1950s and 1960s Trans History

1950s Out of the Shadows

1950: Justice The Mattachine Society, the first gay men’s advocacy organization, is founded.  For much of its existence it is largely a white, middle class, assimilationist organization; where assimilationist means that they attempted to gain more acceptance through aspiring to appear like mainstream genteel heterosexual society in all ways save romance and sex. Both The Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Billitis were strong presences in the early Gay Liberation movement in the 50’s and 60’s, but tended to view transgender people as too outré to be associated with, fearing that society at large’s greater disdain for trans people would hinder the social progress of cisgender gays and lesbians.  This pattern would repeat itself in the 21st century in which trans rights were put aside as a priority while the cisgender parts of the queer community focused their lobbying and legal efforts on marriage equality.

1950-1951 Medical Culture  Automobile racer and WWII RAF pilot Roberta Cowell becomes the first person in the UK to have vaginoplasty, having been taking hormone therapy since 1948.  Dr. Michael Dillon, the first trans man in Britain to have phalloplasty, secretly performed an orchiectomy on her, giving her legal cover to claim to be intersex, which then allowed Dr. Sir Harold Gillies to perform her vaginoplasty.

1949-1953 Medical Culture  Christine Jorgenson’s medical transition and public debut.   Jorgenson was a former soldier who had fought in World War II.  In 1949, she claimed to be a medical technology student in order to get access to ethinyl estradiol. She had traveled to Denmark to have her initial surgeries for SRS (sexual reassignment surgery) performed by Christian Hamburger (vaginoplasty would wait until 1954) and upon her return to the U.S., she became a celebrity and performer, perhaps the first famous out trans woman.  By 1953, Jorgenson had become a patient of Harry Benjamin and was in that year the subject of more news articles than any other individual or event.  Because of her fame, many trans folks contacted her seeking direction on medical transitioning & like Louise Lawrence, she connected them to Benjamin.

1952 Culture  Louise Lawrence, Edythe/Edith Ferguson, Joan Thornton, and Virginia Prince founded Transvestia, the first periodical focused on crossdressing and met in Thornton’s apartment.  Louise Lawrence considered the transvestites targeted as their readership to include “"heterosexuals,... definite fetishists, sadists, masochists, voyeurs, homosexuals, etc.".  This incarnation only ran two issues.
Prince’s later, 1960/1 version narrowed the target audience to heterosexual crossdressers.
Jules Gill-Peterson characterizes this group as “The Long Beach Group”.   She notes that despite Lawrence’s connections to Kinsey and Benjamin, they maintained a skepticism of the establishment medicalization of transness, promoted a DIY style of feminization, and at the time only Ferguson and Thornton presented themselves to the world as women full time, though none of them considered themselves “transsexuals”.  At the same time, they were decidedly a white, middle class group and their reach and vision did not appear to extend beyond that demographic.

1952 Justice ONE Inc. was spun off from The Mattachine Society and another Los Angeles based homophile group, The Knights of the Clock (which focused on interracial gay couples), as a homophile activist organization inclusive of both gays and lesbians.

1952: Medical The DSM (1) is published and includes transvestism as a diagnosable condition.  Nothing is said relating to transsexual people directly but are presumed to be included under transvestism.  It is grouped along with pedophilia and homosexuality as a form of sexual deviation..
From the DSM 1:

“OOQ-x63 Sexual deviation This diagnosis is reserved for deviant sexuality which is not symptomatic of more extensive syndromes, such as schizophrenic and obsessional reactions. DEFINITION OF TERMS 39 The term includes most of the cases formerly classed as "psychopathic personality with pathologic sexuality." The diagnosis will specify the type of the pathologic behavior, such as homosexuality, transvestism, pedophilia, fetishism and sexual sadism (including rape, sexual assault, mutilation).”

1954 and beyond: Medical Having defined transsexualism as a psychological disorder, several attempts were made to “cure” the condition through various conversion therapies.  Studies of such attempts revealed that they fundamentally did not and do not work.  Harry Benjamin and Elmer Belt developed protocols to screen out anyone from surgical candidacy whom they thought would have “bad outcomes” essentially anyone that they thought would not conform to heterosexual norms of being only attracted to men (for trans women) and their beauty standards and those who conformed to stereotypical gendered behavior.

1955 Justice The Daughters of Billitis one of the earliest lesbian organizations, was founded.  LIke the Mattachine Society, it was largely white, middle class, and became assimilationist.  It published the first national lesbian magazine, The Ladder, beginning in 1956.

1958: Medical Culture Legal Coccinelle, (stage name of Jacqueline-Charlotte Dufresnoy) became the first French person to have bottom surgery.  She had begun a stage career as a singer and actress in 1953, which continued in films in the late 1950s through the 1960s.  She was able to legally marry a man in 1960 and to do so, blessed by the Catholic Church. 

1958: Medical Agnes Torres began seeing Dr. Robert Stoller at UCLA, seeking gender confirmation surgery.  While such surgeries were being done in other countries, in the United states there was resistance except when the patient was known to be intersex, for whom such surgeries had been done from the early 1900s.  Because of this, trans patients of folks like Dr. Benjamin were often directed out of the country to places like Denmark, Spain, or Mexico for surgeries from the late 40s through the early 60s.  Agnes, in 1952 at age 13 had begun taking her mother’s estrogen pills in secret and by the time she saw Stoller, without disclosing her self-medication, her estrogen levels were unusual enough for someone assigned male that she was presumed intersex and had surgery in 1959.  Only afterwards did she reveal her pharmacological assistance.
Agnes and other trans people were interviewed by Stoller and Harold Garfinkel as part of a research project at UCLA.  In 2022 Chase Joynt produced a documentary feature, “Framing Agnes” based on those interviews, with reenactments after first developing it as a short a few years earlier.

1958 Culture : Susanna Valenti (then Tito Arriagada) and her wife Maria Tonell opened The Chevalier D’Eon resort in the Catskills and began hosting weekly “female impersonation” shows and became a social nexus for white middle class, straight crossdressers, many of whom turned out to be trans women.  The story of the resort and its patrons is told in the documentary Casa Susanna.  They later, in the 1960s, relocated the resort and renamed it Casa Susanna, dropping the drag shows and becoming a smaller resort for crossdressers before selling in the 1970s to pay for medical bills.

1959: Justice  The Cooper Do-nuts Riot.Cooper Do-nuts was a cafe situated between two gay bars and frequented by trans women, drag queens, and sex workers.  Trans people and other gender non-conforming queers were not allowed in the gay bars as it was believed (with reason) that they would draw more police raids.  Police would regularly arrest people for violating crossdressing laws and enter establishments to do so.  One night in May 1959, while attempting to arrest a collection of trans and gay patrons, police were driven out of the cafe and into the street, expanding into a riot that closed the street for a day. 

1960s

1960 Culture Virginia Prince took over as editor of Transvestia, which began to refocus towards her primary audience of crossdressing men and trans feminine people who were exclusively attracted to women.  A Look Back at Transvestia
The complete run of Transvestia is archived by the University of Victoria.

1961 Culture Virginia Prince formed “The Hose and Heels Club” thought to be the first crossdressing organization.

1961  Culture  April Ashley, a model and actress, who had performed in a drag cabaret in the late 1950s in Paris, and appeared in the Hope/Crosby “Road Picture” The Road to Hong Kong, is outed as a trans woman when a friend sold her story to the British tabloids.  She had surgically transitioned the previous year and never worked as a model again following her outing.

1962 October: Culture “The Hose and Heels Club” was renamed “The Foundation for Full Personality Expression” aka FPE, aka Phi Pi Epsilon.  In the documentary Casa Susanna, Katherine Cummings (1935-2022) states that it was formed at the Chevalier D’Eon resort in the Catskills over Halloween weekend.

1962 Medical UCLA’s Gender Identity Research Clinic was founded under the auspices of the Psychiatry department.  Throughout the 60s when trans kids were brought in, often by parents concerned that their child might be gay, they were subjected to some manner of conversion therapy if they were pre-adolescent, but upon reaching adolescence it was presumed that gender identity was no longer malleable and the trans teens were often then prescribed hormone therapy and the clinic acquiesced to their social transitioning.  

Harry Benjamin remained reluctant to prescribe hormones to teens throughout the 60s.  At the same time, children from less supportive and less affluent homes, particularly Black trans kids, were institutionalized.

As more trans people became aware of the possibilities for medical interventions, providers became overwhelmed and developed restrictive criteria for providing such interventions with goals of reducing post-operative regret, legal liability, and negative sensational media attention.

1964 Medical Reed Erickson, a trans man, established the Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF) which funded much of trans medicine from the 60s through the 80s.  He had met Harry Benjamin in 1963.  In 1977 the EEF was reorganized into the Janus Information Facility, which two years later became the Harry Benjamin International Dysphoria Association.  The Benjamin Association published the Standards of Care for trans people and in 2007 was renamed the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH).  

1964  Medical Dr. Robert J. Stoller of UCLA, promulgated the term “Gender Identity” in a paper titled “A Contribution to the Study of Gender Identity”.

1964 July: Justice Legal  The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into U.S. Federal law by President Johnson.  Title VII provides various legal protections from discrimination on the basis of sex.  These protections are interpreted to include or exclude gender identity and/or gender presentation at various times, in various courts and by various administrations over the following decades.

1965 Medical Culture  Psychiatrist Dr. John F. Oliven introduced the term “transgender” as a middle ground between “transvestite” and “transsexual” in the 1965 revision of his reference work Sexual Hygiene and Pathology.

1965 Medical Johns Hopkins Hospital opened its Gender Identity Clinic. 

1965 April and May: Justice The Janus Society of Philadelphia supported the Dewey’s Lunch Counter Sit-Ins at the Philadelphia restaurant in response to their policies of excluding people who appeared visibly homosexual or gender variant, particularly those who were gender non-conforming .  No arrests were made and following the May sit-in, the policy was changed.

Culture  Beauty Contests/Drag pageants continue and become fundraising events that some cisgender people attend.  On many occasions they may have been technically illegal and had to be negotiated with local law enforcement.  In the U.S., Flawless Sabrina organizes what would become a national pageant circuit.

1966 Culture The Beaumont Society is founded in the UK.as a secret society for crossdressers.  Later it expanded its scope to be a support group for transgender people in general.  It was started as a branch of the American organization Phi Pi Epsilon (Full Personality Expression) (in parallel with French and Scandinavian branches) which was associated with Virginia Prince’s incarnation of Transvestia.  Like Prince’s Tri-Ess, The Beaumont Society restricted membership to heterosexual cis male crossdressers (and their wives) for fear of being more strongly  persecuted by homophobes.
1966 Medical Harry Benjamin published The Transsexual Phenomenon which includes The Benjamin Scale classifying transvestites and transsexuals along a 0 to 6 scale (modeled after Kinsey). Among other things it associates transvestism with being attracted primarily to women and transsexual surgery candidates with being primarily attracted to men, whereas the true range of sexual orientation among both transsexuals and crossdressers is much more varied.  This is illustrative of the sort of medical gatekeeping that has long been in place regarding prescriptions and surgeries for trans people, though Benjamin is often lauded as leading the only group of physicians of the era in the United States to provide services for transgender people.  For instance, only those trans women who were attracted primarily to men, were recommended for medical interventions such as hormone therapy and surgeries and he still considered such “true transsexuals” to be fundamentally gay or bi men.  In many cases those interventions were further restricted to those whom the physician thought were pretty and would likely pass for cisgender following treatment.  For trans women primarily attracted to women, he saw transness as something to “cure” potentially through conversion therapy.   The successor to scales like this is the diagnosis of gender dysphoria in the DSM V…
1966 Justice Compton’s Cafeteria Riot: Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco was a 24 hour diner and a place where Black and Brown, drag queens and trans women hung out.  They had been kept out of local gay bars.  The owners didn’t want them hanging around and would call the cops on them to have them removed or arrested for female impersonation.  In August 1966, the queens fought back, threw coffee at the police, further fighting broke out and the queens and trans women were arrested.  Susan Stryker’s documentary Screaming Queens documents the riot.  A fictionalized version appears in “Episode 8, The Days of Small Surrenders” of the 2019 season of Tales of the City.  This review both details the history with period photos and reviews the episode.  It is also referenced at the beginning and end of the second episode of HBOMax’s Equal documentary mini-series and it is referenced in the second episode of FX’s Pride documentary mini-series..

Late 1960s: Culture  Virginia Prince promulgates the term “transgenderist” as a word meaning someone who maintains they are male, but prefers to appear female.  For the same concept she preferred the term femmephile.  It included both part time crossdressers and those whose gender presentation was female full time, yet were of cisgender male identity  Prince also held to firm traditional ideas about what male & female constitute.

 
1966, 1968: Legal  Court challenges rule that a transsexual  person can not have their sex changed on their birth certificate in New York, but can have their name changed.

1967:Culture The movie Queens At Heart profiles four trans women in a brief 22 minute   documentary.

1967 Culture The movie Behind Every Good Man gives a brief 10 minute intimate portrait of the life of a black trans woman in Los Angeles.

1968: Culture The movie The Queen profiles participants in the February 13, 1967 NYC drag pageant, the Miss All-America Camp Beauty Pagent, including Crystal LaBeija as Miss Manhattan, who later would found the House of LaBeija.  The Queen is focused largely on people who today would be considered cisgender gay men though some other participants would be considered transgender women.  This incarnation of the drag pageant circuit had been organized by Flawless Sabrina who is considered responsible for initiating the national circuit for such pageants early in the 1960s.
1968 Medical DSM-II: The classification of Transvestic Fetishism did not change significantly with the publication of DSM-II (1968). The condition was still classified as a sexual deviation, and the sexual deviations remained classified as a subgroup of the personality disorders. The DSM-II (1968) emphasized that at the core of Transvestic Fetishism was a lack of attraction to people of the opposite sex but, instead, attraction for sexual acts not associated with coitus or for “coitus performed under bizarre circumstances” - from Should Transvetic Fetishism be Classified in the DSM V?

1968 Medical Dr. Robert Stoller, of UCLA, after decades of study and interactions with trans patients, reluctantly concluded that surgical interventions for trans people were more useful than attempts at conversion therapies or other purely psychiatric management of trans feelings, writing “if there were any psychiatric treatment that was even partly useful, it would probably be better than this disquieting ‘psychosurgery’”.

Stoller continued, through the 1970s, to believe that gender identity was mutable up to a certain age and conducted studies known as the “Feminine Boy Project”. This project hypothesized that the degree of masculinization a boy was exposed to through his mother affected the degree of adhering to a cisgender orthopraxis.  Still, Stoller felt that by ages five to seven, any conversion therapy interventions would become increasingly futile and that by adolescence gender identity was set.  He saw trans identities as failures.

1968 Legal  Ewan Forbes, a trans man, who had lived as male since his boyhood in the 1920s, has his baronial title challenged by his cousin.  Prior to that in the UK in the 20th century, self identification had been enough to assert gender identity.  The court required anatomical proof of Ewan’s male status to get the title and he acquired testicular tissue to pass off as his own.  He was awarded the title, but the case was covered up so as to prevent challenges to primogenitor for the British Crown

1969 Medical John Money and Richard Green of Johns Hopkins, collaborated with over two dozen others to write Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment