Trans America

A Counter-History

Barry Reay

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781509511792, 9781509511785
• eBook ISBN: 9781509511822
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Science History
• Index: History

Trans seems to be everywhere in American culture. Yet there is little understanding of how this came about. Are people aware that there were earlier periods of gender flexibility and contestability in American history? How well known is it that a previous period of trans visibility in the 1960s and early 1970s faced a vehement backlash right at the time that trans, in the form of what was then termed transvestism and transsexuality, seemed to be so ascendant? Was there transness before transsexuality was named in the 1950s and transgender emerged in the 1990s?

Barry Reay explores this history: from a time before trans in the nineteenth century to the transsexual moment of the 1960s and 1970s, the transgender turn of the 1990s, and the so-called tipping point of current culture. It is a rich and varied history, where same-sex desires and identities, cross-dressing, and transsexual and transgender identities jostled for recognition. It is a history that is not at all flattering to US psychiatric and surgical practices.

Arguing for the complexity of a trans past and present, Trans America will be a groundbreaking work for the trans community, as well as anyone interested in the history of medicine, sexuality, psychology and psychiatry.

1
Before Trans

Introduction

‘When we first examined him [sic] we could not make up our minds whether we should send him [sic] to the men’s wards or in with the women.’ Such was a brief entry in the memoirs of the man who had been the Chief Surgeon at San Quentin, California’s State Prison. ‘After many careful examinations by many physicians’, he continued, ‘it was the consensus of opinion that Artie had been born a normal male child, and that some skilful surgeon, for reasons unknown, had operated … and turned him [sic], to all outward appearances, into a woman.’ The memoirs are from 1940, so the recollection is from any time between then and (going backwards) 1913, when Leo L. Stanley took up his post at San Quentin. They are from the period before the transsexual moment of the 1960s and 1970s, when what is now called gender reconciliation became a feasible option for people like ‘Artie’. The surgeon’s description certainly hinted that some form of surgery had occurred, even if it was removal of the penis and testicles rather than any attempted vaginal reconstruction. ‘Artie’ was ‘completely asexualized’. There had been attempts too at facial reconfiguration: ‘Scars dotting his [sic] face were evidently the result of attempts to destroy the beard by electrolytic needle. What medical brute did such a thing, and why, we shall probably never know.’¹

Leo L. Stanley’s cryptic chronicle of attempted gender modification is typical of so much of the historical evidence in the period before transsexuality and transgender were named. One might assume that Stanley would have been attuned to the varieties of genital surgery, given his (notorious) eugenicist medical experiments with sterilization and testicular implants.² With his oversight of thousands of inserts of testicular substance, and experimentation with transplanting the testicles of executed prisoners, he should have known an absent testis when he did not see one.³ However, he claimed that he was perplexed at first sight of ‘Artie’. ‘I thought he [sic] was a true case of dual sexuality [intersex as it would come to be called] … Leading physicians from the nearby cities came to examine Artie. It took a corps of them to determine if he [sic] were male or female.’⁴

As far as we are aware, the inmate ‘Artie’, our person of interest, left no historical traces other than these medical/mediated ones. It is possible that there are more detailed case notes in Stanley’s archive at the California Historical Society in San Francisco, not obvious from a quick survey of its guide.⁵ But, as things stand, the person known only as ‘Artie’ does not speak to us directly. Apart from the fact that they were eventually perceived by Stanley as a neutered male, we have no idea what their female name was. In keeping with modern trans sensibilities, we should probably attribute womanhood, yet we have no way of ascertaining how ‘Artie’ saw themself at that particular moment in San Quentin – whenever that was. Did they identify as female or male or neither? Stanley claimed that ‘Artie himself [sic] was uncertain’ and begged the Chief Surgeon to ‘reinstate him [sic] by operative means to either male or female status’.⁶ This did not occur; ‘there is no hope of making a normal being of him [sic]. Trained only in bisexual perversion, syphilitic, and undoubtedly insane, what chance has this victim of human bestiality?’⁷ Stanley’s summary was harsh: ‘A moronic monster, he [sic] could only jabber filth. He [sic] leered in answer to our questions and made obscene replies. Evidently, he [sic] knew nothing of his [sic] origin or sex, and only some of the most shocking adventures of his [sic] life were remembered.’⁸

What do we make of such cases? Can we get beyond the medical or disciplinary case study, the moral judgements, the objectification and victimhood? Was gender modification possible before the well-publicized cases of the 1950s? Are there other Arties, and, if so, are they part of trans history? Can we even think of trans before trans? While not assuming that transsexuality, transgender, and trans have always existed, what is their prehistory?⁹ Some promising investigations have been ‘trans-ing’ (Clare Sears’s term) the history of nineteenthand early-twentieth-century America, so the issue is worth pursuing.¹⁰ Emma Heaney has discussed what she calls the ‘trans feminine’ in some nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century texts, including some of the sexological works that are discussed in this chapter.¹¹ Yet her subjects too quickly become ‘trans women’ in the discussion.¹² Similarly, is Jay Prosser right to claim transsexual subjectivities for this prehistory?¹³ Or is transhistoricity or ‘trans*historicities’ a better way of conveying – in the words of Kadji Amin – not some ‘stable foundation’ of transsexuality or transgender but rather ‘a network whose nodes eventually shifted, were rejected, and fused with new elements to compose what we now know as “transgender”’?¹⁴ How do we write the history of transgender before transgender?

The task is by no means simple. Rachel Hope Cleves’s short biography of Frances ‘Frank’ Ann Wood Shimer, a nineteenth-century American teacher, once identified as lesbian, has posed five contemporary ways of making sense of his or her masculinity – with six if the more modern ‘lens of trans studies’ is invoked with Frank Shimer as a trans man.¹⁵ But the danger is that, whatever authorial intent, this mere invocation, this naming, ‘Six Ways of Looking at a Trans Man?’, will foreclose the subtleties of historical reinvestigation.¹⁶ Searching the US newspapers from the 1870s to the 1930s, Emily Skidmore has located sixty-five instances of ‘individuals who had been assigned female at birth but [who] chose to live as male’, many of them married to or living with women. Yet whether they should be described as ‘trans men’ (as Skidmore does) is complet...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction
• 1 Before Trans
• 2 The Transsexual Moment
• 3 Blurring the Boundaries
• 4 Backlash
• 5 The Transgender Turn
• Conclusion
• Index
• End User License Agreement