But despite long being termed “illegal” and “unnatural” and still carrying with it an “unofficial” death penalty, transvestism is still a part of human expression.
Transvestites and other transgendered people were leaders of the first wave of gay liberation that began in the 1880s in Germany. That movement enjoyed the support of many in the mass Socialists parties.
Magnus Hirschfeld, a Jewish gay leader of the first wave of gay liberation in Germany in the 1880s, was also reported to be transvestite. He wrote a groundbreaking work on the subject. Most of the valuable documentation this movement uncovered about transgender throughout history, along with research about lesbians and gay men, was burned in a pyre by the Nazis.
Lives rendered invisible
While, as we have seen, transgendered expression has always existed in the Western Hemisphere, the need to “pass” washed up on these shores with the arrival of capitalism. Many women and men have been forced to pass. Some of their voices have been recorded.
Deborah Sampson passed as a male soldier in the American War of Independence. She once pulled a bullet out of her own thigh to avoid discovery. She later published her memoirs entitled The Female Review and went on a public speaking tour in 1802.
Jack Bee Garland (Elvira Mugarrieta), born the daughter of San Francisco’s first Mexican consul, was detained by police in Stockton, Calif, in 1897, charged with “masquerading in men’s clothes.” A month later the gregarious and outspoken Garland was made an honorary member of Stockton’s Bachelors Club.
Lucy Ann Lobdell, born in New York State in 1829, was a renowned hunter and trapper. She explained her painful decision to leave her young daughter with her parents and venture out into a “man’s world” as Rev. Joseph Lobdell.
“I made up my mind to dress in men’s attire to seek labor, as I was used to men’s work. And as I might work harder at housework, and get only a dollar a week, and I was capable of doing men’s work, and getting men’s wages. I feel that I cannot submit to see all the bondage with which woman is oppressed, and listen to the voice of fashion, and repose upon the bosom of death. I am a mother; I love my offspring even better than words can tell. I can not bear to die and leave that little one to struggle in every way to live as I have to do.”
Lobdell died in an asylum.
Harry Gorman lived as a man for more than 20 years, until hospitalized in Buffalo in 1903. The 40-year-old cigar-chomping railroad cook swore that “nothing would hire” her to wear women’s clothing. Gorman alluded to at least 10 other women “who dressed as men, appeared wholly manlike, and were never suspected of being otherwise, also employed in the same railway-company; some of these being porters, train-agents, switchmen and so on. They often met together and made themselves not a little merry over the success of their transference from one class of humanity to another.” (Gay American History)
Cora Anderson lived as Ralph Kerwinieo for 13 years before being brought up on charges of “disorderly conduct” in 1914 in Milwaukee after her sex was disclosed. After being ordered by the court to don “women’s” apparel, Anderson, a South American Indian, explained: “In the future centuries it is probable that woman will be the owner of her own body and the custodian of her own soul. But until that time you can expect that the statutes [concerning] women will be all wrong. The well-cared-for woman is a parasite, and the woman who must work is a slave. The woman’s minimum wage will help, but it will not—cannot— effect a complete cure. Some people may think I am very bitter against the men. I am only bitter against conditions—conditions that have grown up in this man-made world.” (Gay American History)
The struggle of James McHarris (Annie Lee Grant) for the right to live as a man was reported in a 1954 article in Ebony. McHarris, arrested in Mississippi on an unrelated petty charge, endured having to strip in front of the mayor and police, and was imprisoned in a men’s jail.
Transvestism has continued to flourish in drama and comedy in the U.S. and in Europe. Cross-gendered performances were an integral part of burlesque and vaudeville in the U.S. during the 19th century.
The blues tradition in the 1920s and 1930s incorporated lyrics about transgendered expression in the urban African American communities in songs like Ma Rainey’s “Prove It On Blues,” and Bessie Jackson’s “B-D Women” (bull-dagger women).
Transgendered roles are still seen—most frequently as “comedy”—on television and in film, theater, literature, dance and music. But the social penalties for transgendered people who try to live and work in dignity and respect are still cruel and frequently violent.
Christine Jorgensen battled bigotry
The development of anesthesia and the commercial synthesis of hormones are relatively recent discoveries of this century. These breakthroughs opened the possibility for individuals to change their sex to conform with their gender. Since that time, tens of thousands of transsexuals in this country alone have made the same life decision that Christine Jorgensen made.
While Jorgensen was not the first person to have a sex-change, she was by far the most well-publicized. She died May 3, 1989, at age 62 after a battle with cancer. Jorgensen was remembered in mainstream media obituaries as George Jorgensen, the Bronx-born ex-GI and photographer who traveled to Denmark in the early 1950s to become Christine—the first reported sex-change.
These accounts admit to an “international fuss” over her life decision, but add that she was “transformed into an instant celebrity. She traveled the lecture and nightclub circuit, met royalty and celebrities and ended up rich.” (New York Daily News, May 4, 1989)
Sounds like a Harlequin novel, doesn’t it? This is sheer hypocrisy coming from the media—and the ruling powers guiding their pens—that made Jorgensen the object of universal ridicule. Not once during her lifetime did anyone who controls this society say that Christine Jorgensen was a human being deserving respect.
The news of Jorgensen’s sex change was leaked to the press in late 1952— one of the deepest periods of political reaction in the history of the United States. It was the height of the notorious McCarthy witch hunts, when hundreds were dragged into court and put in prison simply for their political views. The Rosenbergs were sitting on death row, awaiting electrocution at Sing-Sing.
Pentagon planes bombed Korea and tested the hydrogen bomb in the South Pacific.
Jim Crow laws still ruled the South. Gay men and lesbians were fighting for survival without a movement. Transvestism was only acceptable when it was “Uncle Milty” Berle putting on drag for guffaws.
When the news about Christine Jorgensen hit, all hell broke loose. From appalled news commentators to cruel talk show hosts, she was attacked so viciously it seemed she was exiled from the human race.
What had been an important private decision was seized on by a hostile media and vulgarized. Her personal life was no longer her own. She was relentlessly hounded. Jorgensen told the media a year before her death: “I’m not that recognizable anymore. I can actually go into a supermarket and people don’t know who I am, which is just wonderful and suits me just fine.
“Things don’t hurt the way they did then,” she added.
Somehow she paid this punishing emotional price and survived with grace and dignity. It took great courage.
The attacks on Jorgensen were part of a campaign meant to enforce conformity, but it was too late in history for this to succeed.
Jorgensen told the press in 1986: “I could never understand why I was receiving so much attention. Now, looking back, I realize it was the beginning of the sexual revolution, and I just happened to be one of the trigger mechanisms.”