A review of James I. Martin’s Sexual and Gender Minority History: A Counter-Narrative. Oxford University Press, 2025.

This is a LGBT+ history book. However I will be reviewing mainly the trans elements.

Despite the title, this book is a history of LGBT in the US only, apart from a quick foreshadowing in Weimar Germany. The one and only mention of England is the names of the last two men to be hanged for sodomy in 1830 - that is it, really. I am surprised that Martin’s English publisher, Oxford University Press, did not insist on adding the term “US” into the books title.

James I. Martin was an Associate Professor at the NYU Silver School of Social Work where he published several sociological and social psychological studies of sex and gender minorities. He did not publish as a historian.

In chapter 2 “Germany in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries” Martin gives quickie summaries of Károly Mária Kertbeny, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Magnus Hirschfeld, Adolf Brand etc. Of Hirschfeld (p 14-16) Martin tells us that he was a co-founder in 1897 of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee which applied three times to the Reichstag to decriminalise homosexuality, and in 1919 he founded the Institute for Sexual Science. As Martin tells it, he presumably did no work with trans persons in that none are mentioned. On p27 we are told of the destruction of the Institute. On p95, while discussing Virginia Prince, Martin says erroneously: “At the time, such men referred to themselves as transvestites, the English translation of a term invented by Magnus Hirschfeld more than 40 years earlier”. And equally erroneously “transsexuals, an identity label also invented by Hirschfeld”.

Having skirted around Germany’s trans history, Martin then totally ignores that of England, France, Italy, Brazil, India, Thailand, etc.

The first transvesting, anywhere, that he mentions is in Chapter 4 “Foundations in the United States” where there is a single paragraph on female-born persons who fought as men in the US civil wars of the 1770s and the 1860s such as Deborah Sampson and Albert Cashier. This is followed by a full page on Charlie Parkhurst, Mary Fields and other unnamed masculine women/trans men on the frontier. (p33-5) For male-born persons, he mentions only the gender social construction of ‘fairy’ particularly in New York (p40-1), drawing mainly on George Chauncey’s Gay New York - although one searches in vain in Martin’s book for the best known ‘fairy’ who published two books and many journal articles in this period, that is Jennie June/Ralph Werther/Mowry Saben. Nor is there any mention of the first sexological study of trans women in the US, that by Bernard Talmey, 1913-4.

In his chapter 4 summary, Martin writes: “Men developed devoted and sometimes sexual relationships in the all-male cowboy, railroad, mining, and logging communities of the frontier West before encroaching settlement extinguished their freedom to do so. Many women escaped their prescribed gender role by dressing and behaving as men in military service or by living independently in the rural West.” There is no mention of the few male-born persons who did socially transition such as Alice Baker and Mrs Noonan, army wife.

Chapter 5 “The Jazz Age” quickly summarises prohibition and the Harlem Renaissance. Cross-dressing singer Gladys Bentley (p47,60) is mentioned, as are the Hamilton Lodge Balls (p50,60), Julian Eltinge (p51) and The Pansy Craze, where only Gene Malin (p52) is mentioned. Strangely he mentions Radclyffe-Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, in The Pansy Craze section - John Radclyffe-Hall would not be amused. Pansies such as Frankie Jaxon, Valda Grey, Rae Bourbon are not mentioned.

Chapter 6 “The 1930s and the Great Depression ” tells of the post-Prohibition drag clubs in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago. But not much else re trans persons.

Chapter 7 “The World at War” is almost all about gay man and lesbians in the military. It does not mention then-starting ball organizer Phil Black, nor the research by Jan Gay that included several biographies of trans women and was published as George W. Henry’s Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns, 1941, nor the arrival of the US’s first completed trans woman, Charlotte Charlaque, a patient of Magnus Hirschfeld who had been deported from Nazi Germany.

Chapter 8 “The 1950s and the Homophile Movement ” describes the Lavender Scare and state oppression on one hand, and the emerging gay and lesbian self-help organizations on the other: Mattachine, One Inc, Daughters of Bilitis - and then very quickly (p95) Virginia Prince and Christine Jorgensen. However the trans pioneer activist Louise Lawrence is not mentioned at all, and Harry Benjamin who introduced Prince and Jorgenson to each other is not mentioned until later.

Likewise: Claire Elgin, who would later become a successful business woman and the first trans woman millionaire, was creating waves in 1953-4 but is not mentioned, nor is Tamara Rees. In 1953 Harry Benjamin participated in a symposium with the Austrian neuro-psychiatrist Emil Gutheil. Benjamin’s paper, “Transsexualism and Transvestism as Psycho-Somatic and Somato-Psychic Syndromes” is in effect the first draft of what 12 years later will become his book The Transsexual Phenomenon. From the early 1950s, Dr Elmer Belt in Los Angeles started doing vaginoplasty for trans women at the urging of Benjamin. This predated the team led by Poul Fogh-Andersen in Copenhagen, and Belt was doing vaginoplasty using skin grafts from the thigh, buttocks or back while the Fogh-Andersen team was doing only orchiectomy and penectomy. In 1958 the 19-year-old trans woman we refer to as Agnes approached Dr Robert Stoller at the University of California at Los Angeles Medical Center and persuaded him that she was intersex, leading to successful vaginoplasty. These are major events in the history of transsexuality in the US, and yet Martin seems totally indifferent to them.

Chapter 9 “A Rising Tide of Resistance” opens with the general uprisings of the 1960s, by blacks, feminists and anti-war protestors. The gay/trans riots at Cooper Do-Nuts, Los Angeles; Dewey’s restaurant, Philadelphia and Compton’s Cafeteria, San Francisco are mentioned. After more details of gay/lesbian activism, there is a short summary of Virginia Prince and the creation of the Foundation for Personality Expression (FPE) and Reed Erickson and his financing of Harry Benjamin’s work. The Transsexual Phenomenon is mentioned. (all p111) Stryker is given as the sole authority for all three. Neither Docter’s nor my biographies of Prince are referred to.

However Donald Wollheim/Darrel Raynor’s influential book, A Year Among the Girls, is not even mentioned; nor is Susan Valenti’s Casa Susana’s trans getaway in the Catskills; nor Andy Warhol’s ‘superstars’, Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn and Jackie Curtis; nor Jane County; nor Rachel Harlow.

A major omission is the opening in the late 1960s of the university hospital gender clinics: Johns Hopkins, Minnesota; Stanford, UCLA. Even major sex-change doctors other than Benjamin, such as John Money at Johns Hopkins and Robert Stoller at UCLA are not mentioned as such, only as authors of one or two papers. Drs Stanley Biber and Marci Bowers are also not mentioned.

Chapter 10 “Stonewall and its Aftermath” briefly summarizes David Carter’s book, avoids naming any persons who may have been present at the riots, but does names journalists who wrote about them. The Queens Liberation Front founded by Lee Brewster and Barbara de Lamere is mentioned (p120-1), but Martin follows Susan Stryker in not naming Barbara correctly - but only by a short-lived stage name of ‘Bunny Eisenhower’. This is to refer to a trans woman only by one of her dead names. Barbara was one of very few New York trans women of the late sixties to eventually achieve completion surgery. Brewster’s Mardi Gras Boutique which lasted for 30 years, and was the place to shop for trans persons, impersonators and others, is not mentioned. Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries and STAR house, both founded by Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P Johnson are mentioned but we are not told what happened to Sylvia and Marsha in later years, not even that Marsha was murdered.

However trans activist groups in other US cities at the same time are not mentioned at all: such as TAO in Miami or COG in San Francisco, nor entertainment troupes like the Cockettes.

Martin writes (p124) “During the 1970s, Virginia Prince used the term transgenderist to refer to gender-variant people who did not consider themselves transsexuals, particularly those who were male bodied. However, it would take until the 1990s for transgender to become an umbrella term for most, if not all, gender-variant people”. This sentence has several difficulties. Prince did use ‘transgender’, ‘transgenderist’, ‘transgenderal’ but only a few times. She was by nature transgenderphobic, but the false attribution of her endorsing the word while being the most divisive of trans activists caused many to not adopt the term ‘transgender’ for a long time. For more detail see my The Myth that Transgender is a Princian Concept.

Chapter 11 “Turbulence and Visibility in the 1970s”. A lot happened re trans persons in the later 1970s: Lou Reed and Rachel; Benjamin’s practice was inherited by Jeanne Hoff who herself transitioned; the Diane Delia murder; DSM III removed homosexuality and added transvestism; Kim Kristy discovered Sulka and reverted to male and became editor of Female Mimics; Rachel Harlow dated the brother of Grace Kelly; the film Let Me Die a Woman was released; The Johns Hopkins Gender Clinic was closed; Dog Day Afternoon.

However the only trans event for this period mentioned by Martin is the Erickson Educational Foundation’s symposiums that later became the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA) symposiums, and their first Standards of Care. He does not mention that HBIGDA later became WPATH.

Chapter 12 “The Deluge and Beyond”. This is the 1980s and the scourge of AIDS. Martin says nothing of trans women dying of AIDS although many did. He lists (p158-9) Leslie Feinberg, the adoption of the word ‘transgender’, states allowing birth certificates and driver’s licences to be changed, The International Conference on Transgender Law and Employment Policy, GenderPAC, Brandon Teena and Boys Don’t Cry, Transgender Day of Remembrance.

Here the book stops. Was a first draft written 35 years years ago, but only now published? That would certainly explain some of the omissions, although there are citations to much more recent books.

Why does Martin call this book a ‘counter-narrative’? “Counter-narratives are stories told from the perspectives of people who are marginalized in society, and thus they serve to resist the domination and marginalization perpetuated by the dominant narrative.” The problem is that such a counter-narrative has already been done many times in books by George Chauncy, Lillian Faderman, Florence Tamagne etc. These three are cited, and are mainly histories of gays and lesbians. Histories of trans people that are not cited and their contents not used in Martin’s bibliography: for Weimar Germany: Rainer Herrn, Raimund Wolfert; for the US: Michail Takach, Barry Reay.

Reay had previously named his book Trans America: A Counter-History. However I would deny the term ‘counter-history’ in both cases as they both draw on established and published histories. At this point in time, a counter history would draw on neglected sources and alter our perceptions of our own history.

Not that I have any problems with the books by Chauncey, Faderman, Tamagne etc. They are on my shelves and I do return to them now and then. But there is a new generation of historians who are looking at our history differently: Benjamin Kahan, Laurie Marhoefer, Ben Miller, Sabine Meyer and of course Rainer Herrn and Raimund Wolfert.

At £49.00/US$109.30/C$121.55/€76.99 Martin’s book is outrageously overpriced, without delivering quality content.

If you want a trans history of the US, despite much repeating of what is well known, I suggest Reay’s book, at a fraction of the price.

If you want a queer history of the US, mainly about gays and lesbians, but with a lesser part on trans history, I suggest (also at a reasonable price):

Michael Bronski's A Queer History of the United States - a review.