Late Modern
I'm pretty jazzed to be a part of this year's Lilac Peril anthology -- but also it's been a strange thing to live with the timeline of a print publication. I wrote my essay (about the history of Casa Susanna and the influence of mid-century transvestites on my early adult life) over a year ago. In the time since I've written a few other pieces about the period
I've also come to a place of, if not peace, then at least understanding of my young self and first run at living as an out queer human back in the '90s and '00s.
In reading through the record and considering my own history, many trans women seem to hit a spot where we feel an increased sense of agency over our lives. Often it's linked to developmental timelines -- i.e. when we start pulling away from our parents. In rare cases, it happens earlier because we're raised by parents who encourage and trust our sense of agency. Less rarely, it happens earlier because we're raised by parents whose behavior forces us to develop that sense of agency sooner than we might otherwise.
Armed with this sense of increased control and responsibility for our lives, we start to question why we're different from the people around us, and we start looking around for options. Susan Stryker can read about the existence of transsexuals and start to believe in a version of herself.
"Not only did I now have definitive proof that I was not the only person to have ever questioned their own gender, I also had a vocabulary to help me frame my thoughts. And off to the public library I rode, unconsciously fey, on my purple Schwinn Sting-Ray with the banana seat and sissy bar, handle bar streamers flying furiously in the wind.
The library was hugely disappointing. “Transsexualism” was indeed listed in the subject classifications of the card catalog, but the only books treating the topic were textbooks of abnormal psychology. I read that transsexuals were deeply disturbed people who feared being homosexual, or who felt guilty about being homosexual, and who wanted to be members of the other sex so that their sexual feelings would appear normal. Sadly, I concluded that I was not a transsexual after all, because not only did I not consider myself abnormal, I also did not consider homosexuality repulsive. In fact, I thought it sounded pretty cool."
Perfect Day, Susan Stryker; from Trans People in Love, reprinted in When Monsters Speak
Cecilia Gentili can move to Rosario, meet her first trans woman, and think -- I want that.
"I met her in a bar. She had long, blond hair, big breasts, big hips and ass, and a small nose. Very kind of Barbie-like kind of beauty, which now I kind of like, ugh, but at the time it was like, she was everything that I thought was beautiful. And I told her that I wanted to be like her. And she looked at me and she said, okay. But you know how this life is? And I said no."
Interview of Cecilia Gentili, NYC Trans Oral History Project
Two women with wildly different upbringings, a similar observant discontent in their hearts, who both made a decision about how to live, and who had wildly different lives due to the possibility space offered by their circumstances.
Occasionally, a news or political organization will conduct a generational survey about how many adults identify as transgender. The results from this 2023 Newsweek poll are typical.
0.05% Silent Generation (born 1928 - 1945)
0.2% Baby Boomers (born 1946 - 1964)
0.3% Generation X (born 1965 - 1980)
1.0% Millennial (born 1981 - 1996)
1.9% Generation Z (born 1997 - 2004)
That sharp uptick for Millennials -- when bioidentical HRT started to be covered by public and private insurances and a trans culture both distinct from gay culture and visible to cis culture began to emerge. "Social Contagion" is the fear mongering thought technology conservatives like to throw on the phenomenon -- as though seeing that a better life is possible was a contagious disease.
I've ended up mired in the records these old cross-dressing communities left behind because I wanted to understand why, when I felt that increased sense of agency in my late teens and twenties, the only things available or visible to me were materials from this so-called gender community. Virginia Prince handed over (or sold) Transvestia to Carol Beecroft in 1979 and settled into retirement. New magazines and newsletters letters began to emerge, some from Prince's Tri-Ess chapters, others from different organizations that chaffed at the Tri-Ess structure. A small cottage industry of conferences and guides emerged, and some of that ended up on the early internet, and that's what I found. They are, I think, what a lot of my generational cohort found. A culture started by a 48-year-old Prince in 1961, stretching its tendrils into the mid-'90s.
Prince remains a frustrating figure to me -- I've talked with people who knew her. By all accounts, she could be generous and magnanimous. She had that ineffable charismatic skill to draw people to whatever cause she was pursuing. She could also be ruthless and cruel if she perceived you as standing at cross purposes to her own goals. At times in her life, perhaps for all of it, she carried a racism and classism that went beyond the institutional racism and classism of being raised in a segregated pre-WWII American. She spoke vehemently, and lobbied the early gender clinicians, against bottom surgery for most transfemme people.
She is, as my middle-aged self has grown fond of saying, someone who makes it difficult for me to find my grace.
If there's one last thing I want to investigate about this whole period, it's the publishing angle of this community. Prince managed to put out Transvestia for 18 years before stepping down as publisher, and the magazine itself existed for twenty-five. Its model was picked up by another generation, and the gender community magazines continued until the mid/late aughties.
One way to look at Prince's transition in 1968, at fifty-five, is as an early retirement. She sold her share of her industrial chemical business and started anew, transitioning to life as Virginia Prince "full-time". Was Travestia a vanity project that furthered Prince's other political goals, or was it something she was relying on financially to carry her through transition and the rest of her life? One incongruity of Prince's I can't get over is how she remained, rhetorically, steadfast that her media and social-support clubs were for cross-dressers only, even as she lived as an out woman aided by hormones and pursuing a change of some of her sex characteristics. Viewing the Travestia subscribers and Tri-Ess chapters less as a polity and more as a market segment brings some of Prince's actions into sharper, if more damning, focus.
More importantly than the financial planning of one person's transition -- what interests me is that this culture and media maintained itself for decades and managed to penetrate, ever so slightly, into the cis world of my generation. It's this larger footprint I'm most interested in. Trans women have been writing for each other for a long time -- Little Puss Press's upcoming publication of the Gender Trash from Hell zines are one example of this -- but our work rarely breaks containment. Gender Trash, or something like it, was a work and perspective I desperately needed to see in 1993 -- but it was a zine with a small footprint, and I never happened to stumble into the right coffee shop in Toronto on one of my visits.
My feeling is that there are stories still buried in the old gender community publications, as well as buried in the memories of their publishers and writers, some of whom are still alive. This is not a community that necessarily inspires me -- their model of transness did not get me where I needed to be -- but they are a part of our history.
I chose zines as a format for my early transition writing in part for the nostalgia of a culture I missed out on, but also because it seemed like the right format for the intimate, sometimes hard, stories I needed to tell in the early days of my late becoming. As I begin moving out of the awkward earnest years of young transition art, I'm finding my ambitions growing, and wanting more for us and our work than the fringe, and wondering if there's a way to create publications with reach that don't flatten the perspectives of our lives.