late-night crowd of drag queens, hustlers, slummers, cruisers, runaway teens, and down-and-out neighborhood regulars. The restaurant’s management became annoyed by a noisy young crowd of queens at one table who seemed to be spending a lot of time without spending a lot of money. So they called in the police to roust them—as they had been doing with increasing frequency throughout the summer. A surly police officer, accustomed to manhandling Compton’s clientele with impunity, grabbed the arm of one of the queens and tried to drag her away. She unexpectedly threw her coffee in his face, and a melee erupted. Plates, trays, cups, saucers, and silverware flew through the air at the startled police officers, who ran outside and called for backup. Compton’s’ customers turned over the tables and smashed the plate-glass windows before pouring out of the restaurant and into the streets. The police wagons arrived, and street fighting broke out in the vicinity of Compton’s, all around the corner of Turk and Taylor. Drag queens beat the police with their heavy purses and the sharp stiletto heels of their shoes. A police car was vandalized, a newspaper stand was burned to the ground, and—in the words of the best available source on what happened that night, a retrospective account by gay liberation activist Reverend Raymond Broshears, published in the program of San Francisco’s f...

Vanguard, founded in 1965, was the first gay and transgender youth organization in the United States. The members published a psychedelically illustrated magazine (also called Vanguard) from the mid-1960s until the early 1970s.

In fact, if you look up the word tenderloin in many dictionaries, you’ll find that one slang meaning is actually an inner-city “vice” district controlled by corrupt police officers. As large cities formed in the United States in the nineteenth century, they typically developed certain neighborhoods in which activities that weren’t tolerated elsewhere—prostitution, gambling, selling and consuming criminalized drugs, and sexually explicit entertainment—were effectively permitted. Police often turned a blind eye to this illicit activity, often because the cops on the beat, and sometimes their superiors in the station house, were getting a cut of the profits in exchange for not arresting the individuals engaged in those activities. Only occasionally, when civic or religious groups mounted a morality crusade or some sex scandal implicated a high-ranking politician, did police make “sweeps” of the neighborhood. Soon enough, however, it would be business as usual again.

the vision of radically participatory democratic social movements outlined by Saul Alinsky in his activist handbook Reveille for Radicals. Neighborhood activists, including many members of San Francisco’s homophile organizations and street-outreach ministers from Glide Memorial United Methodist Church,

The eventual establishment of the Central City Anti-Poverty Program thus represented a singular accomplishment in the history of US progressive politics: the first successful multiracial gay-straight alliance for economic justice.

One unexpected consequence of neighborhood mobilization was the formation of Vanguard, an organization made up mostly of young gay hustlers and transgender people. Vanguard, formed in 1965 with the encouragement of a young minister named Adrian Ravarour, is the earliest known queer youth organization in the United States. Its name, which signaled members’ perception that they were the cutting edge of a new social movement, shows how seriously they took the ideals of radical democracy. The group’s second leader even took a nom de guerre, Jean-Paul Marat, after a famous figure in the French Revolution.

Dr. Harry Benjamin published a pathbreaking book, The Transsexual Phenomenon.

Benjamin essentially argued that a person’s gender identity could not be changed and that the doctor’s responsibility was thus to help transgender people live fuller and happier lives in the gender they identified as their own.

the first “sex change” program in the United States was established at the Johns Hopkins University Medical School.

The circumstances that created the conditions for the riot continue to be relevant in trans movements today: discriminatory policing practices that target members of minority communities, urban land-use policies that benefit cultural elites and displace poor people, the unsettling domestic consequences of US foreign wars, access to health care, civil rights activism aiming to expand individual liberties and social tolerance on matters of sexuality and gender, and political coalition building around the structural injustices that affect many different communities.

The Central City Anti-Poverty Program Office opened that fall as a result of the Tenderloin neighborhood organizing campaign. This multiservice agency included an office for the police community-relations liaison officer to the homophile community, a police sergeant by the name of Elliott Blackstone. One afternoon shortly after the agency opened, a transgender neighborhood resident named Louise Ergestrasse came into Blackstone’s office, threw a copy of Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon on his desk, and demanded that Blackstone do something for “her people.” Blackstone was willing to be educated on the matter, and he soon took a leading role in changing police treatment of transgender people. Another group of transgender Tenderloin activists, led by a trans woman named Wendy Kohler, a patient of Harry Benjamin, started working with activist doctor Joel Fort at a unit of the San Francisco Public Health Department called the Center for Special Problems. A few months later, in early 1967, a group of transgender people began meeting at Glide Memorial Methodist Church, where they formed the first known trans support group, Conversion Our Goal (COG).

COG, which published the short-lived COG Newsletter, provided an initial point of contact for transgender people seeking medical services, who were then steered toward the Center for Special Problems, which offered additional group support sessions, psychological counseling, hormone prescriptions, and, eventually, when a “sex change” clinic was established at nearby Stanford University Medical School, surgery referrals. Perhaps most important, however, the center provided ID cards for transgender clients that matched their social genders. It was a simple laminated piece of orange paper, signed by a public health doctor, bearing the name actually used by the client, the client’s home address, and the statement: “[Client’s name] is under treatment for transsexualism at the Center for Special Problems.”

COG split into two competing factions within a year of its founding. The major faction regrouped as the equally short-lived National Sexual-Gender Identification Council (NSGIC) under the leadership of Wendy Kohler, whose main accomplishment was holding a one-day conference on transsexual issues at Glide. The minor faction, which never emerged as an effective organization and which existed primarily on paper, regrouped as CATS (California Advancement for Transsexuals Society) under the leadership of Louise Ergestrasse.

National Transsexual Counseling Unit (NTCU), which, in 1968,

Millionaire philanthropist Reed Erickson was a trans man who funded the revolutions in transgender health care and social services that blossomed in the 1960s.

Schuylkill Industries owned a large yacht, the Granma, that the company sold in the 1950s to Fidel Castro, who sailed it from Mexico, filled with scores of armed supporters, to launch the Cuban Revolution.

In addition to being a successful businessman, he was a nudist (and owned his own nudist colony in Florida), a New Age spiritualist, and a recreational psychedelic drug user with an interest in interspecies communication and mental telepathy. He considered his best friend to be a leopard named Henry, and he lived most of the time in a gated residential compound in Mazatlán, Mexico, that he named the Love Joy Palace. Erickson, who eventually became addicted to the party drug ketamine (“Vitamin K”) and who was under indictment in the United States on several drug-related charges, fled to the Love Joy Palace permanently in 1972.

In 1964, he established the Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF)