Foreword

Aaron Devor

As this book goes to press, the two most widely used medical diagnostic manuals in the world take differing approaches to the pathologization of gender diversity. The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) (2013) includes “gender dysphoria” as a mental illness, whereas the United Nations’ World Health Organization’s International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-11) (2019) lists “gender incongruence of adolescence or adulthood” as a “sexual health condition,” rather than as a pathology, thereby opening a door to providing health care rather than treating disease.

Clearly, while the medical community generally agrees that medical interventions should be provided to those who need them, they are divided on the question of what constitutes “need.” Those who might request such services are not always in agreement about what level of access is appropriate. Should treatment be provided on demand, by informed consent alone? Should physicians screen patients? Are psychiatric assessments needed? What we learn in this book is that these questions have been with us for more than a century.

The authors of this book have become colleagues and friends as a result of our shared commitment to understanding how trans and other gender diverse people have actively contributed to medical discourse about gender diversity. I have been an eager supporter as they developed their ideas and created effective vehicles for getting them out to the public. As the world’s first Chair in Transgender Studies, I am pleased and honoured that they approached me to write this foreword.

I first met Rainer Herrn, Michael Thomas Taylor, and Annette Timm in March 2016 when they came to talk about this work at one of the “Moving Trans History Forward” conferences that I host in Victoria, British Columbia. By June 2016 the TransTrans exhibit discussed in this book was opened for public display at the Nickle Galleries at the University of Calgary, in conjunction with the annual Congress for the Humanities and Social Sciences. At Annette Timm’s invitation, I provided some context for the show by giving an archivist’s talk about the Transgender Archives that I founded at the University of Victoria, and by participating in a curator’s roundtable.

Later that month I met Alex Bakker in Amsterdam at the twenty-fourth Scientific Symposium of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) for which I serve as the official historian, an author of their Standards of Care since 1999, and the coordinator since 2014 of multiple translations of the WPATH Standards of Care (eighteen at last count). At those meetings, Alex appeared on the program directly after the official opening by Her Majesty Queen Máxima of the Netherlands and spoke movingly about “Transgender Holland: Sixty Years of Culture and Care.”

This book, which grew out of those talks, considers and illuminates the complex relationships that trans and gender-diverse people have always had with medical service providers. Over the past several years, and extending into the foreseeable future, trans and other people who contribute to gender diversity have been leading a movement to depathologize gender transitioning. Those who promote this approach argue that so long as being gender diverse remains defined as a mental illness, as it is in many parts of the world, trans and other people who contribute to gender diversity will continue to be treated as incapable of making their own informed medical decisions and will suffer from high levels of discrimination and violence. Ironically, despite supposed mental incapacities gender-diverse people find that they most often have to educate medical professionals about how to provide them with proper medical care.

However, many contemporary people argue that a medical diagnosis of some sort is in the best interests of those who wish to engage medical professionals in their gender transitions. After all, medical providers generally swear an oath to do no harm, most of them like to get paid for their work, and no one wants to get sued. Furthermore, people often fail to understand that many gender-diverse people have legitimate needs for medical interventions. Having an officially recognized medical diagnosis on the books helps more people to understand that being gender diverse is a real part of natural human variation, and this better understanding helps to decrease stigmatization and violence. A diagnosis also guides medical service providers in how to care for trans and other people who contribute to gender diversity, to do so with little fear of malpractice litigation, and to get paid for bona fide medical services.

Others of My Kind: Transatlantic Transgender Histories gives us a richly illustrated window into how these kinds of questions were handled by gender-diverse people and by medical professionals from the end of the nineteenth century until the 1960s; from the time of Magnus Hirschfeld, who oversaw some of the first attempts at transsexual transitions in the Western world, to that of Harry Benjamin, who wrote the first book on transsexualism and oversaw some of the first medical transitions in the United States. In this book, we learn new information about how the medical knowledge gained about gender diversity in early twentieth-century Germany traveled from gender-diverse people to medical professionals, and across the Atlantic to the United States.

Virtually unknown until this book, are the names and contributions of those gender-diverse people who taught the pioneering giants of trans medicine. What we learn in Others of My Kind is that there is nothing new about gender-diverse people educating their doctors. Magnus Hirschfeld, Alfred Kinsey, Harry Benjamin, and many of the other great pioneers of trans medicine were taught by gender-diverse people – people who knew that they were not delusional and who were eager to have their gender identities recognized by doctors, and by a diagnosis. Christine Jorgensen and Roberta Cowell are names known to many people. Less well known are Otto Spengler, Carla Erskine, Louise Lawrence, Lotte Hahm, Willy Pape, John O., Baron Hermann von Teschenberg – all of whom taught the fathers of trans medicine about gender diversity.

Each of the authors in this book gives us a different take on how trans and other people who contribute to gender diversity interacted with the most sympathetic medical men of their day. Each chapter is generously illustrated with rare historical photographs. Rainer Herrn introduces for the first time in English the earliest known magazine for transvestites, Das 3. Geschlecht (The 3rd sex). (Herrn previously published a facsimile of the entire German publication run.)

Annette Timm recounts how Otto Spengler befriended Bernard Talmey, who wrote about transvestite social networks in a 1914 article in the New York Medical Journal. Timm also elucidates how Alfred Kinsey and Harry Benjamin built a friendship and a knowledge base about gender variance, and about how Carla Erskine and Louise Lawrence, who thought of themselves as “doing missionary work for our cause” (p. 103), befriended and assisted Kinsey and Benjamin as they learned about genders beyond women and men.

Alex Bakker recounts stories about Dutch trans pioneers of the 1950s and 1960s that he learned from archival research and oral histories he conducted. Bakker explains the harsh realities of life during this period for gender-diverse people. He recounts that there was one doctor in the Netherlands who would do the desired surgeries at a time when none would do so in the United States. When, not long after the Christine Jorgensen story spread around the globe, Denmark closed its borders to foreigners seeking “the operation,” Harry Benjamin arranged for some of his patients to travel to the Netherlands where castration was still possible for well-screened candidates. Later, many Dutch trans women and a few Dutch trans men journeyed to Casablanca, where Dr. Georges Burou famously operated on up to a thousand trans patients.

Michael Thomas Taylor then immerses us in the visual rhetoric of representation of gender diversity starting at the end of the nineteenth century and moving through the first half of the twentieth century. He analyses the use of photography by Hirschfeld, Benjamin, and others to produce “before” and “after,” clothed and nude, pictures that together, and only together, illustrated that an individual was transvestite. In a final chapter, reflecting the shared curation of the four contributors, he also relates how the TransTrans team grappled with how to tell the story they wished to tell in the TransTrans exhibit with maximum respect for the long-dead people depicted in photographs of fifty and a hundred years ago. This chapter tells the story of the thinking that went into how the 2016 TransTrans art installation show at the University of Calgary and in Berlin was fashioned

This is an important book. Most people who think at all about the relationships between medical communities and gender-diverse people assume that, until very recently, trans and other people who contribute to gender diversity have been passive and grateful consumers of medical expertise. This work shines a light on the many ways that gender-diverse people have been very proactive about bringing their needs to the attention of medical experts for more than 100 years. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to have a gender identity other than what your sex dictated that it should be was to be entirely delusional. To have a medical condition was something else entirely. With proper medical documentation, one could go out in public dressed in accordance with one’s gender identity, and sometimes even receive treatment to effect physical transition. A few brave gender-diverse people on both sides of the Atlantic made it their project to enlist medical professionals to create diagnoses so that they could be seen as real and be provided with treatment. This could only happen when they were willing to take the risk to trust the few doctors who were curious and willing to learn.

Aaron Devor, PhD, FSSS, FSTLHE

Founder and Inaugural Chair in

Transgender Studies

Founder and Academic Director,

Transgender Archives

Founder and Host, Moving Trans History

Forward conferences

Professor, Sociology Department

University of Victoria, Canada