Struggling for Ordinary. Andre Cavalcante
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alternative and later, in the 1970s, began to use the word “transgenderist,” which she defined as “a third way between transvestism and transsexuality” (Hill 2013, 377). Transgenderists, as Prince wrote, were “people who have adopted the exterior manifestations of the opposite sex on a full-time basis but without surgical intervention” (cited in Hill 2013, 377). The term “transgenderist” would be taken up, resignified, and modified to “transgender” by scholars and activists in the 1990s.
Throughout the 1960s, print media expanded its purview, addressing diverse trans communities. Some periodicals such as Transformation Magazine (1969) were examples of erotically charged adult entertainment, while others focused on the art and craft of female impersonating. Generally published by commercial entities specializing in fetish culture, they were circulated on the margins of society, sold in adult bookstores and pornography shops. Magazines including Female Mimics, which premiered in 1963, Female Impersonators, which began in 1969, and Drag, which debuted in 1970, depicted the world of professional female impersonators. They reported on drag balls and contests, published photo essays of professional performers, offered “how-to” guides and tips for female impersonation, printed fantasy fiction, and included listings of clubs and venues where performances could be seen. These magazines were visually stirring and brimming with photos. But even more, they operated as nascent public spheres and counterpublics. Their classified sections allowed individuals to post personal ads and reach across time and space to communicate with like-minded others for friendship, companionship, dates, sex, and love. For example, in a 1976 issue of Drag magazine, one reader placed a classified ad looking “to hear from tvs [transvestites] and tss [transsexuals]. I like to read tv stories, especially like to hear from those who can pass in public” (44). Other ads expressed desires for “mature men for dates” (43), “new friends, TVs, females, bi-males and gays” (43), and “exotic get-togethers” (44). Letters to the editor sections revealed just how important these magazines were to readers. In a 1969 issue of Female Impersonators, Myrtle from London requested that the letters to the editor section “be extended to five or six pages … This is my favorite feature.” Likewise, another letter asked the magazine to create a “pen pal section” so readers could learn about each other’s everyday lives and experiences.
In 1964, Reed Erickson, a wealthy transgender man, started one of the largest and most well-funded organizations for transgender advocacy: the Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF). The group worked on a variety of socially progressive projects, but its mission was centered on the cause of transsexuality. EEF funded medical research, held conferences, arranged public relations events, and published newsletters and educational leaflets to promote greater understanding of transsexuality (Meyerowitz 2002; Devor and Matte 2007). The organization’s pamphlets, small booklets on various topics of transsexuality, were an authority on the topic written to be accessible to a general audience. EEF also offered emotional support and referral services, circulated resource lists, and furnished medical and legal information. They sponsored speaker series, conducted public talks at colleges and universities, and consulted with medical professionals. In 1964, they funded Harry Benjamin’s research institute, the Harry Benjamin Foundation. Notably, EEF supplied all of the initial funding for the first university Gender Identity Clinic to provide sex change operations in North America at Johns Hopkins University, which opened in 1966 (Devor and Matte 2007). The establishment of the clinic made national news headlines and granted much needed legitimacy to sexual reassignment surgery.
Into the 1970s, trans advocacy and print culture continued to evolve. In 1970, Angela Davis, a transgender woman, activist, and reporter for the underground Los Angeles press, formed TAO, the Transsexual Action Organization, which published the newsletters Moonshadow and Mirage. Her organization became one of the first national transsexual advocacy groups. Davis, a former member of the Gay Liberation Front in LA, brought an ethics of transsexual liberation and countercultural philosophy to both her organization and its publications. In the late 1970s, Merissa Sherrill Lynn founded the New England support group the Tiffany Club, which published its own newsletter in 1978 called the Tapestry. The magazine addressed issues across the gender spectrum. In fact, the word “tapestry” was chosen for the newsletter because it meant a “ ‘weaving’ of all orientations into one.”6 The Tapestry was circulated to other transgender organizations and sold in adult bookstores. Over time the Tapestry would be renamed Transgender Tapestry, and the Tiffany Club would become the International Foundation for Gender Education. Transgender Tapestry covered politics, health, and well-being; featured film and book reviews; and published one of the most comprehensive resource lists spanning everything from doctors to support groups. Leaving the confines of the adult world, the magazine was eventually sold in major bookstores such as Barnes & Noble.
Alongside these developments in transgender advocacy and print culture, “a new generation” (Meyerowitz 2002) of trans individuals emerged in the 1960s and ’70s. For one, gay communities in the West began to distance themselves from gender nonconformity and “forced transsexuals to find their own point of reference outside gay lifestyles” (Perkins 1996, 55). Moreover, with greater knowledge of and access to information and medical treatment, different subcultures under the transgender umbrella began to take shape. Ekins and King (1996) identify two different communities emerging at this moment. The first were “full-time ‘outsiders,’ ” which included female impersonators, cross-dressers, transgender strippers, showgirls, and sex workers. These were marginal figures on the economic fringe and generally communicated face-to-face. The second community inhabited “ ‘respectable’ worlds” and were “more concerned with individual being or identity” (Ekins and King 1996, 50). Similar to Virginia Prince and her organization, this community was highly literate, engaged with the medical literature on gender variation, and rather than shared space, connected with each other through print culture. Esther Newton’s Mother Camp, one of the first major ethnographic studies of female impersonators, made similar distinctions between “street” and “stage” performers. Living lives of “confrontation, prostitution, and drug ‘highs’ ” (Newton 1979, 8), “street” impersonators were generally younger people who worked as impersonators part-time and lived their everyday lives as trans, fighting stigmatization and struggling to make a living. “Stage” impersonators were older and better-paid performers who identified as gay men and cross-dressed primarily as a job (akin to professional “drag queens” today).
While many of the performers in Newton’s study self-identified as gay men, her work bears witness to the emergence of what she calls “hormone queens,” those who used hormone shots to modify the shape of their body to achieve conventional female physicality. In the 1970s, legal and underground access to hormones became more widely available. Importantly, those individuals who took them were often exiled from gay subcultures and condemned by stage performers who no longer viewed them as authentic female impersonators (Newton 1972). Anne Bolin’s (1988) work focused on this emerging community, one that sought out surgical intervention and sexual reassignment surgery. Bolin explored the process of gender transition as a rite of passage, a highly stylized practice “with all the facets of a ritualistic and symbolic transformation of status” (8). One of the more compelling insights that emerged from Bolin’s (1988) work is that by the late 1970s many transsexuals had developed both formal and informal communication networks and communities of support. They had a collective consciousness, cultivating and circulating knowledge about effective practices for securing hormones, receiving sex change operations, and maintaining a transsexual identity. Indeed, at this time, medical professionals were creating best practices to serve this community. In 1979, the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA) approved “the standards of care,” a set of principles that guides the medical treatment and care of transgender people.
As the 1980s approached, the tensions between transgender and gay communities grew.7 The solidarity that had once bound them together—albeit a historically uneven and conditional one—became even more tenuous. For example, while gay activists sought to distance homosexuality from medical and psychiatric definitions, transsexuals were unable to divorce themselves from the medical field. They needed psychological services, hormone therapies, and surgical procedures to transition. At the same time, some in the feminist movement viewed transgender women as inauthentic intruders of female space. Further, the same kinds of white, middle-class, respectability politics that shunned individuals like Sylvia