Drag Queenery on the Road to Womanhood

Dolly Parton: “It’s a good thing I was born a girl … otherwise I’d be a drag queen.”

Mae West: “Camp is the kinda comedy where they imitate me.”

Leslie Feinberg: "I've heard women criticize drag queens for 'mocking women's oppression' by imitating femininity to an extreme, just as I've been told that I am imitating men. Feminists are justifiably angry at women's oppression – so am I! I believe, however, that those who denounce drag queens aim their criticism at the wrong people. This misunderstanding doesn't take gender oppression into account. … There is a difference between the drag population and masculine men doing cruel female impersonations. The Bohemian Grove, for example, is an elite United States club for wealthy powerful men that features comedy cross-dressing performances. Many times the burlesque comedy of cross-dressed masculine men is as anti-drag as it is anti-woman. In fact it's really only drag performance when it's transgender people who are facing the footlights. Many times drag performance calls for skilled impersonations of a famous individual like Diana Ross or Judy Garland, but the essence of drag performance is not impersonation of the opposite sex. It is the cultural presentation of an oppressed gender expression."


There is a lot of nonsense being spread around about drag queenery. That all drag queens are gay; that it is only performance; that drag queens do not become women; that transsexuals and drag queens have little in common.  None of these claims are true when they are examined.

First of all – what does 'drag queen' mean. There have been three major usages:

a) theatrical performance as the other gender.

Such people were previously referred to as female impersonators or female mimics. Some female impersonators complete the journey to womanhood with surgery, others live full-time. Some of these transition while still performing the same act, others go on to acting, being restaurateurs, etc. Certainly as an occupational group, they have an extremely high transition rate.

F=Finocchio's, J=Jewel Box Review, C=Le Carrousel, G=Garden of Allah

FG   Liz Lyons (191? - ?)
G     Hotcha Hinton (1915 – 1983)
       Jeanette Schmid (1924 - 2005)
       Ginza Rose (192? - ?)
       Minette (1928 - 2001)
C    Jacqueline Charlotte Dufresnoy/Coccinelle (1931 - 2006)
C    Marie-Pierre Pruvot/Bambi (1935 - )
C    April Ashley (1935 - )
J    Terry Noel (1936 - )
F   Aleshia Brevard (1937 - )
F   Katherine Marlowe (193? - )
J    Angie Stardust (1940 – 2007)
     Karūseru Maki (1942 - )
C   Yeda Brown (194? - )
      Carlotta (1943 -)
C   Rogeria (1943 - )
C   Amanda Lear (1946 - )
      Holly Woodlawn (1946 - )
      Marie-France Garcia (1946 - )
      Rachel Harlow (1948 - )
      Nanjo Masami (194? - )
      Ajita Wilson (1950 -1987)
      Candis Cayne (1971 - )

If these women are not trans, then we really do not have much history

b) cross-dressers or transvestites who like attention, who like to be read, who exaggerate their femininity, while other transvestites prefer to pass.

This of course is also a type of performance, except that it takes place on the street, in restaurants, on public transport etc. Of course cis women also like to get in on this act, Mae West and Dolly Parton (who once failed to win in a Dolly-Parton lookalike contest) quickly come to mind.

This was a common usage when I was transitioning in the 1980s, but I get the feeling that the expression is less used these days. I am seeing 'attention junkie' or 'attention whore' more frequently, which disassociates the attitude from the cross-dressing.

c) street queens.

When Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P Johnson are described as 'drag queens' it is not because they were stage performers (although Marsha was for a while in Hot Peaches) but because they were 'street queens', that is they lived on the margins without a job or any reliable source of income and either they were without a steady place to live or lived in a commune of similar persons. Several of the voguing ball people such as Angie Xtravaganza lived similar lives. This is the classic life style for trans women found in India (hijras), Thailand (kathoay) Philipines, Brazil etc. The classic study is Frederick Whitam's Male Homosexuality in Four Societies: Brazil, Guatemala, the Philippines, and the United States. 

Most of these women fail to complete the journey to womanhood because they lived too soon for hormones and surgery to be available and/or they don't have the money to acquire them.   That does not make them less trans and it does not make them less of a woman.

This was the dominant way of living for trans women in the pre-modern world. Those who claim that drag queens are not trans are cutting us off from our past.
___________________________________________________________

"If there is any one lesson to be learned from studying this field it is that the individual is individual. People define themselves and the self-definition must always takes priority over the received wisdom. I have met self-defined drag queens whom others would describe as TV either because they enjoy 'passing'; or because they 'dress' so often that it could be seen as a compulsion; or because they wear lingerie, either to turn men on or to make themselves feel sensuous. I have met drag performers who have grown to dislike drag, and men who insist on being called 'cross-dressers' because they dislike what the word 'drag' stands for, and men who wear part-drag in order to create confusion and doubt amongst others, but who would never wear full drag because that would defeat their object. I know self-defined TVs who are gay or bisexual or oscillating, some of them having learned to cross this sexuality barrier through their cross-dressing. I have met TVs who dress like drag queens and drag queens who dress like TVs, and TVs whose cross-dressing has encouraged them to question their 'male role', which in turn has made them examine their idea of 'femininity'. And perhaps most important of all, I have learned how marshy a terrain is the middle ground between our earlier clear-cut distinction between transvestites and transexuals." - Kris Kirk. Men in Frocks, 1984: 74.

• J. Nelson Aviance. "The Problem With Automatically Labeling Drag Queens as Cisgender Gay Men". HuffPost, 4/29/2014. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/j-nelson-aviance/post_7434_b_5233848.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices.
  
• Andrea James. “I F*cking Hate @RuPaul”. Boingboing, 2014/04/04. http://boingboing.net/2014/04/04/rupaul.html.
  
• Hannah Elyse Simpson. "Why This Trans Woman Doesn't Want to Ban Drag, But Say 'Thank You' ". Advocate, July 31 2015. www.advocate.com/commentary/2015/07/31/op-ed-why-trans-woman-doesnt-want-ban-drag-say-thank-you.
  

Some observations on the tranny word

There have recently been two well-worth-reading articles on the word by Cristan Williams and Julia Serano. This is by the way of a supplement re aspects not mentioned.

Kate Bornstein has previously attributed the origin of 'tranny' to drag queens and transsexuals working together in Sydney in the 1960s. Maybe. I don't know an alternate origin claim. I came across the term in the 1970s when it existed in two forms: tranny and transy. People tended to opt for one or the other. I was in the latter camp on grounds of euphonics, that both transvestite and transsexual contained an 's' and that in the 1960s a trannie was the word for a transistor radio.

Today people talk in terms of umbrella words. I always felt that it was a matter of indeterminacy. I met people who were apparently transy some way or another, but it was rude to ask about genitals, and I had no way of knowing if the person was post-op, intended to become so or chose not to be. This was even more so when there was a transy in a film – probably because the part was underscripted. The one distinction that was immediate in my mind was between transvestites and drag queens: the former hated being read while the latter revelled in it. However both types were quite likely to progress to going full-time and becoming post-op.

Both tranny and transy are deeply embedded in our history. Tranny Roadshow, Trannyshack, Tranny Crew, Tranny Granny, Transy House, and in the biographies of our older sisters and brothers.

In the last few years there have been a few developments:

1. tranny and transy have both transmogrified into 'trans' or 'trans*'. However it is still the same word and concept.
   
2. In schoolyards and on the street the repressed meanies, the ones who who are terrified that they themselves should be seduced by homoeroticism or gender variance, the ones who previously put down others by shouting 'pouf' or 'fag' found that those they feared had created words for themselves: gay and tranny. So they thought it clever to take those words and use them as insults. The gay and trans communities have had completely different responses.
   
3. The gays use irony and cleverness to counter the meanies, but there is no question of surrendering the word.
   
4. A small but loud minority of trans persons decided to surrender the word 'tranny' to the meanies. This is a defeat, and a temporary withdrawal. The meanies use the internet also and will be using trans, transgender, transsexual (even HBS were it to enter common usage) in the same tone of voice.*
   
5. Strangely the repressed meanies have not picked up on the word 'autogynephile': it is the bullies within our own community who use that word for trans women whom they do not like. The soi-disant autogynephiles, like the gays, have stuck with their own choice of word despite others using it as an insult.
   
6. Having had a bad experience with the meanies, rather than use irony or cleverness, or stand up to them, the minority of trans women sought an easier target: their elder sisters. Many trans women have been using tranny or transy as a positive word of self identification – in some cases for over four decades. These older trans women were told that they could no longer use their preferred word for themselves because of interactions elsewhere that did not involve them. This is impertinent at best. Some would say that it is rude and insensitive.
   
7. For some reason, those who demand that tranny be expunged from history and discourse say nothing about a similar expungement of transy and trans. Probably because their agenda is derived from the meanies, not from intra-community discourse.
   

Those who demand that a word be no longer used do not understand how language works.  The attempt to ban a word gives it extra force and makes it attractive, not just to repressed meanies, but also to satirists, performers, historians and wordsmiths.   After not using the tranny variant for four decades, I have found myself using it in recent years.

For all of my life trans liberation has been struggling, with success, against the dogma that gender variation is a pathology.   Much of the demand that certain words not be used, even within the community, is also a dogma.   Are we building a new prison?    Let those who want say tranny or transy or trans or trans*.   It is not the word that ever hurts - it is the tone of voice.   Those who hate us can avoid any specific word and still be hateful.   It is our loss to lose the word.   It is not a loss to those who hate us.

---------------------------------------


*There is, of course that delightful scene in It's Pat - The Movie where Pat encounters a bunch of street thugs.   One of the thugs pulls out a battered copy of Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae and says: "Yes, that is what you are: you're androgynous".  

• Kate Bornstein. "Who You Calling A Tranny?". Kate Bornstein Is A Queer and Pleasant Danger—this is her blog, July 12, 2009. http://katebornstein.typepad.com/kate_bornsteins_blog/2009/07/who-you-calling-a-tranny.html.
  
• Cristan Williams. "Tranny: An Evidence-Based Review". The Transadvocate, April 28 2014. www.transadvocate.com/tranny-an-evidence-based-review-2_n_13593.htm.
  
• Julia Serano. "A Personal History of the “T-word” (and some more general reflections on language and activism)". Whipping Girl, April 28 2014. http://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2014/04/a-personal-history-of-t-word-and-some.html.
  

Rejoinder to Kay Brown 2: the gynephilics

See also A Rejoinder to Kay Brown's What is a Transsexual?

Kay’s description of typical gynephilic transsexuals is:

“The prototypical autogynephilic transsexual was accepted as a boy as a child.  She was often a “loner”, finding her hobbies and reading to be more rewarding, but still willing and ready to participate in rough & tumble play.  She often envied girls and observed them more often than most masculine boys.  As she entered puberty, she began erotic cross-dressing in private, often masturbating while dressed, usually with lingerie.  She found this shameful and hid her cross-dressing as best she could.  She entertained thoughts of living as a woman, often in very idealized situations.  As a young adult, she dated women, often finding it necessary to imagine that she was female to “perform”.  She typically hid this fact from her dates.  She fell in love and found that the previously growing desire to live as a woman abated for a while.  She married and had children.  Her need to cross-dress and use autogynephilic ideation grew, as the first blush of their romance matured into committed love.  She agonized about it obsessively, trying alternatively to push it out of her thoughts and trying to appease it by cross-dressing.  At one point, perhaps in her early 30s, or in her late 50s, a set-back or other significant personal change brought all of these feelings to the fore… and she made the fateful decision that she could no longer ignore her sexuality.  After having tried to ignore the cognitive dissonance between her successful social identity as a man, husband, and father, and her obligatory autogynephilic image of being female, concluded that the female image is her “true” image.  She then made steps to begin counseling with a gender therapist, obtained prescription for feminizing hormones, and then began the painful steps to living full time as a “transsexual”, since she didn’t pass very well and had too many social connections who know of her previous status as a man to be truly stealth.  She had SRS within a short time of nominally living as a woman, as she was impatient, feeling like she had waited long enough in her previous life as a man.  Her wife may or may not have demanded a divorce.”

Just as the previous type had to be ‘homosexual transsexual’ rather than just ‘androphilic’, this type must be ‘autogynephilic’ rather than just ‘gynephilic’.  I find it very difficult to accept that an entire category of people should be defined by the details of how they masturbate.  In addition to the common sense rejection of the notion, as a historian I also know that I rarely have information of how people masturbate.

What I do have though is mention that people marry and have children.  Thus I can identify gynephilic persons who later progress to being women.   There are many of these, more than gay transsexuals.  As more people are heterosexual and not gay, it is not a surprise that more trans women previously had a wife than previously had a husband.  Some examples of transsexuals known to be gynephilic before transition:  Jan Morris, Rennee Richards, Katherine Cummings, Gloria Hemingway, Jane Fae, Nancy Hunt, Rachel Webb, Susan Huxford, Judy Cousins; a surprisingly large number of the better known HBS women: Rose White, Cathryn Platine, Jennifer Usher, Tabatha Basco; and the soi-disant or professional autogynephiles: Anne Lawrence, Willow Arune, Maxine Petersen.

Are these women autogynephilic as opposed to gynephilic, now or pre-surgery? I certainly would not say that, and I really don’t think that Blanchard or Brown would come out and say it either, although their theoretical position implies that they should be willing to say that.  But if they are not willing to say that, what does it mean to say that late transitioners are autogynephilic?

Aspersions have been cast against a few of the women, the term ‘autogynephile’ has become an insult term, especially from the HBS women whom others suspect of trying to divert attention from themselves, but where something has been said about a person it is rarely other than hearsay, and as such not admissible as evidence.

It is common sense that cis men and cis women vary in the degree that they are aroused by being the man or the women that they are.  This is particularly intense in teenagers after puberty.  If we are to have concepts such as autogynephilia and autoandrophilia then the concepts should be applied to cis persons as well.  There has been a small amount of investigation of cis autogynephilia in recent years, but the Blanchardians are still in the situation of applying the term to trans women without any idea of how the phenomenon manifests in cis women.  Brown poo-poos a study done by Charles Moser who used a semi-Blanchardian approach to the question.

Brown and Blanchard reject the idea that there is such a thing as cis autogynephilia, because if there were, trans autogynephilia would also be normal.

Brown and Blanchard take the abnormality of trans autogynephilia even further.  They regard it as a subtype of Erotic Target Location Error (ETLE).  The other two types that they identify are autopedophilia and the desire to be an amputee.  It is of course heterosexist to assume that the correct erotic target for a person born male is an woman of similar age.  It is sexist to insist that there is any correct erotic target.  Nature is full of variations and gynephilic transsexuality is as natural as homosexuality.

Their heterosexism also comes out when Brown criticizes the “obvious lack of naturally feminine behavior” in gynephilic trans women – she writes as if the feminist critique of the social construction of artificial femininity had never happened.

In summary, the concept is not at all useful to anybody writing biographical and history essays.

See also:  A Blanchard-Binary Timeline

          What is Autogynephilia?

A rejoinder to Kay Brown’s “What is a Transsexual?”

Last week Kay Brown, the one-time author of Transsexual, Transgender, and Intersex History (which she later took down) and pioneer in liquid crystal displays who has become the major lay advocate of the Blanchard binary, posted a short and straightforward account of that two-type model.  For those who would like to read a succinct and uncritical account of Blanchardianism I would recommend it.  It is probably the best such account.

• Kay Brown.  “What is a Transsexual?”.  On the Science of Changing Sex, April 14, 2013.  http://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2013/04/14/what-is-a-transsexual/

This is Kay’s description of a “homosexual transsexual”:

“The prototypical feminine androphilic (“homosexual”) transsexual was called a “sissy” by her peers growing up.  She avoided rough & tumble activities.  Her primary social circle consisted of one or two girls.  She actively participated in girls games and imaginary play.  Her parents were embarrassed by her femininity, and may or may not have sought professional help in trying to discourage her behavior.  As a young teen, she became interested in girls fashion and make-up, often exploring how she might look as a girl by dressing up and experimenting with make-up.  This did not, of course, involve erotic cross-dressing.  She had crushes on boys at school.  Her peers thought she might be homosexual.  She was hassled, perhaps even bullied, by homophobic boys, but otherwise was reasonably popular in her chosen circle.  She was considered very neat and well dressed in boy’s clothes.  She sought out opportunities to interact with small children and infants, taking on babysitting jobs.  As she approached adulthood, looking at her own nature, her potential future, both romantic and economic, made a rational decision to transition to living as a girl so as to grow up to be a woman socially.  Her family may or may not have disowned her in late adolescence.  As she is naturally feminine and passes quite well, she found that she was socially and romantically more successful as a woman.  She actively dated men while pre-op, but assiduously avoided direct contact with her penis, finding that emotionally uncomfortable.  Being young and lacking capital, she lived several years as a woman, taking feminizing hormones, before having SRS to improve her sex life, replacing genitalia that she didn’t use with those that she did.  She may or may not have found a husband and adopted children.”

You may care to compare this description with Kay’s autobiographical sketch that she provided for TS Roadmap at a time when she and Andrea James were on better terms.  You will notice that the two accounts are similar.  It is always easier to believe in a theory that matches your own life experience.

The distinctive characteristic of Kay’s life is that she was an early transitioner.  Other such are April Ashley, Caroline Cossey, Diane Kearny, Rachel Harlow, Suzan Cooke, Margaret O’Hartigan, Matene, Romy Haag, Hedy Jo Star, Kim Petras,  Veronique Renard,  Lauren Foster etc.   While many of these persons acquired a husband at some point in their life, I would not describe any of them as ‘homosexual’.  Their quickly abandoned male persona did not either have a male lover or indulge in gay sex.

On the other hand there are gay transsexuals, many of whom are not early transitioners.   This is a common pattern among trans men, many of whom spend some years as lesbians, often gaining a female lover who stays with them when they become men.  Similarly many trans women spend some time as gay men on their way to womanhood:  Jennifer North, Poppy Cooper, myself, Roz Kaveney, Dawn Langley Simmons.    ++And there is Susan Cannon, science historian, who went to Dr Biber at age 55 after decades of sex with men.

Kay Brown embraces the Blanchardian model because it matches her life experience; I reject it because there is nowhere in it for me or anyone like me.  And, unlike Kay, I made the mistake of actually applying to the Clarke Institute, as it then was.  They did not know how to categorize me.   I was then 36 and working in computers so they therefore presumed that I was autogynephilic – except that there was a problem in that I had a husband.  Their solution was to refuse me all help, to ignore my husband and tell me that I would meet a woman and change direction !!!

The two groups that I have just summarized, the early transitioning trans women and trans women who spend some time as gay men on their way to womanhood are obviously two different types of trans women – that is if you want to divide us into types.

However Kay insists on labelling the former group as ‘homosexual transsexuals’.  This is obviously confusing.  Blanchard uses the term as he is working in the tradition of cis sexologists who have been doing that for over a century now.  These sexologists also refer to trans women as ‘male transsexuals’ and trans men as ‘female transsexuals’.   John Randell in the 1960s and 1970s upset many of his mtf patients by referring to them as ‘he’ and saying to them ‘you’ll always be a man’.  Even Harry Benjamin in The Transsexual Phenomenon refers to trans women as ‘male transsexuals’ and trans men as ‘female transsexuals’.   This terminology of course reveals that the very sexologists who were arranging surgery for trans patients did not actually accept that transgender surgery constitutes a gender change.  It is also downright rude.  For many years Ray Blanchard was urged to say ‘androphilic’ rather than ‘homosexual’ for heterosexual trans women, but would not do so.  The transkids.us site, previously edited by Kiira Triea and now by Kay, includes a defense of this refusal to be more descriptive and polite.  Trans activists have been talking to the professionals for some time and many are now using more polite language.  Kay is obviously sensitive to this issue and uses the cumbersome ‘strictly homosexual with respect to their natal sex’ rather than simply ‘homosexual’, but like Kiira refuses to drop the word.

However there is a bigger issue: The ongoing erasure of gay transsexuals.   In 1966 Benjamin accepted Virginia Prince’s typology of transvestites as Pseudo, Fetishistic or True (Femmiphilic) which eliminated all gay transvestites.  Vern Bullough systematically ignored all transvestites and transsexuals who had male lovers. Blanchard and Brown misapply the term ‘homosexual transsexual’ to early transitioners, and thus totally ignore the existence of trans women who spend some time as gay men.  Excuse me for protesting, but I feel that for most of my life sexologists have been telling me that I do not exist.

See also Rejoinder to Kay Brown 2: the Gynephilics.

____________________________________________________________

There are other important aspects that I could bring up including the crude positivism of Blanchard’s axioms; the disinterest in different types of homosexuality;  the biased selection by taking as subjects only those trying to get approval under the Ontario Health Insurance Plan so that it will pay for surgery; the disinterest in other theorists such as Frederick Whitam; the disinterest in history; the rudeness of the concept of autogynephilia and even more so of that of Erotic Target Location Errors;  the equivocation between behavioural criteria and identity criteria.  I will return to some of these, but today I am just doing the above.

++See also my discussion of Anne Vitale's similar typology.

Virginia Prince: Jargon terms and general comments

"1978, when Kane introduced Prince to the word 'transgender', was early enough that if Prince had had the gumption and the resourcefulness she could have taken the word and made it hers."


Virginia Prince
Part 1 – Youth and First marriage
Bibliography
Part II – Second Marriage
Part III – Femmiphilic activist
Part IV – Full-time Living
Part V – Transgenderist dowager
Jargon terms and general comments


Transgender lexicons:

Virginia Prince 

Rose White 

Raven Usher

Chris Bartlett

Jack Molay

Raphael Carter

Jargon terms associated with Virginia Prince:

• Transvestite, transvestism – the various forms of transvest* and the French form travest* have been around as noun, verb and adjective for almost 500 years. The Paris police have been issuing Permissions de Travestissement since 1800. Magnus Hirschfeld associated the word with eroticism, and psychoanalysts attempted to redefine it as a fetish. Prince cited Hirschfeld's usage as a justification for restricting the word to heterosexual transvestites.
  
• Femmiphilic, femmepersonator -- these were terms for heterosexual transvestites of the type encouraged to join Tri-ess. Prince coined the terms in 1961 as she knew that her attempted restriction of the word transvestite was not successful, but other members largely kept using transvestite until after 1970 when Prince became more insistent that they not be used. Femmiphilia fell out of use towards the end of the 1980s and was replaced by cross-dressing.
  
• ‘TV-TS’ Ekins claims that Prince pioneered this, but gives no citations. TV and TS are the obvious abbreviations for transvestite and transsexual and were almost certainly coined by many unconnected people independently.
  
• Trangenderal -- a term used by Prince in 1969, but once only.
  
• Male Woman - a person whose sex is one side of the binary divide and whose gender is the other side and whose sexuality vis-à-vis sex is heterosexual.
  
• Dual personality expression
  
• gender is between the ears, not the legs - a phrase that has become popular in recent years, and is not usually attributed to Prince.
  
• Transgenderist -- a variation on transgender which had been picked up by Ariadne Kane around 1978, and copied by Prince in a few articles 1978-9. They used it to mean a Prince-style transvestite who goes full time. Such is a type of what Benjamin called a Non-Surgical Transsexual, but Prince would never admit this. As she had done with 'transvestite' Prince took an existing word and attempted to restrict it to mean only her own type. Richard Docter, 1988, and IFGE promoted the idea that Prince coined ‘transgenderist’, and in 1996, Feinberg popularized the idea in hir Transgender Warriors. From that time Prince started claiming that she had coined the term, but sometimes mocked the idea, depending on the audience. Vivian Namaste uses 'transgenderist' in her Invisible Lives with no connotation of the Princian usage.
  
• The Girl Within -- a term coined by Susanna Valenti in the early 1960s. It was taken over with credit by Prince to express what is found in every male, but repressed in most. Neither Valenti nor Prince compare the term to Ulrichs’ anima muliebris.
  
• Transposeur -- a term proposed by Prince in 1997 to replace transgenderist which was being confused with transgender. She never did follow up on this proposal.
  
• Whole Girl Fetishist – proposed by Sheila Nile in 1968 for members who did not pass well enough, particularly if it were for lack of trying. Over the next few years it came to be that those who failed or didn’t bother to fashion themselves as truly feminine were fetishistic. Susanna even estimated that the majority of members were WGFs.
  

When to use female pronouns? Wikipedia and Ekins follow the confusing convention that the pronouns of a person's final gender should be retrojected to childhood and even birth. The not-TG people and Patricia Califia - who claim to follow that same convention - somehow deny Prince all female pronouns, some just to Prince and others to all non-op trans women. This is despite the obvious fact that Prince had a female gender identity before puberty. However she did not become a full-time woman until 1968. Like the rest of us, Prince had more than one persona. Much clarity is gained when Arnold, Muriel and Virginia are used to signify which aspect is doing what. Virginia did not do a pharmacology PhD, write Chemistry in Your Beauty Shop and marry two wives; Arnold did.

The US state of Virginia has three counties with Prince in the name: Prince Edward, Prince George and Prince William. This does make it difficult to google "Virginia Prince".

In the decades before Stonewall there were silly laws and there were draconian laws. People, gay, trans, lesbian were irritated by those laws, were harassed by them, they were sometimes arrested, less often jailed, and more often lost their jobs. Virginia Prince hobnobbed with the gay and lesbian organizations, with the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis. But she told the members of FPE and she told the police officers that FPE was not not gay, it was not fetishistic, it was not gender variant, and its members did not seek surgical transformation. We are different from people like that. Yes some members of the Mattachine Society were into a similar sense of false respectability, and emphasized that they were not transvestites. But in both cases saying we are different, there is always an unspoken 'jail them, but please not us'.

Was Prince a transvestite activist? Obviously not. I showed this by listing individuals who could be regarded as transvestites who were not supported. Felicity Chandelle stands out as an exception. Comptons Cafeteria, the Black Cat police riot, Sir Lady Java – Prince was not interested. Even Mauricio Archibald, where the charge was identical to that against Felicity, and where an appeal had been secured, Prince was not interested. When she spoke to police officers she always emphasized that her members were different from street transvestites.

Was Prince a transgender activist? Even less so. Non-femmiphilic transvestites were banned from FPE. Also banned were drag queens, all gender queers, all transsexuals, and most non-ops. Prince had transsexual friends. There is no record that she had any transgender friends. Nor did she she seek to co-ordinate or ally of her own accord with any transgender groups. IFGE did ally with various types of transgender groups, as did Leslie Feinberg. Feinberg and IFGE used Prince's name in proclaiming transgender umbrellas but Prince continued to write mean-spirited articles complaining about the umbrellas. In short she was transgenderphobic.

The other partner in Cardinal Industries of California is a well-kept secret. I presume that it was a private company, not quoted on the stock exchange. Attempts to google it mainly bring up Cardinal Industries of New York, a toy-making company.

Likewise the list of the original 12 members of the Hose and Heel Club is still a secret 50 odd years later. Are the names not in the papers left to either Rikki Swin or to Northridge University? Docter tells us that one member was a dress maker and that the second meeting was at his house. Darrell Raynor tells us that Robert Stevens/Barbara Ellen and Evelyn fell out with Prince late 1962 or early 1963. Presumably they were in the original group, but we know nothing about them other than what is in Raynor's book.

It occurs to me that the surviving members of the Alpha Chapter might tell a rather different account, but with the exception of JJ Allen they have not done so. I was able to find so much more about the New York chapter. I can work only from published accounts.

The most remarkable thing about Virginia Prince is that she had dealings with five sexologists: Bowman, Benjamin, Stoller, Bullough and Docter. While each of them disassociated from her published opinions, she did affect, even deform, the writing of Benjamin, Bullough and Docter.

Prince's quest was a quixotic one. She took the example of the femmiphilic and presented it as the ideal type of transvestite person, and that the membership of FPE was the universe of cross dressers. To do this she had to construct three dams of exclusion that were forever disintegrating.

a) Fetishism. Hirschfeld subtitled his 1910 book: The Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress, and Psychoanalysts spent most of the last century developing the idea that transvestism is fetishistic. Quite reasonably Prince reacted against this. In addition, in the early days of Transvestia Prince had to be careful or else the magazine would have been banned by the US Post Office. This meant not only excluding discussions of eroticism, but also forced-femininity and petticoat-punishment fantasies. Nan Gilbert, a publisher of petticoat-punishment fantasies had had his mail stopped and was fined $500 in 1960. So it is certainly intriguing that Issues 1, 2 and 4 of Transvestia featured William Bessie Beck, the legendary recipient of petticoat-punishment whose amazing tale has now been published by Peter Farrer. What should we make of the fiction titles: From Martin to Marion, The Turnabout Party and The Birth of Barbara? They were published by Chevalier Publications, and advertised at the back of How to be a Woman Though Male. Amazon lists the author as "Anonymous (Virginia Prince?)". In fact the first draft of most of these fictions were published in Transvestia. Then there is Sandy Thomas, apparently a long-time friend of Prince. Thomas is the author of lots and lots of transvestite fiction. In the mid-1990s Prince sold the copyright of her major books and of Transvestia to Thomas who has reprinted them on his own imprint and listed them under his own name. Both the original Prince books and the Thomas-authored books are now available together on Lulu.com.

b) Transsexuality. Prince had an initial enthusiasm for transgender surgery, as we saw above. There are rumors that she even applied to be accepted in the Stanford University program (although she had been in Los Angeles earlier at the right time for Elmer Belt's program at UCLA Medical School). However Prince completely denied that rumor. She decided against surgery, as did Yvonne Sinclair, Nicole Murray Ramirez and Leslie Feinberg, but of these only Prince then came down heavy on others who were considering surgery (other changebacks who are more like Prince in wanting to ban gender surgery include Charles Kane, Gerry Leach and Alan Finch). One of the first to receive this negative message was the teenage Diane Kearny who naively wrote to Prince and was told that she was ‘delusional’ in wanting such. Words such as 'mean-spirited' and 'bullying' have been used to describe Prince's antagonism to other people's possible surgery. A typical example was Mary who was Prince's assistant in 1967 and who had originally thought that she would seek surgery. On the other hand, in the period just before Doreen's departure, Prince was friends with Sherry, a post-operative. They would go to dances as two women, and Doreen was stressed that Prince would follow in Sherry's footsteps. In 1979 Prince wrote: "Although I personally try to dissuade people from having the surgery, except in special cases, it is interesting that three of my best girl friends are former men who have had the surgery". Docter (p58) says: "Over the years, Virginia has been very outspoken and dogmatic in her opposition in presenting her opposition to surgical sex reassignment, often going well beyond the simple expression of a personal preference and more into the mode of conducting an ideological campaign. Let's just say she has not shown much acceptance of contrasting opinions on this topic, and it has cost her some friends. But as strong as her views on this may be, she has sustained many close friendships with transgender women who elected to proceed with surgery." Despite her statements, there was a steady loss of FPE-Tri-Ess members to surgery.

c) Homosexuality. In The Transvestite and His Wife, Prince wrote "The femmiphile adopts feminine garb as a matter of personal internal expression – the homosexual 'Queen' does so for external effect – to attract males for sexual purposes and to ease the guilt of both." However in conversation Prince, while denying finding men attractive, did admit to enjoying being attractive to and flirting with men. She had a cross-dresser friend who was willing to play the male role and took her for lunch and drinks. Afterward they did mutual masturbation. She found kissing, hugging and affection from a man to be sexually rewarding. Hence we could take the attitude that by her own definition we can take her as a homosexual queen. The fashion in typology has changed since the sixties. Then the emphasis was on behavior; now it is on sex or gender identity. Prince did emphatically reject a gay identity, but if a police officer had encountered Prince and her date they could have been convicted. She insisted that "never once was there any kind of anal or oral sex". There is of course a significant minority of gay men have the same preference, but with a different sexual identity. Suzan Cooke says that she spoke to a male hustler who counted Prince among his customers. That is certainly possible but we need further confirmation.

Like the later HBS movement, Prince would use 'gender' where the context would imply that she meant 'gender identity'. And of course there is something a bit askew about Prince's gender identity. Even as late as the 2000s she insisted that she was heterosexual. It seems that she never accepted the argument that as a heterosexual woman she should be interested in men. Likewise she kept repeating that she was a pioneer of men's lib. If she were a women with a woman's gender identity then of course she would not be a pioneer of men's lib.

If Muriel were born not in 1912, but in say 1992, where would she be today? Would she have been a transkid on puberty blockers, and completing surgical transition in a gap year before going up to university? Or would she join those who say that it is a violation of the UN statutes against torture to compel trans persons to be sterilized? In none of the source documents is there an explanation of why Prince turned away from wanting surgery.

As TS Eliot famously said: a bad poet borrows, a good poet steals. Actually he did not. What he actually wrote: "One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion." On this basis Prince is a bad poet. 1978, when Kane introduced Prince to the word 'transgender', was early enough that if Prince had had the gumption and the resourcefulness she could have taken the word and made it hers. To do so would have involved using it more than only three or four times. It would have meant using it regularly and with a force that would have withered the competing usages. Prince was not a major intellect: she was making the same specious claims in 2005 as in 1965; and had not the slightest idea how to weld her theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn. Rather she defaced a rich multivalent word, 'transgender', and attempted and failed in her attempt to reduce and narrow it into something quite inauthentic. She threw it into something which has no cohesion.

One can see why Yvonne Cook-Riley and Kimberleigh Richards wanted to credit Prince with something that she never did, and never could have. It is an irony of note that Diane Kearny, Suzan Cooke, Jenifer Usher and Cathryn Platine all want to support Cook-Riley and Richards in this endeavor.

The ebb and flow of social constructions

There is a misconception by some of those who prefer biologistic or even essentialist explanations that they therefore should reject social construction explanations.  For over 150 years now various writers have been proposing that homosexuality, transvestity and/or transsexuality are caused by some mixture of genetics and pre-natal experience, and for 150 years of effort very little has been established, especially in identifying which factors might make someone gay rather than trans or vice versa.  Every now and then some suggestive aspect of brain anatomy/chemistry such as H-Y Antigens or BTSc neurons is accepted uncritically as an explanation.  However these never seem to move on any next stage so that gender variance is as well explained as say autism or schizophrenia, or be developed to be used as a test,  and indeed attempts at replication of the original results by other scientists often fail.

Biologistic explanations have two serious weaknesses.  They cannot explain the dramatic increase in the percentage of us who are trans.  Add up all the known trans people in the entire nineteenth century and you have fewer than the transsexuals who are the newspapers in any one year in the 21st century.

Secondly biologistic factors do not at all explain the cultural changes of how trans persons are perceived and what options are available to trans persons at any time.  The biology was presumably similar for Lavinia Edwards in 1833, Carla van Crist in 1930, Norma Jackson in 1931, Christine Jorgensen in 1953, Bibíana Fernández in 1977 and Jin Xing in 1995, but the social constructions in which they lived have changed enormously.

In the mid 19th century, a person whom we would now regard as transsexual was regarded as an invert, a category that also included what we now regard as homosexual.  In fact the first usage of the concept of a female trapped in a male body, anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa, was to explain male homosexuality.
In the mid 20th century persons like Jorgenson were generally described as transvestists, before the term ‘transsexual’ came into use.

Let us take a small double wave in the sea of social construction.

The HSTS/Autogynephilia distinction was developed by Kurt Freund at what was then the Clarke Institute of Psychology Gender Identity Clinic, and appears in that institute’s Gender Dysphoria: Development, Research, Management 1985, edited by Betty W. Steiner - although different terms are used.   Freund’s protégé and eventual replacement,  Ray Blanchard took the idea and renamed it with the terms that we now use.  Blanchard published papers in the Archives of Sexual Behavior (edited by Richard Green until 2001, and then by Kenneth Zucker) and similar journals that were not read by most trans persons.  However one who did and proclaimed herself to be an autogynephile, was Anne Lawrence who studied for a PhD at the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality at San Francisco.  Michael Bailey was one of her thesis advisors.  Speculations continue as to which influenced the other more.  In 2003 Bailey published The Man Who Would Be Queen, and the concept became a public controversy.

Willow Arune, Lisanne Anderson and others set up the Autogynephilia Yahoo group, and a small but significant number of trans women self-identified as autogynephiles.   The group was apparently destroyed by Jennifer Usher manipulating the Yahoo complaints policy.

There were fewer trans women self-identifying as HSTS (homosexual transsexuals).   The most prominent was Kiira Triea, which was odd in that she had previously identified as a lesbian intersex.  She was the prime mover behind transkids.us.  Others involved included Jennifer Ross, Hontas Farmer and Heike Bödeker none of whom still speaks up for HSTS.

Very shortly afterwards, in 2005, Charlotte Goiar met Diane Kearny online, and then they split and founded two competing groups both using the term Harry Benjamin Syndrome (HBS).  The term had been proposed by Tom Reucher a decade before, but they turned its meaning upside down by applying it to emotions that had been previously expressed by Betty Cowell and Margaret O’Hartigan. The concern here is that most HBS advocates took up the term ‘autogynephile’  (Rose White, the author of the only book on HBS says rather ‘autogyne’ instead implying that she does not properly understand the concept).  It was stated in the short-lived HBS-written Wikipedia page on HBS that non-HBS MTF persons who have gender surgery were either autogynephiles or possibly gay men (no self-identified HSTS woman has ever claimed to be  or to have previously been a gay man).  Kearny claimed that non-HBS transsexuals were autogynephiles and fetishists.  The vast majority of trans women who do not fit these categories were defined out of existence, just as in the Freund-Blanchard-Bailey schema the same vast majority also disappears.

By syllogistic logic, HSTS = not autogynephile = HBS.  However this never worked psychologically.   A small number of HBS persons, could, if you force the HSTS/AGP dichotomy, be considered HSTS.  Diane Kearny who transitioned relatively early and later married a man, is the best candidate.   However most HBSers were first husbands and fathers, and transitioned only later. Thus if we force the dichotomy they would be AGP. Examples include Joanne Proctor, Tabatha Basco, Jennifer Usher, Cathryn Platine.  Rose White’s accounts of her life exclude what she did between the ages of 14 and 57, and it seems reasonable to assume that she fits here also.

The link between autogynephile and HBS was kept alive by the mutual antipathyof Willow Arune and Jennifer Usher across various Usenet fora.

In 2009 the Transkids site was revived by Kay Brown, the author of Transsexual, Transgender, and Intersex History, writing as Cloudy. She also started a blog: On the Science of Changing Sex.  "I slept through the controversy surrounding the publication of The Man Who Would Be Queen. ... Prof. Bailey graciously gave me access to an online version of the book and I read it from front to back in nearly one sitting. Although I disagreed with several minor points, I felt I could have written the book myself. I agreed with each and every major point. Who wouldn't, if they knew what I know."

Of course the problem with HSTS is that it means ‘homosexual transsexual’, which is a confusing term for women who are mainly heterosexual (some are non-sexual).  It is also a very rude term in that it defines a trans women’s orientation by her birth gender.  There have been attempts to make Blanchard’s system less rude by proposing alternate terms, usually that HSTS should be called by the neutral term ‘androphilic’.  Alice Novic also proposed the terms Love-to-be-femme and Act-femme for AGP and HSTS respectively.  However these terms have not caught on.

The insistence on the term HSTS has kept away those HBSers who might have adopted it and also many others (myself included, even though unlike Triea and Brown, I am a graduate of gay lib).   The transkids.us site includes a page strongly insisting that HSTS and not androphilic is the right term.  Kay Brown/Cloudy continues the insistence in her FAQ:   “Transsexuals with this etiology are most often called, “homosexual transsexuals” (HSTS) or “early onset” in the scientific literature.  (This does not imply that they act like, nor identify, as “homosexual”.  It only means that they are sexually and affectionally attracted to the same natal sex.)” And goes on to refer to AGPs as non-homosexuals.   This is the same Kay Brown who in her Transsexual, Transgender, and Intersex History was critical of Harry Benjamin for using the term ‘male transsexual’ for a trans woman.

Anyway the tents are rolled up, and the circus has almost left town. 

• The Kearny web site and forum are derelict sites.
• The Goiar web site stands, but the forum has become inactive.
• The Rose White book caused such embarrassment that most HBS-ers declined to even mention it.  There has not been a second HBS book from anybody else.
• TS-Si which was initially proudly HBS, later removed the term and denied being HBS, and has now closed.
• Suzan Cooke, who initially labelled Women Born Transsexual an HBS site, later realized that she did not really identify with the HBSers and removed the label.
• In 2009 various HBSers wrote pages for the English, French, Spanish, Italian, German and Simple Wikipedias, but were unable/refused to include critical opinions, give a history of HBS or support their claims.
• Alice Novic has removed almost all content from her web site.
• Cathryn Platine has announced that all “trans themed blog entries“ have been removed from radicalbitch.wordpress.com.
• Joanne Proctor and Tiira Triea are no longer with us.

Charlotte Goiar, who is the youngest person mentioned here, is now 40.  I don’t think that I have seen any enthusiasm for either HSTS/AGP or HBS among persons under 40. Their time is over

• Andrea James. “Denise Magner aka Kiira Triea: fabrications and hoaxes”.  Transsexual Road Map, 12 November 2012.  www.tsroadmap.com/info/transkids/denise-magner.html
• Kay Brown/Cloudy.  “FAQ on the Science”. On the Science of Changing Sex.  http://sillyolme.wordpress.com/faq-on-the-science/
• Zagria.  “A Blanchard-Binary Timeline”.   A Gender Variance Who’s Who, 20/10/2010.  https://zagria.blogspot.com/2010/10/blanchard-binary-timeline-part-1-to.html  https://zagria.blogspot.com/2010/10/blanchard-binary-timeline-part-2-2001.html.
• Zagria.  “What is Autogynephilia?” A Gender Variance Who’s Who, 22/02/2009.  https://zagria.blogspot.com/2009/03/what-is-autogynephilia.html
• Zagria. “A short history of (Harry) Benjamin Syndrome.”, A Gender Variance Who’s Who, 24 April 2012.  https://zagria.blogspot.com/2012/04/short-history-of-harry-benjamin.html.
• “Harry Benjamin Syndrome“.  Wikibin. http://wikibin.org/articles/harry-benjamin-syndrome.html.

La Préfecture de Police, Paris, and permissions de travestissement

Following the French Revolution, Louis-Michel le Peletier (1760-93), an aristocrat who had been avocat-general in the previous regime, sided with the new regime.  He was in favour of the trial of Louis XVI Bourbon, and his was a deciding vote for the king's death.  He was assassinated by a royalist on the eve of the king's execution.  In 1791 he presented a new criminal code to the National Assembly.  It contained only 'real crimes' and not 'phoney offenses created by superstition, feudalism, the tax system, and despotism (ces délits factices, créés par la superstition, la féodalité, la fiscalité et le despotisme)" '.  Thus blasphemy, heresy, sacrilege,  witchcraft, sodomy and transvestity were no longer crimes.  This change stood in the Napoleonic Criminal Code of 1810.

However The Paris Préfecture de Police had other ideas about transvestity.  On 16 Brumaire IX (7 November 1800 in the Gregorian calendar) it issued an Ordonnance:

« Le Préfet de Police, Informé que beaucoup de femmes se travestissent, et persuadé qu'aucune d'elles ne quitte les habits de son sexe que pour cause de santé ; Considérant que les femmes travesties sont exposées à une infinité de désagréments, et même aux méprises des agents de la police, si elles ne sont pas munies d'une autorisation spéciale qu'elles puissent représenter au besoin ; Considérant que cette autorisation doit être uniforme, et que, jusqu'à ce jour, des permissions différentes ont été accordées par diverses autorités ; Considérant, enfin, que toute femme qui, après la publication de la présente ordonnance, s'habillerait en homme, sans avoir rempli les formalités prescrites, donnerait lieu de croire qu'elle aurait l'intention coupable d'abuser de son travestissement, Ordonne ce qui suit : 1 - Toutes les permissions de travestissement accordées jusqu'à ce jour, par les sous-préfets ou les maires du département de la Seine, et les maires des communes de Saint-Cloud, Sèvres et Meudon, et même celles accordées à la préfecture de police, sont et demeurent annulées. 2 - Toute femme, désirant s'habiller en homme, devra se présenter à la Préfecture de Police pour en obtenir l'autorisation. 3 - Cette autorisation ne sera donnée que sur le certificat d'un officier de santé, dont la signature sera dûment légalisée, et en outre, sur l'attestation des maires ou commissaires de police, portant les nom et prénoms, profession et demeure de la requérante. 4 - Toute femme trouvée travestie, qui ne se sera pas conformée aux dispositions des articles précédents, sera arrêtée et conduite à la préfecture de police. 5 - La présente ordonnance sera imprimée, affichée dans toute l'étendue du département de la Seine et dans les communes de Saint-Cloud, Sèvres et Meudon, et envoyée au général commandant les 15e et 17e divisions militaires, au général commandant d'armes de la place de Paris, aux capitaines de la gendarmerie dans les départements de la Seine et de Seine et Oise, aux maires, aux commissaires de police et aux officiers de paix, pour que chacun, en ce qui le concerne, en assure l'exécution. » Le Préfet de Police Dubois

"The Prefect of Police, Informed that many women transvest, and persuaded that none of them abandon the dress of her sex for health reasons; Whereas women transvestites are exposed to endless inconvenience,  even to the point of police officers' contempt, if they are not equipped with a special authorization that they show when necessary; Whereas this authorization should be uniform, and that, until now, different permissions were granted by various authorities; Whereas, finally, that any woman who, after the publication of this order, would dress as a man, without having fulfilled the prescribed formalities, will give reason to believe that she has culpable intent of abusing her transvestment. Orders as follows: 1 - All permissions of transvestity to this day, issued by sub-prefects and mayors of the Department of the Seine, and the mayors of St. Cloud, Sevres and Meudon, and even by the prefecture of Police are and shall remain cancelled. 2 - Any woman who wishes to dress like a man, must appear at the  Prefecture of Police to get permission. 3 - This authorization will be given only with the certificate of a medical officer, whose signature will be duly acknowledged, moreover, with the certificate of mayors or police commissioners, with the full name, occupation and residence of the applicant. 4 - Any woman found transvesting, who has not complied with the foregoing provisions, shall be arrested and taken to Prefecture of Police. 5 - This Ordinance shall be printed, displayed throughout the extent of the department of Seine and in the communes of Saint-Cloud, Sevres and Meudon, and sent to the commanding general of the 15th and 17th military divisions, commanding general of arms of the Paris area, the captains of the gendarmerie in the departments of Seine and Seine et Oise, mayors, police commissioners and peace officers, so that everyone, will assure compliance. " The Prefect of Police Dubois

A permit. P81 in Bard's Histoire.

Note that nothing is said about male-bodied transvestites.

The archives of the Prefecture has retained, in a manner of speaking, some of its archive on the subject.  In the series D/B there is a folder numbered 58 and titled “Travestissement”.    Unfortunately only a few applications have been kept.  The file does contain the Ordonnance reproduced above, and newspaper clippings on the subject.

1806.  The oldest application that has survived is that from Mlle Catherine-Marguerite Mayer, dated 17 September, who wished to dress en homme to ride a horse.  Her application is numbered 167.

1830. Mlle Foucaud, daughter of a ruined industrialist, arrived in Paris, acted a little, and worked as a servant.  Then she got a job as a printer at 2.50 francs a day.  However she discovered that men were paid 4 francs.  She asked for the same, and was told that the sexes must not be mixed.  So she quit, dressed as male and was hired a few days later at 4 francs. She continued in male dress for the next fifty years.  Le Vieux Papier told her story in 1911, and also mentioned a prostitute who became a locksmith, a stonemason, and a Celestine R., who was known as the bearded lady, who was fond of her beard and asked for a permit so that it would not be incongruous.

1833.  Another Ordonnance stipulates that balls, dances, concerts, banquets and public festivals can not receive persons who are transvesting.  This ban may be lifted only during carnival with the consent of the Prefecture.

1846. Claude Gilbert, peddler, was accused of public indecency because he had worn female clothing.  The court however was unable to find a law that he had broken, and dismissed the complaint.  At the same time Jacques-Francois Renaudin appeared several times in court charged under Section 259 of the 1810 Penal Code “Anyone who publicly wore a suit, a uniform or a decoration that is not theirs not, shall be punished with imprisonment from six months to two years”, but was released in that such transvestity is a “kind of distortion that is rare”.

1850-60. According to Le Vieux Papier, 1 July 1911, only twelve women were granted a permit.  They were either in occupations usually reserved for men, or so masculine in their gait or had beards that they attracted attention in skirts.

1853.  Article 471, 15 of the French Penal Code of 10 June passed under the Second Empire criminalized transvesting in public spaces and balls.

1862.  In October Mlle Adèle Sidonie Loüis, 36, artist and musician living in Asnières, applied for a six-month permit for reasons of health.  Her application was numbered 74.

1885. The novelist Rachilde obtained a permit, but is unmentioned in the file.

1886.  La Ligue de l’affranchissement des femmes and Mme Astié de Valsayre demanded the right to dress in trousers.  The Prefect of Police repeated the orders of 1800: a woman dressed as a man must have a permit, unless it is carnival.

1887.  1 July, Mme Astié de Valsayre wrote to the National Assembly demanding “éliminer la loi routinière, qui interdit aux femmes de porter le costume masculin, tout aussi décent, quoi qu’on en puisse dire, surtout incontestablement plus hygiénique (eliminate routine laws which prohibit women from wearing men's dress, just as decent, whatever one may say, and most definitely more hygienic)”.  Her plea relied on accidental deaths, by fire, shipwreck, and on trams where women were hampered by their clothing.  The House found “nulle loi n’impose aux femmes les vêtements compliqués dont elles se recouvrent (no law imposes on women the complicated clothes that they wear)”.  Mme Valsayre took to dressing as male, as did Mme d’Estoc, a sculptor, who wore short hair and a false beard.

1889. La Petite République française ran a story about dame Libert who ran a printing press in the Latin Quarter.  She was from Strasbourg, and had left her husband in 1878.  The local police commissioner had remonstrated with her several times for wearing men’s clothing, and a tribunal had warned her to return to female clothing.  Le Temps 9 February 1889 reported that following a denunciations Libert found herself at the commissariat accused of impersonating a man for ten years.  She explained that “ le costume d'homme permet aux femmes de se livrer avec plus de liberté aux travaux du commerce (men’s clothing permits women to engage more freely in the work of trade)”, and that up till then no one had discovered her sex.  She asserted her ignorance of the Paris law and agreed to seek a permit.

1890. La Lanterne reported in 1890 that permits had been issued to the exceptional:  the archaeologist Jane Dieulafoy, the painter Rosa Bonheur, a former actress at the Comédie française who wanted to participate in hunting, Marguerite Boullanger mistress of Napoleon III.  Although not mentioned there seems to be no evidence that novelist George Sand, actress Sarah Bernhardt or traveller Isabelle Eberhardt ever applied for a permit.

After 1890, the Prefecture seems to have stopped enforcing the Ordonnance of 1800.

1900. Clementine Delait, bearded lady, did not live in Paris.  She obtained her her permit from the Minister of the Interior.

Madeleine Pelletier wore men’s clothing habitually from 1905-39, and never requested a permit.

1927.  The 1853 anti-transvesting law was re-affirmed in January.

1928.  The sporting star Violette Morris, who also never obtained a permit, was excluded by the French Women’s Sporting Federation.  At her appeal in 1930, the Federation cited the Ordonnance of 1800 as part of its argument.

1933.  The Ordonnance of 1833 was repeated verbatim.

1949.  The 1853 anti-transvesting law was re-affirmed yet again in February.

1963.  Paris Press announced that the Prefect of Police had asked the Interior Minister to introduce a bill in the National Assembly to ban transvestity.  This did not happen.

1969.  Dr Bernard Lefay, conseiller de Paris, wrote to the Prefect of Police that it would be unfortunate if the Ordonnance were to enforced against any female persons.  The Prefect replied, 20 June 1969, that they deemed it “sage de ne pas changer des textes auxquels les variations prévisibles ou imprévisibles de la mode peuvent à tout moment rendre leur actualité (wise not to change the text given the predictable and unpredictable changes of fashion)”.

The ordonnance was finally repealed in January 2013.

• Jann Matlock.  “Masquerading Women, Pathologized Men: Cross-Dressing, Fetishism, and the Theory of Perversion, 1882-1935”.  In Emily S. Apter & William Pietz (ed). Fetishism As Cultural Discourse. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993: 31-61.
• Vernon A. Roserio II. “Pointy Penises, Fashion Crimes. and Hysterical Mollies: The Pederasts’ Inversions”. Jeffrey Merrick & Bryant T. Ragan (ed). Homosexuality in Modern France. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996:152,170n40.
• Christine Bard.  “Le « DB58 » aux Archives de la Préfecture de Police”.  Clio, 10, 1999.  http://clio.revues.org/258.
• Christine Bard. “L’inderdiction de s’habiller en homme (1800)”. Une histoire politique du pantalon. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2010.
• "Parisian women finally 'allowed' to wear trousers". France 24, 04/02/2013. www.france24.com/en/20130204-paris-women-trousers-law-revolution-equality-france.
 

____________________________________________________________

I have mainly followed Bard’s essay in Clio.  Obviously not all the female-born persons mentioned above should be regarded as trans.  In some cases the issue was dress reform.  We forget that 19th century female dress with corsets, hoops and layers of petticoats could indeed hamper mobility and could result in accidental deaths, by fire, shipwreck, and on trams.  In other cases there was a temptation to transvest to gain higher wages.  Mlle Foucaud increased her pay from 2.50 fr to 4 fr.  On the other hand Foucard continued en homme for 50 years, and Libert had been dressing en homme for ten years and was never questioned.  Surely they were likely trans.

It seems to be a peculiarity of France that apparent trans men do not take a male name – see Jane Dieulafoy, Mathilde de Morney.  In the cases above this may be an artefact of reporting.  Neither the police nor the journalist was willing to record the male name.

We can easily posit three types of transvesting:  dress reform, economic (for higher pay) and a trans identity.  Bard writes mainly from a feminist and dress reform perspective.  Matlock covers many of same examples in a context of psychiatry and the social construction of fetishism.  Interestingly she posits a different three types of what she calls ‘clothing obsessionals’:

1. those who enter an asylum because of severely agitated behaviour, and are found to have gender identity confusion.
2. those who have tried to become men.  Some have succeeded, some have been unmasked.  Doctors at that time could not understand why they would want to.
3. those who find male clothing to be more convenient, and congruent with an easier life.

I cited Roserio for the law of 1853.  Bard and Matlock do not mention it at all.  It was passed in the conservative early days of the Second Empire, but remained as a tool for police repression.   Roserio does not mention the Ordonnance of 1800.

The erasure of female transvestites

• Elisabeth Krimmer. In the Company of Men: Cross-Dressed Women Around 1800. Detroit, Mich: Wayne State University Press, 2004.

The word transvestite has been constricted during the twentieth century to mean mainly men, and to imply an erotic involvement.   Neither of these constrictions were in place in earlier centuries.

The other distortion that has developed is the false claim that Magnus Hirschfeld coined the term 'transvestite'.  This is obviously in conflict with the legal requirement in nineteenth-century Paris that female-bodied transvestites must acquire a permission de travestissement.  In fact the various transvest* and travest* word have been around since the sixteenth century.   I have covered this before in some detail.   Click here.


The following is from Krimmer, p17-18.  She is discussing how the modern usage of 'transvestite' gets in the way of one such as herself who is writing about eighteenth and nineteenth century transvestites.   It is a pity however that she repeats the disinformation that Hirschfeld coined the term.

Until the twentieth century, male-to-female cross-dressers were the exception rather than the rule. Today, of course, the situation is diametrically inverted. The modern medical definition of transvestism all but excludes female-to-male cross-dressers. The origin of this lopsided model can be traced back to the German researcher of human sexuality, Magnus Hirschfeld, who coined the term transvestite in 1910. Thus, one might claim that Germany is not only "the forge in which modern sexuality was constructed", but also the home of the transvestite. Notwithstanding some modifications, today's standardizing definition of the term, set forth in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV-R) of the American Psychiatric Association, is essentially based on Hirschfcld's insights. According to the DSM-IV-R, a transvestite is a man who derives sexual pleasure from wearing women's clothing. Transvestites are to be distinguished from transsexuals, who conceive of themselves as female souls trapped in male bodies and ultimately seek to undergo sexual reassignment surgery. Unlike transsexuals, transvestites hold on to their male identity and are mostly heterosexual. The DSM-IV-R considers transvestic fetishism a sexual disorder which calls for treatment.  Both transvestism and transexualism refer to gender preference; sexual preference is denoted by the term homosexuality.

One (among many) reasons to be skeptical of the DSM-IV-R is its refusal to include women in the category of the transvestite.  The assumption that women wear male clothing for purposes of comfort or fashion effectively denies the possibility of female fetishism. On the other hand, the modern claim that all female transvestites are to be subsumed under the category of transsexualism is based on the even more questionable premise that all women ultimately want to be men. Typically, such psychological theories are unwilling to concede the possibility that female transvestites may want to adopt a male appearance while still holding on to a female gender identity, a combination which is  essential to the definition of male transvestism. Furthermore, the pertinent literature maintains that, in a male-dominated society, the desire to he a man does not hear the mark of pathology but must he considered rational behavior. From this vantage point, female transvestism is neither perverted nor psychotic but rather a suitable strategy for dealing with unfavorable conditions.

To the modern feminist sensitivity, postulating fundamentally different motivations for female and male transvestism clearly constitutes discrimination. However, demanding equality for today's gender-benders should not lead us to transpose today's standard onto historical cross-dressers of both genders. In their study of female cross-dressing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Dekker and van de Pol emphasize that historical cross-dressing is intrinsically different from its modern counterpart. If we level such differences, we fail to do justice to the specificity of a historical epoch nor do we take into account the historically conditioned power dynamics between the two genders.

One of the factors that differentiates historical cross-dressing from its modern counterpart is that cross-dressers throughout the eighteenth century were free of the restrictions imposed by modern forms of identity control such as passports. But while they were not forced to document their identity and gender, they faced other inhibitions, such as sumptuary laws.  These laws were motivated by two considerations: protection of the domestic textile industry through trade restrictions and stabilization of class hierarchies. An example of the former is Frederick William I's prohibition of the import of colored cotton fabrics from England. By outlawing foreign products, the soldier king intended to shield the domestic textile manufactures from unwelcome competition.

A Prolegomenon to a Typology of Cis Gender Variance

While there is variance of gender from male to female, from cis to trans, from authentic to bad faith, there are in fact very few Typologies of Gender Variance.

The best known are:

Harry Benjamin in The Transsexual Phenomenon, 1966

1. Pseudo Transvestite
2. Fetishistic Transvestite
3. True Transvestite
4. Non-op Transsexual
5. True or Core Transsexual (moderate intensity)
6. True or Core Transsexual (high intensity)

Ekins & King in The Transgender Phenomenon, 2006

1. Migrating
2. Oscillating
3. Negating
4. Transcending

Anne Bolin in “Traversing Gender”,  in Sabrina Ramet.  Gender Reversals and Gender Culture,  1996

1. hermaphroditic genders
2. two-spirit traditions
3. cross-gendered roles in the manly heart tradition
4. woman-marriage
5. cross-gendered rituals

What each of these typologies have in common is that they are typologies of trans variance only, not of cis variance, and in fact contribute to the mistaken idea that gender variance is a synonym for transgender, that trans persons are at variance in not being cis.

There are in fact quite distinctive variants among people considered as cis-gendered.

Autogynephilia went wrong especially in that the idea was applied to transsexuals before it had been investigated in cis-women as to frequency and as to what are its normal manifestations.   The same goes for autoandrophilia in cis men.  Typologies of trans gender variance are likewise shackled.

I will be treating crossdreamers (to use Jack Molay’s term) as cis, in that that is how the people around them regard them.   Arguably they are wannabe trans, and might persuade a psychologist or a gender therapist that they are such, but one of the points that I will be making is that the dividing line between cis and trans is movable.

As with trans persons, cis persons can be arranged by psychological identification, and then clothing, hormonal and surgical enhancements.

Here are some of the variants within the cis spectrum:

• persons who are quite comfortable with the gender of their body and, what is another way of saying the same thing, are not at all uncomfortable with the idea of or in the presence of transsexuals, genderqueer, drag performers, transvestites, etc.
• persons who do not want to change their gender, but are nevertheless estranged from their current gender.   While there have always been such persons, post-structuralist theory has offered new ways to articulate it.
• intersex persons who stay with the gender of rearing. Intersex is, of course, an umbrella term covering much variation of its own.
• autogynophilics/autoandrophilics.   For many this is a phase typically starting with puberty where they are erotically excited at being the sex/gender that they are.   For some this excitement continues into maturity.
• crossdreamers who have accepted their inner cross gender persona, are comfortable with trans persons, but have not or not yet decided to do anything about it.
• a variant on crossdreaming is literary androgyny where a writer is able to pass, not in person but through his/her manuscripts as the other gender.  Examples would be Fiona Macleod, George Elliot, James Tiptree, Jr, Patricia Highsmith, and the female writers of contemporary gay romances.
• persons who are uncomfortable with the idea and/or the presence of various types of trans persons.   On the model of the research that has established that male homophobes are erotically aroused by male imagery, we may speculate that persons in this type are crossdreamers in denial.
• persons who seek out homosocial environments, be it the military, a convent, a feminist group, a male-only pool-hall as a validation of their biological gender.
• hom(e)ovestites, who dress in a standard or exaggerated way associated with their own gender, even when it is not appropriate.  Examples are men who always wear suits, even when their friends are casually dressed; women who wear skirts and makeup when they are impractical.
• butch men and women. For men this is an extreme homeovestity.  Butch women are taken by some to be a type of trans, but many butch women object that they are not.
• There should be an extreme femme homeovestity, but apart from femme lesbians it does not seem to exist, probably because it is indistinguishable from the way that prostitutes dress – which is required for employment.
• the bear culture that has developed over the last few decades, that appreciates the normal appearance of middle-aged and often overweight men.  This is still mainly a gay culture, but straight bears are becoming more common. 
• same-sex hormonally enhanced cis-persons.  Most women in the developed countries spend some years taking contraceptive pills which of course are estrogens.  Until a health scare a few years ago, many women went on hormone-replacement therapy after menopause.  Estrogens again.   Some men into bodybuilding or athletic attainment like to take testosterone for greater achievement, but this is generally illegal.
• cross-sex hormonally enhanced cis-persons.  Many men are put on estrogens to diminish prostate problems.  Women athletes sometimes take testosterone for the same reasons that men do.
• surgical enhancements 1: plastic surgery.  Traditionally associated with women, this is becoming more common with men.
• surgical enhancements 2: in vitro fertilization
• surgical enhancements 3: body modification. 
• surgical enhancements 4: Transhumanism.