Barry Reay - Trans America

Juliet Jacques, author of Trans: A Memoir

‘The richly varied nature of the current trans movement is so beautifully explored and uncovered in Barry Reay’s new book. A pleasure to read.’

Fayette Hauser of The Cockettes

‘This is an admirable contribution to trans history by a highly respected scholar. It is a story of shifting categorizations, often highly medicalized and limiting, but above all a narrative of agency as trans people pushed definitions to the limit, bent them, and broke them, and increasingly spoke for themselves in a powerful, if not always singular, voice. It’s a major achievement and deserves to become a classic.’

Jeffrey Weeks, London South Bank University

‘This book is of very high quality. Reay is a major scholar in the field and writes with great authority and assurance.’

Thomas Laqueur, University of California at Berkeley

Barry Reay

polity

Copyright © Barry Reay 2020

The right of Barry Reay to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2020 by Polity Press

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

101 Station Landing

Suite 300

Medford, MA 02155, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or, otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1182-2

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Reay, Barry, author.

Title: Trans America : a counter-history / Barry Reay.

Description: Cambridge ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A history of trans before the “trans moment”-- Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019043752 (print) | LCCN 2019043753 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509511785 | ISBN 9781509511792 (pb) | ISBN 9781509511822 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Transgender people--United States--History. | Gender identity--United States--History.

Classification: LCC HQ77.95.U6 R43 2020 (print) | LCC HQ77.95.U6 (ebook) | DDC 305.3--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019043752LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019043753

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

Trans seems to be everywhere in American culture. Yet there is little understanding of how this came about. Are people aware that there were earlier times of gender flexibility and contestability in American history? How well known is it, say, that a previous period of trans visibility in the 1960s and early 1970s faced a vehement backlash right at the time that trans, in the form of what was then termed ‘transvestism’ and ‘transsexuality’, seemed to be so ascendant? Was there transness before transsexuality was named in the 1950s and transgender emerged in the 1990s?

This book explores this history: from a time before trans in the nineteenth century to the transsexual moment of the 1960s and 1970s, the transgender turn of the 1990s, and the so-called tipping point of current culture. It is a rich and varied history, where same-sex desires and identities, cross-dressing, and transsexual and transgender identities jostled for recognition. It is a history that is not at all flattering to US psychiatric and surgical practices.

There are competing narratives in trans history. Some have maintained that convictions of gender dislocation have always existed; this was claimed in True Selves (1996), the popular guide to transsexuality recommended by Jennifer Finney Boylan when she declared her transition to her academic colleagues: ‘one indisputable fact remains: transsexualism exists and has always existed’. 1The authors of True Selves were in good company. ‘The historical records make it very clear that transsexualism has been a human problem since the most ancient times’, wrote the wealthy, female-to-male transsexual Reed Erickson in his foreword to the classic Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment (1969). 2For Max Wolf Valerio, a former radical feminist, ‘People like me have always existed, in every era, on every continent.’ 3Yet this is not the case. As this book will explore, transgender does not float free of historical or cultural context. 4

For others, far from ‘always’ existing, transsexuality was a late-twentieth-century phenomenon. As Catherine Millot once put it, there is a sense in which there was no transsexuality before experts like Harry Benjamin and Robert Stoller ‘invented it’. 5Although Joanne Meyerowitz’s influential book on the subject has charted individual and sporadic instances of surgery and experimental sex modifications in Europe and (more rarely) in the USA from the early twentieth century, she effectively began her story with the intense publicity surrounding the sex-reassignment surgery of Christine Jorgensen in the 1950s: ‘Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty’. 6Transsexuality, a category that had once not existed, quickly became a widely recognized term after it had been named and described in Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon (1966), Richard Green and John Money’s edited collection Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment (1969), and Stoller’s The Transsexual Experiment (1975). 7Before that, those who experienced gender disjunction would invariably have explained those feelings in terms of homosexual or heterosexual transvestism – such was the rapid movement of sexual classification. 8Over the next ten years, the US national picture changed from one of no significant institutional support for transsexual endocrinology, therapy, and surgery to a situation where, by 1975, major medical centres were offering treatment and many transsexuals had been provided with surgery. 9

One of the notable aspects of trans history is the rapid shift in sexual and gender configurations. 10The transgender community emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, more sexually and gender diverse than the older transsexual community (which it incorporated) and less wedded to medical intervention. 11When Anne Bolin published her study on male-to-female transsexuals in 1988, stressing surgery (‘There are no halfway measures. If one is a transsexual, then pursuit of surgery accompanies one’s transition’), it was in that period of movement from transsex to transgender – and already seemed dated. 12By 2008, on the other hand, Walter Bockting was explaining that there was ‘no one way of being transgender’: ‘Feminizing and masculinizing hormones and genitalreconstructive surgery are no longer two steps of one linear process of sex reassignment … Clients no longer necessarily need surgery to live and be recognized in the desired gender role.’ 13Trans surgery too – for wealthy trans women at least – has shifted from an emphasis on ‘the genitals as the site of a body’s maleness or femaleness’ to an increased focus on the face as a site of true sex: moving from genital reconstruction surgery to facial feminization surgery. 14