A Concise History of Transgender Behavior...

or The Answers To Last Month's Quiz

Individuals have crossdressed and crosslived for all of recorded time. During the early study of the transgender phenomenoa, little distinction was made between sex and gender and, therefore, sexual orientation and transgender identity were intertwined and considered similar phenomena. Such behaviors were indiscriminately referred to as homosexuality, Eonism, androgyny, sexual perversion, psychic hermaphroditism, and transvestism.

Initially, individuals presenting with gender concerns were considered moral degenerates. Later they were viewed as criminals and by the dawn of the 20th century had advanced to the questionable pinnacle of being considered mentally disordered. Throughout these periods they were disdained and persecuted.

While the treatment of transgendered people in the U.S. reflected the above attitudes, in Germany, progressive sexologist, Magnus Hirschfeld, himself a self-identified homosexual and crossdresser, fought for the rights of the transgendered and influenced the police to issue permits allowing such individuals to crosslive and dress. He was the first to separate the concept of "transvestism" from homosexuality in 1910. Following upon his work, Havelock Ellis further distinguished transsexuals from transvestites. In 1920 the first recorded modern attempt at SRS occurred in Denmark. A genetically male artist, Einar Wegner, underwent several procedures in an ill-fated attempt to become a woman, Lili Elbe.

The 1950's in America marked an exciting time in the study of the transgender condition. Bear in mind that it was the era of Mc Carthyism, a time in which conformity was raised to a position of sanctity and anyone violating well-defined gender boundaries was targeted as a threat to national security. But ironically, the 1950's also gave voice to Harry Benjamin, "father of transsexualism," Alfred Kinsey, and the most newsworthy event of 1953, the return of Christine Jorgenson from a "sex-change" in Denmark.

Although Harry Benjamin is often credited with the coining of the term "transsexual," the honor belongs to Alfred Kinsey who used it in his 1948 ground-breaking book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. However, this new term was totally overshadowed by the public's hysterical reaction to Kinsey's findings that 37% of all males had experienced a homosexual experience. Kinsey had studied various aspects of transgender behavior throughout the 1940's and in 1953 proposed a wide-ranging study of the the phenomenon. A year later, all funding was withdrawn from the Kinsey Institute, allegedly due to pressures from political conservatives, and instead the money was awarded to another group to develop "vital religious leadership."

Harry Benjamin was luckier. He had his research funded, presented a paper on transsexualism at a major medical conference and paved the way for the acceptance of transsexualism as a distinct medical entity. Defining transsexualism as an illness both served to elicit sympathy for the condition as well as to pathologize those who experienced it.

The 1960's saw the opening of the 1st official gender identity clinic at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. In 1966 Benjamin published The Transsexual Phenomenon, the first guide to the treatment of transsexualism and a vigorous proponent of SRS.

Dr. Virginia Prince, the "grand dame" of the tg community coined the term "transgenderist," connoting the person who cross-lives without obtaining SRS. She formed the first crossdressing organization, Tri-Ess and published the first such journal, Transvestia.

Last month's quiz and this month's column, in which all the answers are diabolically concealed within eruditely complex sentences, were derived from Gordene Olga Mackenzie's book, Transgender Nation, which is now available at the CDS Bookstand in the TG Forum Shopping Mall.

Dr. Anderson is a therapist in the San Francsico Bay Area. She can be reached at 415-776-0139. This article originally appeared in Devil Woman, the newsletter of the Diablo Valley Girls.


© 1996 by Barbara Anderson & 3-D Communications, Inc.