A Presence in the Past: A Transgender Historiography

Genny Beemyn

Journal of Women's History, Volume 25, Number 4, Winter 2013, pp.

113-121 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/jowh.2013.0062

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jowh/summary/v025/25.4.beemyn.html

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2013
A Presence in the Past
A Transgender Historiography

Genny Beemyn

This article provides an overview of the literature written about indi-

viduals who are referred to today as transgender people, with a focus
on material from the United States. Influential studies are discussed,
particularly works by trans people. The article concludes by suggesting
useful directions for future research, including the need to document
trans political, legal, and cultural campaigns; considering a greater
range of transgender people and experiences; and specifically examining
the lives of trans people of color.

A ny attempt to write “transgender history” is complicated by the con-

temporary nature of the term “transgender” and its cultural specific-
ity. Do we include individuals in past centuries who might appear to be
transgender from our vantage point, but who would quite likely not have
conceptualized their lives in such a way? And what about individuals to-
day who have the ability to describe themselves as transgender, but choose
not to for a variety of reasons, including the perception that it is a White,
middle-class, Western term? Should they be left out of “transgender history”
because they do not specifically identify as transgender?
Given the rich histories of individuals who perceived themselves and
were perceived by their societies as gender nonconforming, it would be
inappropriate to limit “transgender history” to people who lived at a time
and place when the concept of “transgender” was available and used by
them.1 But at the same time, it would also be inappropriate to assume that
people who are “transgender,” as we currently understand the term, existed
throughout history. The best that we as historians can do is to acknowledge
individuals whose actions would seem to indicate that they might be what
we would call “transgender” or “transsexual” today without necessarily
referring to them as such and to distinguish them from individuals who
might have presented as a gender different from the one assigned to them
at birth for reasons other than a sense of gender difference. Admittedly,
someone’s motivations are not always clearly discernible, but seeking to
make this distinction is critical to present a specific “transgender history.”2
Medical professionals began to recognize gender-nonconforming in-
dividuals in the mid-to-late nineteenth century and to undertake the first
studies of what would become known as transgender people in response
to the growing visibility of individuals who crossdressed or lived cross-

© 2013 Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 25 No. 4, 113–121.

114 Journal of Women’s History Winter

gendered lives. These early works, written mostly by U.S. and European
physicians, typically categorized those who transgressed gender norms
and expectations as psychosexually disordered. For example, psychiatrist
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who had the greatest influence on the Western
medical profession’s views toward sexual and gender difference in the late
nineteenth century, classified gender-nonconforming individuals by the
degree to which they identified as a gender different from their assigned
gender, which, in his view, corresponded to the extent to which they were
mentally disturbed. He considered those who felt they were the “opposite”
sex and had been assigned the wrong sex at birth to be suffering from a
form of psychosis.3
Most of the literature on gender different individuals through the
1940s continued to be written by non-transgender medical practitioners,
who based their research on client case studies and treated gender noncon-
formity as a pathology. A notable exception was physician and sexologist
Magnus Hirschfeld, who coined the word “transvestite” in his epic 1910
work Transvestites to refer to individuals who were overcome with a “feel-
ing of peace, security and exaltation, happiness and well-being…when in
the clothing of the other sex.”4 Hirschfeld found that “transvestites” were
not suffering from a form of psychopathology, nor were they masochists or
fetishists. Contrary to other researchers, he also recognized that they could
be of any sexual orientation (including asexual) and assigned either male
or female at birth.
The one known transgender person to write about the subject prior to
the 1950s was Michael Dillon, a British physician who was the first recorded
female-assigned, non-intersexed individual to have taken testosterone for
the purpose of transforming his body and to have undergone female-to-male
genital surgeries. In 1946, Dillon wrote Self: A Study in Ethics and Endocrinol-
ogy, a book that argued for the acceptance of people who felt that they were
a gender different from the gender assigned to them at birth. Making the
case that such individuals were not mentally unbalanced, he was especially
critical of the clinicians who believed that they could change the sense of
self of gender different individuals through therapy, when what their clients
really needed was access to hormones and genital surgeries. But because
Self was not widely circulated, and Dillon himself sought to avoid public
attention, his groundbreaking arguments had little effect on the medical
profession. Instead of Dillon, endocrinologist Harry Benjamin became the
leading advocate in the 1950s and 1960s for “adjust[ing] the body to the
mind” of transsexual individuals through hormones and surgeries.5
The late 1960s and 1970s saw the proliferation of clinical studies about
transsexual people, following the publication of Benjamin’s The Transsexual
Phenomenon and the opening of the first gender identity clinic at Johns Hop-
2013 Genny Beemyn 115

kins University, both in 1966. Some of this literature continued to pathologize

transgender people, especially texts by psychologists and psychiatrists, like
the studies of Robert Stoller and Richard Green.6 But the formation of the
first transgender organizations in the 1960s also made possible less biased
research involving non-clinical samples. At the same time, transgender
individuals began documenting their own lives and communities, such as
Virginia Prince’s 1962 survey of readers in her crossdressing publication
Transvestia and Christine Jorgensen’s best-selling 1967 autobiography.7
Jorgensen’s book was especially groundbreaking, as the stories of
transsexual women that had been published in the U.S. until then were
generally lurid exposés of female impersonators, strippers, and prostitutes
with tabloid titles like “I Changed My Sex!” and “I Want to Be a Woman!”
Following the success of Jorgensen’s work, a wave of autobiographies of
well-known, successful transsexual women were published from the mid
1970s through the early 1980s, which included Jan Morris’s Conundrum,
Canary Conn’s Canary, Renée Richards’s Second Serve, and April Ashley’s
Odyssey. While these texts drew substantial attention to the lives of trans-
sexual women, the lack of autobiographies by transsexual men meant that
they remained largely invisible in the dominant society. The only full-length
narrative by a Female-To-Male (FTM) individual to be published in the U.S.
prior to the 1990s was Mario Martino’s 1977 book Emergence: A Transsexual
Autobiography.8
A rapidly growing number of transgender groups and openly transgen-
der individuals in the late 1980s and 1990s provided greater opportunities
to give voice to gender-nonconforming people. Cultural anthropologist
Anne Bolin, for example, studied a Midwestern Male-To-Female (MTF)
transgender support group in the early 1980s and then again nearly a de-
cade later, finding that members embraced a wider range of possible gender
identities for themselves and others over time. In the first in-depth research
on transsexual men, Aaron Devor interviewed 45 individuals about their
lives before, during, and after transitioning for his 1997 book, FTM: Female-
To-Male Transsexuals in Society.9
The development of queer theory in the 1980s and 1990s also brought
further attention to transgender people, as literary critics including Judith
Butler, Diana Fuss, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Teresa de Lauretis, began
to deconstruct gender and examine its performative nature.10 Some trans
academics and activists have criticized this scholarship, which is mostly
by cisgender writers, for often using transgender people to further their
theoretical positions while ignoring the lived experiences of many trans
individuals.11 These criticisms aside, this body of work has led to a more
nuanced understanding of gender and has been instrumental in legitimizing
the academic study of transgender people. Theory that is more rooted in
116 Journal of Women’s History Winter

transgender experience has recently been collected in the Transgender Studies

Reader 1 and 2 and in the historian A. Finn Enke’s anthology Transfeminist
Perspectives in and beyond Transgender and Gender Studies.12
The first book-length histories of transgender communities were
published in the 1990s. Both Leslie Feinberg’s Transgender Warriors: Making
History from Joan of Arc to RuPaul and Pat Califia’s Sex Changes: The Politics
of Transgenderism are noteworthy for being written by transgender activ-
ists, rather than historians, and for seeking to counter anti-trans critics by
presenting gender-nonconforming people as having a clear, rich past. In
the case of Feinberg’s text, the result is a sweeping work that assumes that
“transgender people” existed in vastly different eras and cultures. The
medical historians Vern and Bonnie Bullough’s 1993 study Cross Dress-
ing, Sex, and Gender likewise covers a broad timeframe—from the ancient
world to modern society—but, unlike Feinberg, the authors avoid creating
stable, ahistorical categories for individuals who wore clothing traditionally
associated with a gender different from their own. By simply recounting
instances of cross dressing in different times and cultures, however, the text
adds little to a specific “transgender history.”13
A sort of middle ground is provided by another historical work pub-
lished in the 1990s, the cultural anthropologist Jason Cromwell’s Transmen
and FTMs: Identities, Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities. Cromwell does not make
the kind of generalizations of Feinberg, but goes beyond the Bulloughs in
seeking to understand the motivations behind cross-gender behavior to
trace a history of individuals who might have been what we would call
transsexual men today. He creates a framework for distinguishing between
female-assigned individuals who presented as male for various reasons
but who seemingly identified as their birth gender (people who might be
described as cross dressers, passing women, female husbands, etc.) and
female-assigned individuals who apparently identified and lived as men,
which included presenting as male (people who might be more accurately
characterized as transsexual).14
The two major transgender histories published in the 2000s, the his-
torian Joanne Meyerowitz’s How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in
the United States and the historian Susan Stryker’s Transgender History, are
studies of the U.S. in the twentieth century. Meyerowitz’s How Sex Changed is
a comprehensive, well-researched, and insightful examination of how trans-
sexuality has been understood in U.S. society over time and how “the topic
of sex change has served as a key site for the definition and redefinition of
sex in popular culture, science, medicine, law, and daily life.” Meyerowitz
demonstrates that transsexual history predates not only the development
of the synthetic hormones and plastic-surgery techniques, but also the
terminology of transsexuality itself. Stryker’s Transgender History, part of
2013 Genny Beemyn 117

Seal Press’s series of concise introductory texts on different topics in gender

studies, focuses on trans political and social activism from the mid twentieth
century to today. She details how transgender people have experienced and
responded to discrimination from the medical profession, the police and
legal system, and some leading lesbian feminists. While the standard histori-
cal narrative roots transgender organizing and resistance in the Stonewall
Riots, Stryker shows that the uprising was actually the culmination of more
than a decade of trans people challenging instances of harassment and police
brutality, much of which has not been well-documented.15
While few book-length transgender histories have been published to
date, the number of transgender autobiographies proliferated in the 2000s,
including notable texts by Jennifer Finney Boylan, Jamison Green, and Matt
Kailey. While simply being known as transsexual had made Jorgensen a ce-
lebrity in the 1950s and 1960s, the abundance of transgender autobiographies
published in the last decade means that a trans person today practically
needs to be a celebrity first, like Thomas Beatie and Chaz Bono, to interest
a major press in their story.16 In contrast to the plethora of autobiographies,
few biographies of transgender individuals have been published—the
most significant are works that examine the lives of Jack Bee Garland, Billy
Tipton, Michael Dillon, and Christine Jorgensen.17 Scholars will hopefully
write additional profiles of transgender individuals, especially trans people
of color (Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, and Miss Major immediately
come to mind) in the near future.
An even more pressing need for future research is in histories of spe-
cific trans communities and movements. For example, Tri-Ess, a national
organization for cross-dressing heterosexual men and their partners, has
existed for more than fifty years and has chapters across the country, yet it
has not been the subject of a detailed history. As a consequence, it is largely
unknown, even in the larger transgender movement. The oldest continu-
ing organization consisting primarily of gay male cross dressers and drag
queens, the International Court System, has been considered in a handful of
sociological studies, but, similarly, has not caught the attention of historians,
despite being arguably the largest transgender member organization in the
United States and existing for nearly fifty years.18
Another useful direction for future research would be to document
the political, legal, and cultural campaigns that have led to tremendous
progress in the struggle for transgender rights in the last two decades and
will likely result in even greater success in the next few years. For example,
transgender people have been able to shift the dominant view of the medical
profession from assuming that transsexual individuals are mentally disor-
dered to recognizing that they could be emotionally distressed because of
the incongruence between their gender identity and assigned gender. Also
118 Journal of Women’s History Winter

important to document are the strategies and organizing efforts behind the
legal gains made by transgender activists and allies at the state and local
levels. Prior to 2000, only one state (Minnesota) had passed a nondiscrimi-
nation law that included gender identity/expression; by 2013, seventeen
states and the District of Columbia had done so. The number of cities and
counties with transgender rights ordinances, similarly, has grown from
three municipalities in the 1980s to more than 150 today, so that more than
forty-five percent of the U.S. population is now covered by a transgender-
inclusive nondiscrimination law. Among colleges and universities, more
than 600 campuses have added “gender identity/expression” to their non-
discrimination policies in the last seventeen years, and many have begun
to implement other transgender-supportive policies to create institutions
that are more welcoming and inclusive.19
But no matter the subject, all future research needs to consider a greater
range of transgender people and experiences. To date, transgender histories
have focused primarily on transsexuals and transsexuality, even though a
growing number of gender-nonconforming people identify outside of a
gender binary, particularly many transgender youth. In surveying close to
3,500 individuals for our book, The Lives of Transgender People, Sue Rankin
and I found that the respondents offered more than a hundred different
descriptions for their gender identity, from very detailed labels, like “FTM
TG stone butch drag king,” to vague explanations like “no easy definition,
some other kind of man.”20 By naming themselves in different and complex
ways, transgender youth are vastly expanding the meaning of gender and
raising societal awareness of the concept of gender identity.
Future histories also need to be more racially inclusive and specifi-
cally examine the lives of trans people of color. As a reviewer for several
LGBT journals, I am regularly asked to provide feedback on transgender-
themed manuscripts, and more often than not, these studies include few, if
any, people of color. There is no excuse for this kind of “whitewashing” of
transgender people today. At the same time, Black and Latin@ trans com-
munities in the twentieth century have been understudied. While some
researchers, most notably the historian George Chauncey, have discussed
the rich tradition of drag balls in urban Black communities in the early and
mid twentieth century, there has yet to be an extensive treatment of this cul-
ture.21 Nor has there been much in-depth scholarship on the contemporary
ballroom culture among Black and Latin@ youth, beyond the pioneering
work of the gender studies scholar Marlon Bailey on the Detroit ball scene.22
At the outset of this article, I referred to the difficulties of writing
“transgender history,” whether in considering past centuries or the last
decade. But with a rapidly growing number of transgender people coming
out publicly today and challenging societal assumptions about gender, it
2013 Genny Beemyn 119

becomes even more important to try to recognize and document where we

have been, so that we have a better sense of where we are going.

Notes
1
For a discussion of individuals who lived gender-nonconforming lives in
the United States (or in what would become the United States) before the develop-
ment of the concept of “transgender,” see, for example, Sabine Lang, Men as Women,
Women as Men: Changing Gender in Native American Cultures (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1998) and Peter Boag, Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2011).
2
For more on defining transgender history, see Genny Beemyn, “Transgender
History,” in Trans Bodies, Trans Selves, ed. Laura Erickson-Schroth (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2014).
3
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, with Special Reference to Con-
trary Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Legal Study (Philadelphia: F.A. Davis and Co., 1893).

Magnus Hirschfeld, Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross Dress, trans. Michael
4

A. Lombardi-Nash (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991), 125.

5
Pagan Kennedy, The First Man-Made Man: The Story of Two Sex Changes, One
Love Affair, and a Twentieth-Century Medical Revolution (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007),
71; Michael Dillon, Self: A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology (London: William Heine-
mann Medical Books, 1946), 52–53; Harry Benjamin, The Transsexual Phenomenon
(New York: Julian Press, 1966).
6
Dallas Denny, “A Selective Bibliography of Transsexualism,” Journal of Gay
& Lesbian Psychotherapy 6 (2002): 38; Robert Stoller, Sex and Gender: The Development
of Masculinity and Femininity (New York: Jason Aronson, 1968); and Richard Green,
Sexual Identity Conflict (New York: Basic Books, 1974).
7
C. V. Prince, “166 Men in Dresses,” Sexology (1962): 520–25 and Christine
Jorgensen, Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography (New York: Paul S. Eriks-
son, 1967).

Hedy Jo Star, “I Changed My Sex!”: The Autobiography of Stripper Hedy Jo Star,

8

Formerly Carl Hammonds (Chicago: Novel Books, 1963); Gayle Sherman, “I Want to Be
a Woman!”: The Autobiography of Female Impersonator Gayle Sherman (Chicago: Novel
Books, 1964); Jan Morris, Conundrum: From James to Jan—An Extraordinary Personal
Narrative of Transsexualism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974); Canary
Conn, Canary: The Story of a Transsexual (Los Angeles: Nash Publishing, 1974); Renée
Richards, with John Ames, Second Serve: The Renée Richards Story (New York: Stein
and Day, 1983); Duncan Fallowell and April Ashley, April Ashley’s Odyssey (London:
Jonathan Cape, 1983); and Mario Martino, with Harriett, Emergence: A Transsexual
Autobiography (New York: Crown Publishers, 1977).

Anne Bolin, In Search of Eve: Transsexual Rites of Passage (New York: Bergin &
9

Garvey, 1998); Bolin, “Transforming Transvestism and Transsexualism: Polarity, Poli-

120 Journal of Women’s History Winter

tics, and Gender,” in Gender Blending, eds. Bonnie Bullough, Vern L. Bullough, and
James Elias (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1997), 25–32; and Holly Devor, FTM:
Female-To-Male Transsexuals in Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).
10
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New
York: Routledge, 1990); Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Differ-
ence (New York: Routledge, 1989); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); and Teresa de Lauretis, “Queer
Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural
Studies 3 (1991): iii–xviii.
11
See, for example, Viviane K. Namaste, Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Trans-
sexual and Transgendered People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
12
Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, eds., The Transgender Studies Reader (New
York: Routledge, 2006); Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura, eds., The Transgender
Studies Reader 2 (New York: Routledge, 2013); and Anne Enke, ed., Transfeminist
Perspectives in and beyond Transgender and Gender Studies (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2012).
13
Leslie Feinberg, Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Ru-
Paul (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996); Pat Califia, Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgender-
ism (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1997); and Vern L. Bullough and Bonnie Bullough,
Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993).
14
Jason Cromwell, Transmen and FTMs: Identities, Bodies, Genders, and Sexuali-
ties (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 81.
15
Joanne Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United
States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 285 and Susan Stryker,
Transgender History (Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2008).
16
Jennifer Finney Boylan, She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders (New York:
Broadway Books, 2003); Jamison Green, Becoming a Visible Man (Nashville, TN:
Vanderbilt University Press, 2004); Matt Kailey, Just Add Hormones: An Insider’s Guide
to the Transsexual Experience (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005); Thomas Beatie, Labor of Love:
The Story of One Man’s Extraordinary Pregnancy (Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2008); and
Chaz Bono, Transition: The Story of How I Became a Man (New York: Dutton, 2011).
17
Louis Sullivan, From Female to Male: The Life of Jack Bee Garland (Boston:
Alyson Publications, 1990); Diane Wood Middlebrook, Suits Me: The Double Life of
Billy Tipton (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998); and Kennedy, The First Man-Made
Man; Richard F. Docter, Becoming a Woman: A Biography of Christine Jorgensen (New
York: Haworth, 2008).
18
See, for example, Steven P. Schacht, “Four Renditions of Doing Female Drag:
Feminine Appearing Conceptual Variations of a Masculine Theme,” Gendered Sexuali-
ties 6 (2002): 157–80. While Tri-Ess and the International Court System do not specifi-
cally refer to themselves as transgender organizations, they share with explicitly
transgender groups the goal of challenging a gender binary in heterosexual and gay
communities, respectively, and many of their members do identify as transgender.
2013 Genny Beemyn 121

19
National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, “Jurisdictions with Explicitly Trans-
gender-Inclusive Nondiscrimination Laws,” last modified June 2012, http://www.
thetaskforce.org/downloads/reports/fact_sheets/all_jurisdictions_w_pop_6_12.
pdf; National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, “State Nondiscrimination Laws in the
U.S.,” last modified June 21, 2013, http://www.thetaskforce.org/downloads/re-
ports/issue_maps/non_discrimination_6_13.pdf; and Genny Beemyn, “Campus
Pride Trans Policy Clearinghouse,” last modified July 25, 2013, www.campuspride.
org/tpc.
20
Genny Beemyn and Sue Rankin, The Lives of Transgender People (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2011).
21
George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of
the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: HarperCollins, 1994).
22
Marlon M. Bailey, “Performance as Intervention: Ballroom Culture and the
Politics of HIV/AIDS in Detroit,” Souls 11 (2009): 253–74; and Bailey, Butch Queens
Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit (Ann Arbor: Uni-
versity of Michigan Press, 2013).