The First Drafts of Trans Histories Part I: 1900-1950

It is a cliché that journalism is the first draft of history, and so it is with trans history. The following are journalists who were in the right place at the right time and saw the potential story

Mowry Saben (1870-1950)

Saben, privately educated and fluent in Latin, French and German, and an alumnus of Harvard, started writing articles and essays for various newspapers and magazines in the 1900s, and became an established speaker travelling across the country giving lectures on Emmerson, Whitman, Goethe, Shakespeare and Francis Bacon, Havelock Ellis, Krafft-Ebing, religion and freedom.

In the early 1890s Saben, on the down low, had spent time in the Bowery and elsewhere in New York City, transvesting as a fairie or female-impersonator using the name Jennie June, and saying that her male name was Ralph Werther - and later that it was Earl Lind. She socialised at Paresis Hall, was abused by rough young men and contracted venereal diseases.

But Jennie June was, of course, also Mowry Saben, and contributed several essays about transvesting to the American Journal of Urology and Sexology, 1918-20. These essays were expanded into two books: Autobiography of an Androgyne, 1918 and The Female Impersonators, 1922 which have become the major books about gay/trans life in 1890s New York.

• Earl Lind (“Ralph Werther” – “Jennie June”) Autobiography of an Androgyne. Ed., with an Introduction by Alfred W Herzog. The Medico-Legal Journal, 1918. Reprinted Arno Press, 1975. Digital Transgender Archive. Wikisource.
• Ralph Werther-Jennie June (“Earl Lind”). The Female Impersonators; a sequel to the Autobiography of an androgyne and an account of some of the author's experiences during his six years' career as instinctive female-impersonator in New York's underworld. Ed., with an introduction, by Alfred W. Herzog. The Medico-Legal Journal. 1922. Reprinted Arno Press, 1975. Digital Transgender Archive. Wikisource.
• Zagria “Mowry Saben/Ralph Werther/Earl Lind/Jennie June (1870 - 1950) journalist, female impersonator”, Gender Variance Who’s Who April 2024. Online.

Louise (Loulou) Lassen (1876-1947)

Lassen was for many years the only female journalist at Copenhagen’s Politiken, and also wrote for the sister publication Ekstra Bladet. She was a foreign correspondent and also wrote about medical issues.

In October 1930, rumours circulated in Copenhagen about the non-appearance of Einar Wegener, to the extent that sales were not happening at Gerda Gottlieb's exhibition of paintings. Lassen had interviewed Gerda in 1927, and was now able to interview Lili Elvenes (the name that Wegener had now taken after gender surgery) and produced a short series of articles for Politiken and Ekstra Bladet. It was Loulou who proposed that Lili Elvenes be known as Lili Elbe. The first article was by Loulou about Lili and Gerda. In her write-up Loulou stressed that there was nothing homosexual in the lives of Lili and Gerda. The marriage had not been sexual, Lili had been a woman's spirit in a man's body since childhood, and more than that, that Einar and Lili were two different identities.

The second article was a transcript of a telephone call between Copenhagen's Dr Rank and Dr Kurt Warnekros, who was referred to as von Warnekros. Warnekros boasted that he had performed an unprecedented operation that the top French doctors were incapable of. There was no mention of the other trans women who had been operated on under the aegis of Magnus Hirschfeld.

• Loulou Lassen. “Et Liv gennem to Tilværelser. En Fortid som Mand og en Fremtid som Kvinde. Lili Elbe fortæller om Maleren Einar Wegener og om sig selv.” Politiken, 28 February 1931: 5–6. Online.
• Loulou Lassen. “En tragisk Livsskæbne afsluttedes i Gaar.” Politiken, 14 September 1931: 5. Online.
• Jette Drachmann Sollinge. “Loulou Lassen” Dansk Kvindebiografisk Leksikon / Pressefolk. Online.
• Zagria. “Lili Elbe, media construct” Gender Variance Who’s Who, 13 January 2015. Online.

Niels Hoyer (1884-1969)

Ernst Harthern, born Ernst Ludwig Harthern Jacobson, wrote several books under the pen-name of Neils Hoyer. He was raised in Stade, Lower Saxony, and was of Jewish descent. His father abandoned him, and his mother died when he was nine. Despite difficulties he did finally become a journalist and covered Scandinavia for German newspapers until the Nazi takeover in 1933 when his writings were banned. He escaped the German occupation of Denmark by moving to Sweden, and in 1943 was part of the team that helped the majority of Danish Jews to escape to Sweden.

Lili Elvenes had worked on an autobiography aided by her former wife, Gerda, and the journalist Loulou Lassen. In December 1930, however, an ill-intentioned article in the Danish tabloid Sandheden (‘Truth’) characterized the planned publication as a ‘scandalous book’ (‘Skandalebogen’), leading the Danish publisher to drop the book option. Elevenes then approached Harthern, who was based in Copenhagen. Using the unfinished manuscript, Harthern rewrote a new version in German. Elevenes died before it was finished. Translated into Danish and edited, this became most of Fra Mand til Kvinde: Lili Elbes Bekendelser, 1931. The German edition Ein Mensch wechselt sein Geschlecht, 1932 was not a translation from the Danish edition, but a re-editing of Harthern’s manuscript. The 1933 English Man into Woman, is a translation of the German edition.

• Lili Elbe. Fra mand til kvinde: Lili Elbes bekendelser. Hage & Clausen, 1931
• Niels Hoyer. “Ein Mensch wechselt sein Geschlecht.” Scherl Magazin, 7 May 1931: 439-446. Online.
• Lili Elbe, edited by Niels Hoyer, Ein Mensch wechselt sein Geschlecht ; Eine Lebensbeichte ; Aus hinterlassenen Papieren. Reissner, Dresden 1932.
• Neils Hoyer (ed) translated H.J. Stenning; introd. by Norman Haire. Man into woman: an authentic record of a change of sex, London: Jarrold Publishers, 1933.
• DE.Wikipedia (Ernst Harthern)
• Pamela L Caughie. “Transgressing Translation/Translating Transgression: The Lili Elbe Digital Archive and the Modalities of Translation”, Translation and Literature, 32, 3, November 2023. Online.

Arthur Koestler (1905-1983)

Born with the Hungarian name of Kösztler Artúr, he later anglicised it to Arthur Koestler.

Before Koestler became a well-known writer in the 1940s, he worked as a journalist. In 1927 he became the Middle East correspondent based in Jerusalem for the Berlin-based Ullstein-Verlag group of newspapers. In 1929 he lobbied for a transfer and was sent to Paris, and in 1931 to Berlin, where he worked in a building next to Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, and he spent time in the Institute. After Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Koestler, being Jewish, could no longer return to Germany. He returned to Paris, was active in anti-fascist movements, and later reported from both sides in the Spanish Civil War.

His cousin, Ferenc Aldor, had started a mail-order business selling sex manuals. In 1933 Aldor wanted an Encyclopedia of Sex, and needed a skilled journalist to compile it. Koestler was offered 3,000 francs but no royalties. Drawing on his knowledge of Freud, Jung, Adler, and Stekel and his reading of Paolo Mantegazza’s Die Hygiene der Liebe, Koestler buckled down and finished his part of the book in an astonishing two months. Dr Levy-Lenz from Hirschfeld’s Institute contributed two chapters, and Aldor’s brother Willy Aldor compiled two appendices. It was published in late 1933 as L’Encyclopédie de la vie sexuelle. The 1938 English edition contained material by Dr Norman Haire.

In 1935 Koestler was living in Zurich when Willy Aldor came and offered the same payment for a book on Sexual Anomalies and Perversions, which Koestler wrote in a Budapest hotel room based on the writings of Magnus Hirschfeld - a mixture of translation and precis. Geoffrey Marx claims that Koestler’s major source was Pierre Vachet’s Les Perversions Sexuelles which in turn was based on the works of Magnus Hirschfeld and Felix Abraham.

The 1936 English edition edited by Norman Haire appears to include parts of Haire’s translations of a section of Hirschfeld’s Sexualpathologie: Ein Lehrbuch für Ärzte und Studierende - which has never been published in English. Haire wrote that he had revised Koestler’s text: “amended the language and punctuation where necessary, deleted some passages, inserted some, corrected some statements, and brought the text up-to-date”.

Until 1991 when Michael Lombardi-Nash published his English translation of Hirschfeld’s Die Transvestiten, this was the only work in English that sexologists could consult.

• Magnus Hirschfeld. Sexualpathologie. Ein Lehrbuch für Ärzte und Studierend. A Marcus & E Webers Verlag, 1918.
• Pierre Vachet. Perversions sexuelles, d’après l’enseignement du docteur Magnus Hirschfeld, par son premier assistant le docteur Félix Abraham. Paris: François Aldor, 1931.
• Magnus Hirschfeld. Sexual Anomalies and Perversions: Physical and Psychological Development and Treatment : a Summary of the Works of the Late Magnus Hirschfeld. London: Francis Aldor, 1936.
• Magnus Hirschfeld. Geschlechtsanomalien und Perversionen : Ein Studienbuch für Ärzte, Juristen, Seelsorger und Pädagogen. Paris: Aldor, Villefranche-Niche, 1938.
• Michael Scammell. Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic. Random House, 2009 p176-7.
• Diana Wyndham. Norman Haire and the Study of Sex. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2012 p394-5.
• Zagria “Who wrote Hirschfeld’s "Sexual Anomalies and Perversions"?”. Gender Variance Who’s Who, 28 February 2013. Online.
• Zagria, “Felix Abraham. Part II: Les Perversions Sexuelles”, Gender Variance Who’s Who, 25 September 2022. Online
• Geoffrey Marx. “36. Felix Abraham II”. Online
• EN.Wikipedia(Arthur Koestler)