1

Introduction

Annette F. Timm, Michael Thomas Taylor, Alex Bakker, and Rainer Herrn

The stories this book tells follow the guiding premise of transgender studies by turning traditional medical-scientific history on its head.1 We draw on the pioneering efforts of scholars like Susan Stryker, Aaron Devor, and Ardel Haefele-Thomas to insist upon treating trans individuals themselves, rather than the scientists and doctors who studied them, as the primary agents of change in the story of how various societies have come to accept that the gender one is assigned at birth should not be considered definitive or unchangeable.2 In exploring a network of individuals who profoundly shaped transgender identities between the turn of the twentieth century and the 1950s, the book documents the driving role that trans individuals played in shaping transgender histories. It reconstructs connections that unfolded across the Atlantic, and it tells the story of how trans individuals created photographs and other images and sent them to magazines or doctors for publication, creating communities and making visible these individuals’ identities in public and private.

As a history of sexuality, the very categories and terms of identity of the stories we tell – primarily “transvestite” and “transsexual” – were coined by doctors and scientists, and it was such men (and they were virtually all men) who developed and controlled access to the evolving medical treatments desired by many (but not all) of the trans individuals who approached them.3 As with other histories of sexual identities, those who adopted these labels appropriated and transformed – and later rejected – them, meaning that the terminology of the past is often uncomfortable for trans people today. The last chapter of this book discusses these etymological and taxonomical conundrums, and we recommend that anyone concerned about these issues read that chapter before proceeding. Here we will simply state that we approach this subject as historians who believe that historical understanding cannot be achieved without revealing the language, categorizations, and even misunderstandings of the past and that doing so is not a repetition but an explanation for ways of thinking that we might today find misguided or disrespectful. The stories we have reconstructed have implications for transgender history and for histories of sexuality that go beyond this interplay of agency and authority.4 They offer direct evidence for how trans individuals influenced and participated in developing medical concepts and treatments and in fostering supportive communities for those seeking affirmation of their gender identities. Our aim is to follow the example of the pioneers of trans history by moving away from a vertical history of discovery by experts to a horizontal history in which trans individuals often create their own experts and instrumentalize them as mouthpieces for self-articulation – precisely because this path of medicine or science was the only path available to them.

We tell this story primarily through investigations of historical images. This focus arises partly from the origins of our joint research project, which began not as a search for material for a scholarly monograph but for a historical exhibition. TransTrans: Transgender Histories Between Germany and the United States, 1882–1966 was staged at the Nickle Galleries at the University of Calgary in May and June 2016, and it was restaged and reconfigured for a European audience at the Schwules Museum (Gay Museum) of Berlin as TransTrans: Transatlantic Transgender Histories between 7 November 2019 and 2 March 2020.5 Focusing on images makes logical sense when one is presenting history to the public in a museum/gallery setting. But there is a deeper justification for this practice, which is the crucial role that images play in any representation of one’s own sexual subjectivity and particularly in the objectification of transgender individuals. This is a historical fact but also one that remains omnipresent in our own world today. For this reason, we have supplemented the book chapters with a series of image galleries.

Concretely, our project began as we attempted to trace a connection between the most prominent figures in this history, Magnus Hirschfeld, the innovative early twentieth-century sexologist, gay rights activist, and founder of Berlin’s Institute for Sexual Science (in 1919), and one of his former mentees, the endocrinologist Harry Benjamin, who emigrated to the United States, collaborated with Alfred Kinsey, and wrote the first scientific investigation of what he called “transsexualism” in 1966.6 Exploring this relationship also brought to light a connection between seminal moments in twentieth-century histories of sexuality, and between Europe and the United States, that had been lost to public memory. But what we found in the archives was much more compelling and thought-provoking: not only photographs that vividly illustrated these life stories and offer a poignant window into private moments of self-creation, self-presentation, and self-disclosure, but also ethical questions for us about how to tell these stories. The questions concern historical method and our own curatorial practice, but most importantly, they touch upon our ethical quandaries and our feelings of responsibility for how we might look at, reconstruct, and witness the very personal stories that the archival traces document.

For it was images of individuals that first allowed us to reconstruct disparate parts of these histories and that drew us to the interplay of actors across the Atlantic, not to mention the structures of authority and community between the participants in these exchanges. It was in moments of archival work when images came to light that we stopped to admire and wonder about what we were witnessing. In browsing through the many images in published sources, we began to ask deeper questions about the life stories they often accompanied or were meant to illustrate. The images spoke to us in a way that the life stories, which most often had been reframed as clinical case studies, could not. And the images often give us so much incidental information about the time, situation, and context of these moments that is simply lost when texts written by trans individuals about themselves are published by other authors.

The images often resist or disrupt the aim to generalize that characterizes most medical-scientific literature. At the same time, we are very conscious of the problem that the images can also pander to and feed voyeuristic and sensationalist impulses and intentions – both for those who published them and for us as we look at them today. These issues are especially acute when it comes to trans history – for which so much archival evidence is fragmentary or of a problematic nature (criminal, medical, ephemeral, not personally identifiable). The images we found reflect the fact that the archival record of trans histories is neither objective nor simply incomplete, but that it actively reflects “silences and exclusions,” as K. J. Rawson has written about the significance of the archive for transgender history.7 Conversely, as Rawson also points out, many transgender individuals do not want traces of their lives before their transition preserved: “Transgender people who transition their gender presentation may feel betrayed by the archive’s stubborn and insistent refusal to forget.”8

All of this is complicated by the fact that we bring our own identities into the process of describing the identities of trans people. The ethical questions that this process involves make it necessary to introduce ourselves. Rainer Herrn works at the Berlin research hospital Charité as a historian of medicine on the history of psychiatry and sexology and carries out research on the history of gender, sex, and sexuality as a member of the Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft. With a number of other gay men from East Germany, he played an instrumental part in assembling an archive of Hirschfeld’s work, as well as other documents of sexology from before the Second World War. His current research focuses on the first Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin (1919–33). Herrn has been researching trans history for the last twenty-five years, along with the histories of other sexual and gender minorities. He is interested in the history of relationships between these groups and how it shapes present-day politics. This resulted in the first general history of transgender people in the German-speaking world, Schnittmuster des Geschlechts: Transvestitismus und Transsexualität in der frühen Sexualwissenschaft (loose translation: Patterns of gender: transvestism and transsexuality in early sexual science), which was published in 2005 and served as our starting point for the TransTrans project.9 Michael Thomas Taylor worked for ten years as a professor in Canada and the United States, likewise focussing on questions of sexuality, including work on the history of marriage; he identifies as cis male, gay, queer, and as a radical faerie. Having mostly left academia, Taylor is particularly interested in communicating knowledge to communities beyond the university. Annette Timm is a historian of modern German and European history with a focus on the history of gender and sexuality. As a white, cisgender, and straight woman, she comes to this subject with a deep sense of respect for those with less privilege, both in the past and in the present. She also offers an intense engagement with historiographical debates about representation and the perspective of temporal and geographical breadth that she has gained from her editorship of the Journal of the History of Sexuality. The ethical question most central to her contributions to this book is the dilemma of how to represent the identities of those who have lived in the past – always a foreign country no matter what our present-day identifications might be – without imposing our own, inevitably ephemeral, categorizations upon them. A fourth collaborator joins us for this phase of the project, Alex Bakker. Bakker is a Dutch historian and writer who also works as a researcher for documentaries and exhibitions. In 2014, he published an autobiographical novel about his transgender background, Mijn valse verleden (published in English in 2019 as My Untrue Past).10 He is committed to investigating the lives of trans pioneers – lives that risk being forgotten – and as an interviewer he makes frequent use of oral history. (As a reflection of the collaborative nature of this project, we will now switch to using first names in speaking about ourselves or referencing each other’s work.)

Despite the commitment of the original three curators to sensitively portraying the experiences of all the historical subjects we investigate in our quite varied historical work, we believe that being joined by a trans co-curator was essential to the success of the Berlin iteration of TransTrans. As we note in the chapter of this book describing our exhibitions, we also drew from feedback given to us by community members – from people who identify as trans, genderqueer, or gender nonconforming – at various points of the curatorial process in order to ensure that we remained as sensitive as possible to the dilemmas of terminology and the particularly painful aspects of these histories for those still struggling with prejudices against trans people today.

And yet uncovering any history creates unique traumas that no attention to present-day sensitivities or cleansing/modernization of terminology can preclude. What Ardel Haefele-Thomas announces in Introduction to Transgender Studies could also be said of this book: “By the time you have this book in your possession … the language will most likely have changed again.”11 We believe that sensitive readings of the fact that human categorizations have changed over time also have the power to point towards individual emancipation, because they indicate that if things have changed once, they can change again. In the foreword to Haefele-Thomas’s text, Susan Stryker encourages students to immerse themselves in the history of gender systems they find objectionable. She asks them “to reflect on how best to acknowledge that human cultures throughout time and around the world have concocted a great many gender systems” and to avoid “assuming that all that diversity can be squeezed into the three little syllables of ‘transgender,’ or that everybody who has ever lived a life at odds with currently dominant forms of Eurocentric gender categorization can properly be referenced by that perpetually fraught pronoun, we.”12 We take inspiration from this perspective.

To show concretely how these reflections come to bear on our project, allow us to tell a brief story, the first of several that we will use to introduce this book. While working with Michael in the archives of the Kinsey Institute Library and Special Collections in Bloomington, Annette came across a colour slide, mixed in with Harry Benjamin’s personal vacation photos from Knott’s Berry Farm, California, and Banff, Alberta, that immediately grabbed her attention.

Beginning in the 1950s, Benjamin was almost single-handedly responsible for introducing the diagnosis and treatment of what he was then referring to as “transsexualism” to the United States, and he became widely known and influential after he published his book The Transsexual Phenomenon in 1966. We therefore immediately assumed that the beautiful woman in figure 1.1 might have been one of Benjamin’s trans patients. As it turned out, this image (which we have taken from the original stereoscopic slide) was just one of many in the boxes of Benjamin’s personal effects housed at the Kinsey Institute. The assumption was slowly confirmed, as Annette found more and more images of this and other women sitting on the same couch in front of the same curtain with individuals who seemed to be their family members.

After a great deal of digging and following leads, Annette was able find the names and stories of the women on that couch. Letters between Benjamin and his trans patients revealed that a woman whom we are giving the pseudonym Carla Erskine was the photographer behind this image and other slides in Benjamin’s collection. She had scraped together her very meagre funds to mail the slides to Benjamin in batches between 1953 and 1955. The essays that follow will engage in more detail with Erskine’s history and with the history of how trans people very often photographed themselves for the purposes of advancing scientific knowledge. Erskine’s slides were taken during gatherings of trans women in the San Francisco apartment of Louise Lawrence, a research assistant for Alfred Kinsey and self-described “permanent transvestite.” As Joanne Meyerwitz, a pioneer of American trans history notes, Lawrence was “a one-woman social hub” for gender nonconformists in the San Francisco Bay area.13 Hers is a story that has been frequently told, but we were interested in tracking the stories of those more private individuals who sought refuge on Lawrence’s couch and whose complex interpersonal relationships represent a key point of knowledge transmission. Following Lawrence’s example, Carla was eager to provide information to Kinsey that might, as she put it to Benjamin, “be of help to others of my kind.”14 Those words inspired the title of this book and led us to search for more examples of how personal networks amongst trans individuals and between them and their doctors helped build knowledge and understanding.

This book and our exhibition TransTrans originated in such questions. As we looked at this material, we found many stories like Erskine’s hiding in plain sight within medical and scientific publications. When Michael and Annette visited the Kinsey Institute they were already well acquainted with Rainer Herrn’s research on the very first generation of trans people who had contacted medical researchers for help: people like John O. and Otto Spengler, both born in Germany in the late nineteenth century and of whom more will be said below.15 We were thus predisposed to see Erskine and her friends’ relationship to Kinsey and Benjamin through these eyes: with attention to how self-made images of trans people played a role in the creation of medical knowledge, to how those images became public, and to how the personal, private side of these stories has often remained hidden. We are not the first historians to note that uncovering such intimate glimpses of the lives of marginalized individuals is central to the discovery of how sexual knowledge is transmitted through private networks. Referring to a cache of intimate photos held at the Art Gallery of Ontario that depict cross-dressers in a compound in New York called Casa Susanna in the 1950s and 60s, Elspeth Brown notes the importance of “the relationship of image making to the formation of queer, trans and cross-dressing communities from the 1950s to today.”16 Unlike the Casa Susanna photos, though, we discovered that some of the intimate photos we had found in the boxes of Benjamin’s effects did not remain private but were reproduced, anonymously, in his scientific studies. Our focus, then, was on the gaps that we saw between how these photographs were made and how they were used, between the events they appear to record and what those events meant in context – the context of their own time and the context of what they might mean for us today. This also meant telling the story of the photographs themselves. We asked how they were published, shared, and archived, and what these uses mean for the stories they hold.

Aside from the discovery of Benjamin’s slides, this project had other moments of serendipity. It was only along a circuitous route of luck and misfortune that Rainer Herrn was able to acquire all five issues of Das 3. Geschlecht (The 3rd sex) – the world’s first magazine for people who called themselves transvestites, which published in Germany between 1930 and 1932, and of which only one copy of a single issue exists in any public library in the world. In 2005, a Berlin antiquarian bookshop called Ars Amandi sent him a gift of a full copy via post, but the package was lost or stolen from his mailbox, forcing him to start the search again from scratch. In his 2005 book on transvestites, Rainer had pointed out the rarity of the publication, which drove prices significantly higher.17 After finally managing to obtain issues one through four, he located a copy of issue five with a Munich dealer, but it sold so quickly and at such a prohibitive price that he could not obtain it. Fortunately, however, the dealer agreed to give him a scan first.

Another moment of discovery explains Alex Bakker’s contribution to our project. During his research for his book Transgender in Nederland: een buitengewone geschiedenis (Transgender in the Netherlands: an extraordinary history), Alex came upon another historical fact that had disappeared into oblivion.18 In the middle of the 1950s, the Netherlands was one of the few places in the world where trans people could obtain gender-affirming surgery.19 There were various different surgical techniques employed at this time, and access was restricted; only a happy few could afford surgery, which remained a far-off dream for members of oppressed minorities, such as the poor and colonized. But it did mark the early beginnings of a long and rich history of transgender care in the Netherlands. Since the operations were carried out in secrecy, Alex only found one or two textual sources referring to them, which left him with more questions than answers.20 When he found, in Benjamin’s files in the Kinsey Archive, the letters of five American trans women who corresponded extensively with Harry Benjamin about their stay in Amsterdam, it gave him goose bumps. Now he could finally put names to anonymous figures, identify addresses of unknown locations, and in general reconstruct and interpret this unique epi­sode in transgender history, which – as you will read – offers some surprising twists.

These moments underscore once again that the story we are telling here is neither linear nor traceable to a moment of origin or birth, whether with us as researchers or in the lives we discuss. We also want to be careful to distinguish our own excitement and wonder in finding windows into these private lives from the stories themselves. These feelings reflect our own passion and commitment, but they also come from seeing something that – in many cases – was not meant to be public. We are aware of the voyeuristic connotations of these discoveries, and we know that our decisions about reproducing what we describe below as “difficult photographs” might make some of our readers uncomfortable. At the same time, these images are evidence of the fragility and marginalized nature of much of this history – especially since, or precisely because, it unfolded in very tight personal networks over nearly a century and in locations that were far apart from each other.

What we are doing here is not entirely new. Without hoping to do justice to the richness of the existing scholarly literature on trans history, we would like to briefly acknowledge pioneering works that have inspired us and on which we draw in the pages to follow. The biggest influence on three of us was the work of one of our collaborators: Rainer Herrn. It was Michael’s reading of Rainer’s 2005 book Schnittmuster des Geschlechts that began this collaboration, and all of us have drawn inspiration from this book and Rainer’s other publications for our curation and for all we have written here. Michael’s review of Schnittmuster emphasizes that its contribution rests in a nuanced analysis of the emerging discipline of sexology that stresses the “relationship between politics and sexual science” and that details how “the medical paradigm dominating both case studies and autobiographical accounts gave [transgender] individuals new voices and a nascent sense of community [while also] … repeatedly prov[ing] inadequate to the reality of their lives.”21 We summarize many of Rainer’s findings in the essays to follow in the hopes of demonstrating aspects of this history that have been missed or misinterpreted in English-language summaries of German sexology and trans history.

Despite the fact that the German story has not been as well understood as many of the broader narratives about trans history have made it appear, we have also benefitted enormously from the work of historians of the United States and other places. Of particular note here is the pioneering work of Joanne Meyerowitz, Susan Stryker, Genny Beemyn, Susan Rankin, Leslie Feinberg, Deborah Rudacille, and, most recently, Julian Gill-Peterson, all of whose work has influenced our perspectives.22 Meyerowitz, Stryker, and Beemyn have been particularly influential and pathbreaking in laying out the overarching structure of trans history in the United States, while Rankin, Feinberg, and Rudacille give voices to individual transgender people, some of whom are only now recognized as such. But there is still often a gap between scholarship that focuses on memoir or autobiography (such as that of Feinberg or Julia Serano, Sandy Stone, and others) and more traditionally historical accounts like Meyerowitz’s How Sex Changed, which follows professional historical standards of anonymization and relies on individual stories as illustrative examples within a more broadly thematic structure.23 We seek to combine these trends in trans history by giving individual people a clear voice (tracking their stories across various levels of anonymization and historiographical analysis) while still remaining resolutely focused on historical contextualization.

Following the iconic intervention of Sandy Stone, whose fierce rebuttal of transphobia in “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto” empowered a generation of scholars to engage in new interdisciplinary investigations of trans lives,24 a vibrant field of transgender studies now exists, and we have drawn on the work of many nonhistorians to guide us through the conundrums of presenting a contemporary audience with the taxonomical, ethical, and political intricacies of the historical record (and silences) of trans history.25 A key difference between this book and most other treatments is our time frame. Transgender studies can be decidedly presentist or focused on only the most recent past. Here we draw attention to the less well understood histories of the immediate post-First World War and post-Second World War periods, and we focus particularly on the transatlantic connections between medical researchers but also more importantly between trans subjects themselves. Despite these differences, past historical and transgender studies scholarship has guided not only our writing here, but less transparently our collaborative curatorial work.

Preparing for the first iteration of TransTrans, and the second version in Berlin, we were most inspired by scholarly work that highlights the complicated personal, international, and intimate interconnections between medical researchers and networks of trans people. In both exhibitions, we attempted to visualize these personal interactions as a network wall spreading across two continents. (See figures 1.5, 1.13, and 6.6.)

The wall depicted the key people, institutions, and publications in our network of stories. While the geographic and temporal organization – San Francisco (1904–66), New York (1880–1966), London (1910–20), Berlin (1900–33), Vienna (1910–44), as well as (in the Berlin exhibition) Copenhagen (1951–55), Amsterdam (1954–55), and Casablanca (1956–76) – refer to the interventions of medical scientists or to massive political ruptures like the destruction of the discipline of sexology by the National Socialists, the intersecting red nodes and red lines depict transgender individuals themselves. In San Francisco, several of these transgender individuals were grouped around Harry Benjamin, who spent his summers in the city (sometimes joined by Alfred Kinsey): Christine Jorgensen, who became a celebrity when she returned to the United States in 1952 after undergoing a series of gender affirmation surgeries in Denmark; Louise Lawrence; and Carla Erskine. Benjamin of course also belongs in New York, where his practice was located – and in Germany, where he grew up and where he continued to visit Hirschfeld in the 1920s. In New York, we also find Bernard S. Talmey, like Benjamin a German immigrant to the United States, a doctor who published the first American article about transvestites in 1914. Both Talmey and Benjamin knew another trans individual from New York, who was described in Talmey’s 1914 article as his “first patient”; we now know that this was Otto Spengler. New York was also where we placed another individual who moved between Germany, New York, and San Francisco: a German immigrant to the United States, described in the medical literature as John O. and known at least privately to some in San Francisco as Jenny, whose letters to Magnus Hirschfeld were published in 1910 in Die Transvestiten (The transvestites), a word that he applied to people we would today call transgender, and the etymology of which is described in more detail in the concluding chapter). In Germany, we placed Magnus Hirschfeld and a number of transgender individuals whom the exhibition highlighted, and who also appear in this book. Important institutions and publications included Hirschfeld’s and Benjamin’s books, Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science, and several magazines published in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s by the gay activist and publisher Friedrich Radszuweit. These were aimed at gay men, at lesbians, and – with Das 3. Geschlecht (The 3rd sex), the first magazine of its kind in the world – at transvestites. In Vienna, we find Eugen Steinach – an endocrinologist whose work was crucial for the entire history we discuss here and which was well received by the German public. And in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Casablanca, we find the trans women and doctors who form the focus of Alex’s chapter.

This book will tell these stories in more detail. For the moment, we will simply state that it was often the trans individuals themselves who connected the experts or publishers, usually behind the scenes. It was trans individuals who approached experts and publishers to ask that their stories be told, their images be shown, or that the doctors change or modify their categories to better describe trans individuals’ experiences and self-understandings. We have attempted to mirror this cooperative networking in our own work, remaining in constant discussion with each other and translating individually arrived-at scholarly analyses into a larger narrative. We seek to provide not a seamless narrative but rather an indication of the complex threads that tied trans individuals and their medical collaborators together across the Atlantic.

For this book, and for the exhibition in Berlin, we expand our view to return, as it were, from the United States to Europe and specifically to the Netherlands, where some of Harry Benjamin’s patients were among the individuals able to obtain gender-affirming surgeries in the 1950s – an option that was officially closed down by authorities in the 1960s. The Netherlands is a crucial site for our history because it was unique in offering access to this kind of care and pioneering new treatment models. Yet such treatments remained difficult to access unless one had both the will and the resources to travel outside traditional medical networks.

In telling these stories, we were continually aware of yet another ethical dilemma of this history: the problem of revealing the life stories of those who did not want to be famous in any way. One of the challenges of writing trans history is the ethical necessity to protect the privacy of individuals whose material well-being and physical safety depend upon successfully passing undetected within intolerant communities. This is almost as true today as it ever was, but for the first individuals to medically transition passing was existential (in the sense of being necessary for survival), and tracking these stories involves particular research challenges for historians. Although significant publicity and even fame followed some early twentieth-century cases of surgical transition (Lili Elbe in Germany, Christine Jorgensen in the United States, and Roberta Cowell in England, to name just a few),26 the vast majority of individuals seeking medical help in the early and mid-twentieth century had to contend with public disavowal, police repression, and the likelihood that any discovery of their previous life histories would make it impossible for them to earn a living. It is also important not to fall into the trap of arguing about what the first case of surgical transition was – a pronouncement that makes for good publicity (as was the case with the filmic representation of Elbe in the 2015 film The Danish Girl),27 but which ignores the historical reality that doctors who performed the earliest surgeries (such as the Berlin surgeon Richard Mühsam, who operated on Rudolf Richter [Dora or Dorchen] and Toni Ebel in 1920) had to fear prosecution for purposely damaging healthy tissue and were thus not likely to publicize their procedures.28 Talking about the “first case” also denies agency to earlier trans people, some of whom lived in parts of the world where these histories remain taboo and who might have performed (or had performed upon them) various kinds of surgical interventions. What kind of surgery counts as surgery; are we speaking only of clinically sterile contexts common to Western medicine?29 Even as we focus on European and American people who did find access to care, we must remain aware that this covers only a small percentage of trans people in the world and that it fails to acknowledge those trans people who managed to live without medical intervention or discovery.30 We leave the story of their lives for others to tell.

It is important to remember that most trans people lived very private lives and left few or very scattered archival traces. We purposely chose to focus on people who did not seek fame but who nonetheless made a significant impact through their determination to educate medical authorities or to form supportive communities. This often meant reconstructing threads of relationships that are not immediately apparent in the anonymized images in publications catering to the interests of trans individuals or in the papers of the doctors who treated them. One of our goals in this book is to follow some of these threads of connection across the Atlantic in order to upset standard biomedical narratives regarding how knowledge about sexuality is transmitted.

The work also involves finding the names and life stories of individuals who might not have wanted to be found. As we will try to demonstrate through careful naming practices and explicit links between the four chapters of this book, many of the individuals in Europe and North America who wanted to transition from the 1910s to the 1960s knew each other or knew of each other. They either sought each other out (as was the case with several people whom Otto Spengler found and corresponded with) or they were put in touch by doctors. These communities were sometimes quite intimate, as was the case in 1950s San Francisco, where many transitioning individuals sought out and found a sympathetic ear in the living room of Louise Lawrence. Trans women in particular shared information about sympathetic doctors, surgical techniques, and the new challenges of fashion, hair styling, and makeup. It is no accident that, in the same way that Spengler appears in both the American and the German story we tell here, other people pop up both in 1950s San Francisco and then in Amsterdam, and later in Casablanca.

The era that is the focus of this book can be regarded as a crucial moment in the history of modern trans identities. New medical possibilities for hormonal and surgical transitions that arose in the 1920s and 1930s and became more commonly practiced in the fifties gave some trans people a concrete goal: to obtain this medical care. This was particularly true after December 1952, when former American soldier Christine Jorgensen returned to the United States after having surgery in Denmark, an event that immediately unleashed massive media interest. Jorgensen’s fame made it clear to people all over the world that the promise of physical transition did exist.31 Many transgender people had not even known how to understand their own feelings and thought they were crazy. The Jorgensen case changed – or at least it added a new dimension to – the concept of transgender identity, making completed transition the focus of public attention and perhaps overshadowing the existing diversity among trans people.

The relationship between medical authorities and trans people in the 1950s can be described as one of dependency but also as what one might call benevolent paternalism. With all due respect to the patients themselves, it would be inaccurate to ignore the fact that they were still dependent upon medical practitioners, and their ability to obtain the care they sought was always limited by their subjection to expert opinion. Despite this obvious disparity of power, the relationships formed between these patients and their doctors were often unusually intimate. That the medical decisions made were particularly personal is demonstrated by the fact that, as Alex explains in his chapter, very personal evaluations were made about an individual’s ability to “pass” before permission to undergo surgery was granted. Nonetheless, the transfer of knowledge was mutually beneficial. The transgender individuals needed the medical professionals, and the doctors needed to develop their expertise based on the input they received from their patients, including the life stories collected in psycho-therapeutic sessions, medical tests, and oral or written testimonies of trans experiences. For surgeons this mutual transfer of knowledge was less important: they generally relied on the diagnoses that psychiatrists had already made. In some cases, as Alex will detail, they simply did what trans people asked them to do. This was true of Dr. Georges Burou, who perfected surgical techniques in the 1950s that helped between 800 and 1,000 trans women who found their way to his clinic in Casablanca.32

But psychiatrists and sexologists, like Harry Benjamin, who wanted to play a role in constructing scientific knowledge about trans identity and in providing care, felt the need to thoroughly examine their patients and lay out screening protocols. The emphasis on screening tended to focus on the goal of what was then called sexual reassignment surgery (SRS) and is today generally known as gender-affirming surgery. The prospect of performing life-altering surgery on bodies that the medical science of the day decreed to be healthy and not in need of intervention made many doctors anxious, since they feared that they could be held liable for doing harm. For this reason, they placed high value on the potential to “pass”: the thought was that people who were allowed to go through surgery should later be able to live convincingly in the desired sex role, anonymously disappearing into society.

It must be acknowledged that becoming invisible in society was the personal wish of most post-operative trans people of this period. And yet this very invisibility also made it possible for members of the broader society to avoid discussing the actual sexual diversity in their midst. The trans people, mostly trans women, who were not able or did not want to live invisibly, could only reside on the fringes of society, often finding their communities or their livelihoods in the realms of adult entertainment and night life.33 As long as one’s identification did not match one’s gender identity or gender expression, these individuals were subject to arrest in countries, including the United States, Germany, and the Netherlands, where cross-dressing could be prosecuted under various laws against “masquerading,” hiding one’s identity, or “the excitement of public nuisance” (Erregung öffentlichen Ärgernisses).34

Such harsh judgements about individuals who were simply trying to live private lives and thus could not avoid being seen in public makes the careful and historically contextualized use of terminology all the more critical. In deference to this difficult social and legal situation, and as the final chapter will outline more theoretically, we generally use the names and pronouns that the individuals themselves chose to use or were forced to use at the time. We use gender-neutral pronouns (they/their) only when we have no information about the individual’s public presentation while simply avoiding pronouns altogether in cases, like that of Otto Spengler, where we know that the person was forced to carry on living a public persona in a gender they might have entirely rejected if this had been a socially and legally viable option for them.

Anonymization presents another challenge.35 Remaining very sensitive to the desires for privacy of our trans subjects, we have chosen not to use the full names of anyone about whom we know that they did not want any publicity or fame. In some cases, this was a very difficult decision. On the one hand, we want to accord these individuals their rightful place in history, granting them their full identities and describing the role they played in the advancement of knowledge. This goal, however, is much more complicated in cases where the individual lives described do not involve fame or activism.36 The most difficult decision involved Annette’s work on the life of Carla Erskine, who had consistently told Benjamin that she wished to remain a private person. For this reason, and in order to follow the wishes of the Kinsey Institute, we have chosen to fully anonymize her and the friends who were part of her story. But doing so also reflects the larger issues we have been discussing here. Benjamin’s files contain a consent form signed by Erskine for the use of her images in his book that explicitly notes: “It is understood that my identity will not be revealed and that proper procedures are followed to ensure my anonymity.”37 This desire to contribute to science while maintaining individual anonymity creates dilemmas for us as researchers. On the one hand, it is possible to discover Erskine’s identity from other sources (in online documents and blogs), meaning it is not a secret. But even when the curtains of anonymity might be easily parted, we have chosen to fully name only individuals who were already famous in their day or who have already been frequently mentioned in historical texts. We admit some discomfort about how anonymization works to minimize the agency of the others. Too often historians have, perhaps unwittingly, repeated the gesture of turning these fully realized individuals into medical specimens or case studies. For this reason, Annette made a very concerted, yet ultimately fruitless effort to find Erskine’s living relatives or close friends, who might have been able to give permission to drop the anonymization. Despite this failure, we have nonetheless tried to avoid the kind of verbal dismemberment that can result when one life story gets scattered across a historical text. We have tried to present these individuals as individuals rather than as medical case studies.

One aspect of the story about trans identities in the period we investigate that certainly comes up a bit short in our narrative is the lives of trans men. As Annette will explain in her chapter, this has something to do with the prejudices of the scientists whose files we relied on (most of whom simply assumed that individuals labelled male at birth were much more predisposed to transsexuality than those labelled female), but it also has something to do with the fact that trans men were much more successful at passing without medical intervention than trans women. We also discuss this issue in an image gallery devoted specifically to trans men. As Emily Skidmore’s research on trans men in the United States reveals, there are countless stories of trans men having been discovered only be accident after living almost their entire public adult lives as men.38 Aaron Devor and Nicholas Matte have explained that it was only after 1964, when Reed Erickson, a very wealthy trans man, began overseeing millions of dollars of philanthropic spending to finance research into transsexual medicine that any significant attention was paid to the medical concerns of trans men.39

Finally, a word about intersectionality. As a discipline, transgender studies has been particularly attuned to the intersectional implications of gender identity. For the histories we tell, this is most relevant because of the fact that all of our figures are white. This is the historical reality with which we are dealing in the era before the 1960s. When we focus on trans men and women from this period who had access to treatment and were in contact with doctors and/or researchers, and who we can identify by name, we simply find very few examples of transgender people of colour. As George Chauncey notes in his forthcoming sequel to Gay New York,40 many trans people of colour, particularly but not exclusively Latinx, could be seen on the streets of New York before the 1960s.41 But the word “streets” is apropos, because that is where they were; they did not have the material or social capital to appear in doctors’ offices. Choosing to focus on the life of Carla Erskine and on the American women who travelled to the Netherlands for surgery in the 1950s means that we end our story right before the story of how trans people of colour also accessed medical treatment begins. As with the story of anonymous trans men, this story is urgently in need of telling, but it is not our focus here.

These choices should not be read as an argument that trans people did not exist before the 1950s, simply that they appear in different contexts and tracking their story would involve different methodologies than the ones we deploy in this book. Magnus Hirschfeld included two people of colour on his “Wall of Sexual Transitions,” a grid of photographs of sexual types that he used to educate the public about sexual diversity. Two of the individuals depicted on the wall were men with breasts – so-called Gynäkomasten (sufferers of gynomastia) and two were Onnagata (cross-dressing male actors from Japanese Kabuki theatre).42 These individuals are never named, however, and serve only to underline Hirschfeld’s claims about universal sexual variety. It is impossible to know who these people were, and they appear on the wall as anthropological specimens, completely detached from the kinds of personal relationships with the researchers that we are investigating. The anonymity and absence of people of colour is evidence of wider social judgements about race that informed ideals of feminine beauty and masculinity and determined who had financial and social access to medical treatment – who was socially visible or invisible and on what terms.

As far as we have been able to determine, the first person of colour to have accessed gender affirming surgery in Europe or North America was Delisa Newton in the United States,43 but her surgical transition likely occurred around 1964, later than the focus of the American accounts we explore.44 Of course, the reason why black people do not appear in Kinsey and Benjamin’s documents in the 1950s is itself instructive. As Newton pointed out in her Sepia magazine article in 1966: “Because I am a Negro it took me twice as long to get my sex change operation as it would have a white person. Because I am a Negro many doctors showed me little sympathy and understanding. ‘You people are too emotional for such an ordeal,’ one doctor told me. But finding medical attention wasn’t the only problem complicated by the color of my skin. Even with my college and nursing education, I couldn’t get a good, steady job to raise money for the operation.”45

Newton’s experience seems to have been typical, and as Hilary Malatino puts it, this compromised access to medical treatment for people of colour “manifests most often as archival absence. Trans and intersex folks of color are conspicuously missing from the medical archives of sexology.”46 It is therefore clear that the fact that medical intervention seems to have been confined to white people up until the mid-1960s had much to do with the intersection of race and class in America and elsewhere, a fact that was exacerbated by the even more condescending and sensationalized treatment that trans people of colour received in the popular press.47 We have circumstantial evidence that some trans women of colour travelled to Casablanca for surgery in the 1970s, but this is a subject that awaits future research and will likely involve significant challenges, given the extreme marginalization of racialized trans people.48 In short, tracking the stories of trans people of colour would require different sources (fewer medical papers, and more personal reminiscences and oral interviews) and a different geographic and/or temporal focus than the ones we have chosen.

Most trans pioneers of the 1950s as described in this book were independent, able to travel freely, and pay for months of leave, travel, accommodation, and medical costs, though some, such as Erskine, did so on the slimmest of budgets and in circumstances so precarious as to problematize the word “privileged.” Nevertheless, we acknowledge that Carla and others like her had access to the social circles and social capital of a white resident of California, advantages from which trans people of colour in the United States of the 1950s and ’60s were excluded.

Similarly, Hirschfeld’s work with trans individuals in Germany was focused on white Europeans living in Berlin, even though some of his work on behalf of socially disadvantaged or marginalized individuals explicitly crossed lines of class. Hirschfeld was specifically interested in formulating universal theories of variance in gender and sexuality across cultural contexts, and he carried this out using the anthropological methods of his day (methods that were themselves evolving and highly contested). Yet as Heike Bauer has recently elaborated, the homosexual rights politics at the centre of Hirschfeld’s work was also haunted by racism, colonial brutality, and gender violence.49 Hirschfeld’s strategy of appealing to human rights to argue for minority sexual rights also fell prey to the dangers of framing nonbinary genders within heterosexual and cisgendered norms. Bauer even argues for a “straight turn” in Hirschfeld’s work (setting in with his world tour between 1930 and 1932) – which she sees continued by Alfred Kinsey – by which she means that Hirschfeld turned away from speaking up for the rights of queer individuals to focus instead on heterosexuality and marital love.50 Most of the individuals whose stories we can reconstruct aspired to living within the prevailing standards of white, Western, middle-class heterosexual comportment.51 This was, in fact, often a prerequisite for access to treatment.

None of this means that race was absent in trans history. As scholars in postcolonial studies have shown, anthropological discourse has been conditioned and shaped by colonialist concepts, social structures, and relations of power. Transgender histories, too, point to the impact of Western colonialism on existing nonbinary conceptions of gender.52 Our analyses of various images will show that Benjamin also relied on colonialist concepts of race in making some of his arguments. Most pertinently, the entire medical field on which these histories unfold developed out of eugenic discourse from the first decades of the twentieth century, discourses that were almost invariably tainted with racialized logics. The development of hormone treatments also involved projects of “rejuvenation” that promised eternally young, virile, fertile bodies that could be useful in various larger biopolitical contexts.53

Susan Stryker elaborates race as the biopolitical category defining life as worth living, meaning it underlies all other biological identity categories.54 Our focus on white trans individuals must be read with this definition in mind, because the biopolitical structures of the mid-twentieth century in both Europe and North America were inextricable from the racialized political systems within which they developed. But we do not focus our analysis on the implications that these stories of white trans individuals have for wider histories of race. That is an analysis and history that is crucial to the overarching global history of transgender people but one that we leave for others to tell.55 Our analyses of images will point, however, to instances where they reflect racist colonialist discourses – for example, Orientalist fantasies of artists or “natural” peoples.

Similarly, the stories we tell took place before the emergence of second-wave feminism. This book raises questions of how emerging transsexual identities – which represented highly normative notions of femininity and masculinity as well as challenges to existing gender norms – might have conditioned histories of feminism(s). A virulent backlash against the growing visibility of “transsexualism” (to use a historical term that offends many trans people today but that was widely used in the post-Second World War period) erupted in medical contexts in the 1970s and led to the closing of many clinics. This backlash was anchored in extremely static, binary conceptions of gender, some of which informed and continue to inform some strands of feminism. It is our hope that this book might lay the groundwork for discrediting hostile, transphobic feminist responses to transgender histories while providing fuel to more affirmative feminist arguments for accepting trans people’s self-definition.56

At the same time, we are also highly aware of the power dynamics inherent in the photos we discuss and exhibit – and to the possibility that our work may reproduce scenes of forced exposure, voyeurism, or objectification. There is a large body of literature focusing on the history of how photography has been used to racialize, medicalize, or criminalize bodies, constituting what Alan Sekula called a “shadow archive” in opposition to the democratizing impulse of bourgeois portraiture.57 Michael’s essay engages with that history to situate the photographic practices of Hirschfeld and Benjamin, and this concept also conditions the more popular practices Rainer discusses. Katie Sutton has provided the most direct, comprehensive analysis of how photographs of trans identity drove what she calls “sexology’s photographic turn.”58 Situating these images within a history of photography and queer history and theory, Sutton explicitly calls for further research in terms that resonate deeply with how we see our own work. She interrogates these “photographs of gender-atypical individuals in the sexological archive” in order to ask how historical investigation “might … emphasize or recover the traces of subjectivity that these medicalized images work to erase.” Like Sutton, we believe that the “representational violence” of the “objectifying gaze” of both the original creators of these “overtly medicalized images” and the present-day viewer/reader must be counterbalanced by paying attention to “the representational practices of individuals who were starting to claim a trans and, specifically, a transvestite identity for themselves.”59

We also draw from work that explicitly attends to the ethics of viewing what Susie Linfield calls “difficult photographs”: photographs of “violence and suffering,” of the Holocaust, of war, of racial violence.60 Linfield, Dora Apel, and Shawn Michele Smith, among others, call for more attention to the practice of historical witnessing. As Linfield writes: “photographs excel, more than any other form of either art or journalism, in offering an immediate, viscerally emotional connection to the world,” which we must take as “a starting point of discovery: by connecting these photographs to the world outside their frames, they begin to live and breathe more fully. So do we.”61

Providing this context is one of the main aims of our book, and as readers will note, this necessitates various temporal and analytical transitions. We begin with Rainer’s investigation of how trans individuals shared their most intimate photographs, this time less in service to scientific research than to community building and peer support. He investigates the visual practices in the interwar Berlin magazine Das 3. Geschlecht and examines the complications of retracing the decision-making process of a commercially oriented publisher who reprinted private images with the stated purpose of providing self-empowerment and self-reassurance to an audience of readers presumed to themselves be transvestites. Two essays then shift the focus from the specifically visual to the experiences of trans individuals themselves and their role in the production of knowledge. Annette’s contribution builds the historical bridge from Germany to the United States, tracing the lines of knowledge transfer from Magnus Hirschfeld to Harry Benjamin and then to Alfred Kinsey through a story that focuses on trans individuals themselves. The chapter is a reflection on how historians can and should tell these stories – on how necessary it is to remember and celebrate how extremely marginalized individuals created their own life histories and contributed to the acceleration of medical knowledge. We see a similar process occurring after trans people’s hopes for surgery in the U.S. were blocked by American laws in the 1950s and 1960s, forcing them to look to Europe for experts who could help them.

Alex’s essay performs the vital service of continuing the story that in our first TransTrans exhibition in Calgary we had capped with the publication of Harry Benjamin’s 1966 book The Transsexual Phenomenon.62 Alex describes how the Netherlands became the new refuge for trans individuals after the path to Denmark, which banned surgery on foreigners as a response to the Jorgensen case, was blocked. Describing the social situation for trans people in the Netherlands in the 1950s and 1960s, Alex then follows these individuals as they take advantage of a new possibility for medical treatment: a trip to Burou’s clinic in Casablanca. Quite unlike the other cases we have described, Burou focused almost exclusively on his surgical technique, a technique that other doctors eventually recognized as considerably ahead of its time. He trusted trans surgery seekers to make their own decisions and was untroubled by the fears that had shut down the surgical option in other countries. In 1966, the Dutch medical commission closed the loopholes that had made surgery in that country possible, stating that doctors should stay clear of these severely disturbed patients.

Michael’s chapter then examines the (medical) visual rhetorics of the images on which our research is based, emphasizing how the context and intentions of the image's production mostly diverge from the ways in which they were used. He explores how this tension shaped the histories we are telling, focusing on the medical/scientific categories that Hirschfeld and Benjamin bring to these images – the shift from “cross-dressing” to “transvestite” to “transsexual” – and on the complex interplay this tension reflects between these assertions of authority and the moments of self-fashioning captured in the photographs. In a separate chapter, Michael then takes up our strategies as curators. Having described the exhibitions, we then turn to an intervention from one of the trans people who was central to their success: Nora Eckert. Eckert uses her participation in a video installation in the Berlin version of TransTrans as a jumping off point for a reflection on the transformations of trans identity that she has experienced in her lifetime. We conclude with a summary of how transgender terminology might be historicized.

As a whole, these chapters aim to shift the historical discussion about this history into realms both larger and smaller than previous accounts have emphasized. We seek to highlight the role of intimate relationships between the individuals themselves and between trans patients and their doctors while emphasizing the central importance of repeated flows of knowledge across the Atlantic. Although American media culture sensationalized and trivialized the fates of people like Jorgensen with headlines like “Ex-GI becomes blond beauty,”63 it also provided a vital service by revealing to trans individuals across the world that they were not, in fact, utterly alone. Personal and scientific knowledge networks then produced other refuges for these people, opening up services in the Netherlands under the auspices of a psychiatrist, Frederik Hartsuiker in Haarlem, whose expertise involved the castration of sex offenders. This last point is yet another demonstration of both some of the uncomfortable truths of this history and the intrepidness of trans individuals themselves, who encouraged a wide range of physicians and specialists to take up their cause.

In other words, these histories were never confined to one national context or scientific discipline. In each national setting, the reactions to the wishes of trans people met with a unique cultural response. While the progressive contributions of Weimar German sexological research were literally burned to the ground in the Nazi book-burning frenzies that followed Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in January 1933, the knowledge produced had a very long reach, stretching across Europe and to North America.

GALLERY NOTES: Carla Erskine’s Slides

1 Sandra S. Phillips in Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera Since 1870, ed. Sandra S. Phillips (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 13.

GALLERY NOTES: Images of Otto Spengler

1 B. S. Talmey, “Transvestism: A Contribution to the Study of the Psychology of Sex,” New York Medical Journal 99 (January to June 1914): 362–8.

2 George W. Henry, “Rudolf von H.” in Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns (New York and London: P. B. Hoeber, 1948), 487–98.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

1 The seminal issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly (TSQ), for instance, defines the premise of transgender studies as transgender agency: “Perhaps most importantly, the field encompasses the possibility that transgender people (self-identified or designated as such by others) can be subjects of knowledge as well as objects of knowledge. That is, they can articulate critical knowledge from embodied positions that would otherwise be rendered pathological, marginal, invisible, or unintelligible within dominant and normative organizations of power/knowledge.” Stryker and Currah, “Introduction,” in “Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty- First-Century Transgender Studies,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 5, no. 1 (1 Feb 2018): 1–18, 9.

2 Susan Stryker’s Transgender History (Berkeley, CA: Distributed by Publishers Group West, 2008) was a pivotal intervention that remains seminal. Sociologist Aaron Devor’s work demonstrates both how far the discipline has come within academia and its central connection to a community of trans elders and pathbreakers. Ardel Haefele-Thomas’s excellent new textbook promises to help establish transgender studies as an important teaching field on more university campuses. Ardel Haefele-Thomas, Introduction to Transgender Studies (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2019). Other pathbreaking scholars will be mentioned in the pages to follow.

3 Katie Sutton has recently elaborated on scientific approaches to this subject in a book that was published too late to be entirely integrated into our account here. See Katie Sutton, Sex between Body and Mind: Psychoanalysis and Sexology in the German- Speaking World, 1890s–1930s (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019), especially the chapter “The Case of the Transvestite: Expert Knowledge, Subjects, and Trans Identity Politics,” 173–201.

4 For an example of a history that focuses on the emergence of sexual science (sexology) while also demonstrating the importance of confession and life stories to the formulation of medical categorization, see Harry Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry and the Making of Sexual Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

5 TransTrans: Transgender Histories between Germany and the United States, 1882–1966, curated by Rainer Herrn, Michael Thomas Taylor, and Annette F. Timm in co-operation with the Nickle Galleries, University of Calgary; the Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft in Berlin; the Institute for History and Ethics in Medicine of the Charité Clinic, Berlin; and the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction in Bloomington, Indiana. TransTrans was originally shown at the Nickle Galleries from 27 May to 10 June 2016 and was produced in co-operation with curator Michele Hardy and the support of Christine Sowiak. In Berlin, the exhibition was shown from 7 November 2019 to 2 March 2020. We especially thank Andreas Puskeiler, who designed significant sections of the shows in Calgary and Berlin. We would also like to thank Birgit Bosold, director of the Schwules Museum, and Peter Rehberg, director of the museum’s archive, for their support and guidance in Berlin.

6 Harry Benjamin, The Transsexual Phenomenon: A Scientific Report on Transsexualism and Sex Conversion in the Human Male and Female (New York: The Julian Press, 1966).

7 K. J. Rawson, “Archive,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, nos 1–2 (2014): 24–6.

8 “Archive,” in TSQ 1, nos 1–2 (2014): 25.

9 Rainer Herrn, Schnittmuster des Geschlechts: Transvestitismus und Transsexualität in der frühen Sexualwissenschaft (Giessen: Psychosozial-Verlag, 2005).

10 Alex Bakker, Mijn valse verleden (Amsterdam: Nieuw Amsterdam, 2014); Alex Bakker, My Untrue Past: The Coming of Age of a Trans Man (Victoria, BC: Castle Carrington Publishing, 2019).

11 Haefele-Thomas, Introduction to Transgender Studies, xxx.

12 Susan Stryker, “Forward,” in ibid., xxvii.

13 Joanne Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), 185, and 154–5.

14 Letter from Carla Erskine to Harry Benjamin, 5 Oct 1953, Kinsey Institute Library & Special Collections, Harry Benjamin Collection (hereafter KILSC-HB), Box 4, Ser. II C.

15 Herrn, Schnittmuster des Geschlechts.

16 The photos were exhibited in 2016 as part of the exhibition Outsiders: American Photography and Film, 1950s–1980. See “Casa Susanna: On Photography and the Play of Gender,” Art Gallery of Ontario, accessed 12 June 2019, https://ago.ca/events/casa-susannaphotography- and-play-gender. They were first published by Michael Hurst and Robert Swope as Casa Susanna (New York: PowerHouse Books, 2005).

17 Herrn, Schnittmuster des Geschlechts, 151. Herrn has since published a facsimile edition of all five issues: Rainer Herrn, Das 3. Geschlecht: Reprint der 1930–1932 erschienen Zeitschrift für Transvestiten (Hamburg: Männerschwarm Verlag, 2016).

18 Alex Bakker, Transgender in Nederland: Een buitengewone geschiedenis (Amsterdam: Boom Uitgevers, 2018).

19 Harry Benjamin tried to track as many of these surgeries as possible in the years leading up to the publication of his book (Benjamin, The Transsexual Phenomenon). The handwritten tables in his notes for this book include mention of four surgeries performed in Mexico between 1955 and 1960, three by Dr. Daniel Lopez Ferrer, and one (in 1960) by a Dr. Calderon. Benjamin lists six surgeries in the Netherlands in the mid-1950s (Drs. Koch and Nauta) but does not seem to track them after that. See KILSC-HB 28. One more surgery by Dr. Ferrer (Debbie Mayne in the mid-1950s) is mentioned in Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed, 147.

20 C. van Emde Boas, “De behandeling van transseksisten in Nederland 1953–1973: Een les van 20 jaar attitudeschommelingen,” Medisch Contact 29 (1974).

21 Taylor, “Review of Schnittmuster,” 314. This praise for the book was echoed by Vivian Namaste. See Viviane K. Namaste, review of Schnittmuster des Geschlechts: Transvestitismus und Transsexualität in der frühen Sexualwissenschaft by Rainer Herrn, Journal of the History of Sexuality 16, no. 2 (2007): 326–8.

22 To name only their most important publications for our purposes: Joanne Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2002); Susan Stryker, Transgender History (Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2008); Genny Beemyn, “US History,” in Trans Bodies, Trans Selves: A Resource for the Transgender Community, ed. Laura Erickson-Schroth (Oxford University Press, 2014), 501–36; Genny Beemyn and Susan Rankin, The Lives of Transgender People (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Deborah Rudacille, The Riddle of Gender: Science, Activism, and Transgender Rights (New York: Pantheon Books, 2005); and Leslie Feinberg, Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Rupaul (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996). We received a copy of Julian Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018) too late to integrate all of its important insights here.

23 Leslie Feinberg, Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998); Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2007); and Sandy Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 10, no. 2 (1 May 1992): 150–76. See also: Pat Califia, Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1997); Mario Martino, Emergence: A Transsexual Autobiography (New York: Crown Publishers, 1977); Dierdre N. McCloskey, Crossing: A Memoir (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Livia Prüll, Trans* im Glück – Geschlechtsangleichung als Chance: Autobiographie, Medizingeschichte, Medizinethik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2016); Mark Rees, Dear Sir or Madam: The Autobiography of a Female-to- Male Transsexual (London: New York, 1996); Renee Richards, Second Serve (New York: Stein and Day Pub, 1992); and Donna Rose, Wrapped in Blue: A Journey of Discovery (Round Rock, TX: Living Legacy Press, 2003).

24 Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back.”

25 Again, we are limiting this list to the works that have been most influential for this book: Persson Perry Baumgartinger, Trans Studies: Historische, begriffliche und aktivistische Aspekte (Vienna: Zaglossus, 2017); Aaron Devor, FTM: Female-to-Male Transsexuals in Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016); Richard Ekins, “Science, Politics and Clinical Intervention: Harry Benjamin, Transsexualism and the Problem of Heteronormativity,” Sexualities 8, no. 3 (2005): 306–28; Viviane Namaste, Sex Change, Social Change: Reflections on Identity, Institutions and Imperialism (Toronto: Women’s Press, 2011); Arlene Stein, Unbound: Transgender Men and the Remaking of Identity (New York: Pantheon Books, 2018); Amy L. Stone and Jaime Cantrell, eds, Out of the Closet, into the Archives: Researching Sexual Histories (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2015); Nicholas M. Teich, Transgender 101: A Simple Guide to a Complex Issue (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); David Valentine, Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).

26 Much has been written about all three figures. For overviews, see: Rainer Herrn and Annette F. Timm, “Lili Elbe,” in Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBTQ) History, vol. 3 (Farmington Hills, MI: Charles Scribner & Sons, 2019), 500–502, which discusses why what is usually taken as her memoir (Niels Hoyer, ed., Man into Woman: The First Sex Change: A Portrait of Lili Elbe: The True and Remarkable Transformation of the Painter Einar Wegener, trans. James Stenning [London: Blue Boat Books, 2004]) needs to be read more circumspectly. See also: Richard F. Docter, Becoming a Woman: A Biography of Christine Jorgensen (New York: Routledge, 2007); and Roberta Cowell, Roberta Cowell’s Story (New York: British Book Centre, 1954).

27 Tom Hooper, The Danish Girl, 2015.

28 Rainer Herrn and Michael Thomas Taylor, “Transvestites/Transsexuals,” in Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBTQ) History, vol. 3 (Farmington Hills, MI: Charles Scribner & Sons, 2019), 1640–44.

29 Given the much more multicultural atmosphere of German and Dutch cities today, it is not surprising that scholars who focus on the present have much more to say about colonial and racist contexts for trans lives. See Jin Haritaworn, Queer Lovers and Hateful Others: Regenerating Violent Times and Places (London: Pluto Press, 2015).

30 Non-European contexts for trans identity would raise very different questions than those we are able to address here, such as the relationship between trans identity and such cultural practices as eunuchism. See for example, Howard Chiang, After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018); and Veronika Fuechtner, Douglas E. Haynes, and Ryan M. Jones, eds., A Global History of Sexual Science, 1880–1960 (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018).

31 Docter provides a detailed account of the media furor around Jorgensen’s transition and describes her later fame. Docter, Becoming a Woman.

32 As far as we know, Burou did not keep careful records. This is an estimate derived from personal communications, detailed in J. Joris Hage, Refaat B. Karim, and Donald R. Sr. Laub, “On the Origin of Pedicled Skin Inversion Vaginoplasty: Life and Work of Dr. Georges Burou of Casablanca,” Annals of Plastic Surgery 59, no. 6 (2007): 723–9, esp. 725.

33 For examples of trans individuals who made their careers in entertainment, see: Herrn, Schnittmuster des Geschlechts, 76–7; Stryker, Transgender History, 23, 29, and 77; Katie Sutton, “‘We Too Deserve a Place in the Sun’: The Politics of Transvestite Identity in Weimar Germany,” German Studies Review 35, no. 2 (2012): 335–54; and Alex Bakker’s chapter in this book.

34 For a history of early measures in the United States, see Clare Sears, Arresting Dress: Cross- Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth- Century San Francisco (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).

35 In a discussion of Casa Susanna photos, for instance, Ms. Bob Davis writes: “The use of aliases is evidence of the early community’s relationship to the larger culture, a relationship based on fear of discovery and a need for secrecy. Though we can never be sure of an individual’s motivation, it seems logical that within their community transgender people use names that accurately reflect their gender identities, rather than names assigned at birth. However, the use of multiple surnames means that some early community members were not out in their daily lives, a decision that archivists and researchers must respect” (626). See Bob Davis, “Using Archives to Identify the Trans* Women of Casa Susanna,” TSQ 2, no. 4 (2015): 621–34, here 626.

36 For convincing evidence that trans activism has played a decisive role in the production of academic knowledge, see the various contributions to Dan Irving and Rupert Raj, eds, Trans Activism in Canada: A Reader (Toronto: Brown Bear Press, 2014).

37 See the release form signed by Carla Erskine on 24 February 1964 in KILSC-HB, Box 25-1, Permissions (1964).

38 Emily Skidmore, True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2017).

39 See Aaron H. Devor and Nicholas Matte, “One Inc. and Reed Erickson: The Uneasy Collaboration of Gay and Trans Activism, 1964–2003,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10, no. 2 (2004): 179–209; Aaron Devor and Nicholas Matte, “Building a Better World for Transpeople: Reed Erickson and the Erickson Educational Foundation,” International Journal of Transgenderism 10, no. 1 (2007): 47–68. The Erickson Educational Foundation made most of Harry Benjamin’s later work possible, but as Abram Lewis argues, recognition of Erickson’s contribution came late in part because of his drug use and his interest in New Age spirituality. Abram J. Lewis, “‘I Am 64 and Paul McCartney Doesn’t Care’: The Haunting of the Transgender Archive and the Challenges of Queer History,” Radical History Review 120 (2014): 13–34.

40 George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994).

41 As told to Annette Timm by George Chauncey, Calgary, 23 Aug 2019.

42 Alex Bakker’s interview partners and the Paris Match article that he cites in his essay did mention a few trans people of colour, but we simply have very little information about these individuals and there is no mention of them in the medical records we have relied on for this book. See Bakker’s essay for allusions to his interviewees and V. Merlin, “L’homme qui change le sex,” Paris Match (1974): 37–9.

43 Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed, 86 and 199– 200. See also Emily Skidmore, “Constructing the ‘Good Transsexual’: Christine Jorgensen, Whiteness, and Heteronormativity in the Midtwentieth- Century Press,” Feminist Studies 37, no. 2 (2011): 270–300, esp. 270.

44 As with other areas of trans history, it is often trans people themselves who are doing the most intrepid digging. See the discussion in the blog: Monica Roberts, “TransGriot: Who Was the First African-American Transwoman?,” TransGriot (blog), 26 May 2009, accessed 28 June 2019, https://transgriot.blogspot. com/2009/05/who-was-first-african-american. html. For a pioneering study of black trans history, see C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

45 Quoted from Delisa Newton, “From Man to Woman,” Sepia (May 1966): 66 in Skidmore, “Constructing the ‘Good Transsexual,’” 292.

46 Hilary Malatino, Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019), 119.

47 Skidmore contrasts stories about Newton and two other women of colour, Marta Olmos Ramiro and Laverne Peterson, in African American publications like Sepia and Ebony with the ridicule they endured in print in the mainstream tabloid press, particularly the National Insider, where they were regularly derided as not “authentic” transsexuals. She contrasts this with the relatively respectful treatment of Christine Jorgensen, Charlotte McLeod, and Tamara Rees. See Skidmore, “Constructing the ‘Good Transsexual,’” esp. 271.

48 As Treva Ellison, Kai M. Green, Matt Richardson, and C. Riley Snorton have argued, exploring black trans histories involves an excavation of “repressed genealogies.” We have not undertaken such an exploration here, not least because the stories we tell emerge primarily from the kind of archives (of the medical establishment) from which black subjects were generally excluded. Treva Ellison et al., “We Got Issues: Toward a Black Trans*/ Studies,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 4, no. 2 (2017): 162–9.

49 Heike Bauer, The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017).

50 Bauer suggests this was “direct response to the perilousness of [Hirschfeld’s] political exile,” rather than being motivated by shame or secrecy. Bauer, Hirschfeld Archives, 105.

51 For transvestites in Germany, see especially Katie Sutton, “‘We Too Deserve a Place in the Sun’: The Politics of Transvestite Identity in Weimar Germany,” German Studies Review 35, no. 2 (2012): 335–54.

52 See for instance, Charlie McNabb, Nonbinary Gender Identities: History, Culture, Resources (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018). There is also a growing interest in colonial legacies within disciplines focusing on the present social and political position of trans people in Western societies, and much of it is framed in rather ahistorical terms. See for example, Jin Haritaworn, Queer Lovers and Hateful Others.

53 See especially Michaela Lindinger, Sonderlinge, Aussenseiter, Femmes fatales: Das “andere” Wien um 1900 (Vienna: Amalthea, 2015). Lindinger notes that Benjamin was the only doctor among those she discusses who specialized in the rejuvenation of women (148); “Im Zentrum stand die ‘(Wieder-)Herstellung der Weiblichkeit an sich’” (the re-establishment of femininity stood at the center), 148. A fuller account of this earlier history can also be found in Heiko Stoff, Ewige Jugend: Konzepte der Verjüngung vom späten 19. Jahrhundert bis ins Dritte Reich (Cologne: Böhlau, 2004). Stoff focuses primarily on the history of masculinities, though he has some discussion of how neuroses related to masculine identity could be conditioned by ideas about femininity. More general overviews can be found in: Chandak Sengoopta, “The Modern Ovary: Constructions, Meanings, Uses,” History of Science 38, no. 4 (2000): 425–88; and Chandak Sengoopta, The Most Secret Quintessence of Life: Sex, Glands, and Hormones, 1850–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

54 Susan Stryker, “Biopolitics,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, nos 1–2 (2014): 38–42.

55 For an important contribution to these efforts, focused on the nineteenth century, see C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides.

56 In what Stryker describes as “the mother lode of transphobic feminist rhetoric, tropes, and discourse,” Janice Raymond provided a blueprint for arguments about trans exclusion that continue to be repeated today. See Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979). Recent popular media attention has created a new wave of public acrimony, too extensive to detail here, between feminists on either side of this debate. For an excellent overview see Sophie Lewis, “How British Feminism Became Anti-Trans,” New York Times, 8 Feb 2019, sec. Opinion, https:// www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/opinion/ terf-trans-women-britain.html. See also Jack Halberstam, “Trans* Feminisms,” in Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 107–28. Halberstam asks about the “constellations of alliance and opposition” that emerge “when the male-female binary crumbles” (108); the book points, instead, to modes of embodiment and identity that move away from “idealized notions of discrete bodies laying claim to well-established categories of male and female” to offer “a different language for embodiment that draws from humananimal relations, uncertain experiences of embodiment, and haphazard, profuse, and viral models of embodiment” (127).

57 Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986): 3–64.

58 Katie Sutton, “Sexology’s Photographic Turn: Visualizing Trans Identity in Interwar Germany,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 27, no. 3 (Sept 2018): 442–79.

59 Sutton, “Sexology’s Photographic Turn,” 470.

60 Susie Linfield, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Dora Apel and Shawn Michelle Smith, Lynching Photographs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

61 Linfield, Cruel Radiance; Apel and Smith, Lynching Photographs.

62 Benjamin, The Transsexual Phenomenon.

63 “Ex-GI Becomes Blond Beauty,” New York Daily News, 1 Dec 1952.