Gender Transgression

Gender-Variant People

Before the 19th century, preceding the work of Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Emile Durkheim, it was widely believed that there were only two sexes. It was “natural” to belong to one or the other, no matter what the individual desired. The problem of “anomalous” individuals became prominent at the time of Darwin and Freud, but it seems it did not significantly alter their understanding of what was “natural” and “normal” in human sexual behavior. However, the 19th-century sexologists and sexual activists and reformers were preoccupied with this problem, attempting to introduce new terminology and hence classify the gender-variant people. Concepts such as Uranians, homosexuals, psychic hermaphrodites, or the intermediate sex were coined, aiming to identify persons whose minds, bodies, or behavior seemed to challenge sexual dimorphism. In 1923, Magnus Hirschfeld coined the term transsexual, whereas a few years before that, in 1917, the first genital reassignment surgery helped Dr. Alan Hart achieve his female-to-male transformation. Hart's case was published in 1920, in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disorders by Dr. Joshua Gilbert, who assisted Hart with his transition and who kept the identity of his patient a secret.

The early-20th-century researchers believed that gender and sexual behavior were the result of a sexually dimorphic brain. The brain itself was believed to have a sex, which was most often in accordance with chromosomal and genital sex; however, just as there were genital or chromosomal intersex conditions, there were cases of the brain intersex morphology too, causing gender identity that was at odds with either chromosomal or somatic sex. Hirschfeld's concept of sexual intermediates, or intersex, included, for example, the whole spectrum of what is today called queer expression—gay, lesbian, transgender, and transsexual. His Institute for Sexology in Berlin, established in 1919, provided endocrinological and surgical services to transgender individuals, one of them being Lili Elbe, a case well-known in the literature on gender transgression as well as on the history of sexology. After the Nazis closed the institute in 1933, there were no cases of gender transgression in Europe accompanied by surgery until the case of Christine Jorgensen in Denmark in 1952. Surgical sex change, however, was not a choice of all gender transgressors. For example, Virginia Prince—the Southern Californian advocate for heterosexual male transvestites and the author of 1960s self-help books How to Be a Woman Though Male and The Transvestite and His Wife—argued for change of gender through nonsurgical means. She was the first person to use the term transgender.

...