Struggling for Ordinary. Andre Cavalcante

      Figure 1.1. Christine Jorgensen, February 1953. The press swarms around Jorgensen as she returns from Denmark. Credit: Photofest.

      Christine Jorgensen, a Danish American from the Bronx, was born George Jorgensen and served in World War II as a private. After her service, Jorgensen traveled to Denmark in the early 1950s to privately undergo a series of sexual reassignment surgeries and hormone treatments only available in Europe at the time. When the New York Daily News learned about her procedures, they published the story of her transformation on the cover of the December 1, 1952 issue. The story catapulted Jorgensen into the global limelight and she became an instant celebrity. This attention made her the public face of transsexuality.

      Following the global news storm around Christine Jorgensen, transsexuality became part of the American imagination and psychotherapists increasingly saw it as a legitimate object of inquiry (Meyerowitz 2002). As a result, the 1950s witnessed one of the first major professional symposiums on transsexuality led by Harry Benjamin, which was covered in the American Journal of Psychotherapy. Also in the late 1950s, psychologist John Money (a colleague of Benjamin) coined the word “gender identity” to differentiate between genital “sex” and one’s belonging to a social group that expresses masculine or feminine expressions and behaviors.2 Money’s conceptualizations of “gender identity” and also “gender roles,” or what a society expects from its men and women, articulated gender as multiple and unsettled.

      By the 1960s, amid the growing social movements of the time—such as the women’s, civil rights, and anti-war movements—and within the burgeoning hippie counterculture, gender itself became a site of political and social contestation. Younger Americans began experimenting with sexuality and challenging gender norms, embracing more unisex, androgynous styles (Meyerowitz 2002). On the ground, as Hill (2013) reminds us, there was a large, loosely connected social formation of gender and sexual misfits including transvestites, transsexuals, drag queens, street queens, radical fairies, butch lesbians, sissy gay men, female impersonators, and clothing fetishists. Representative of the political zeitgeist, the spirit of defiance was in the air in the ’60s as “a wave of increasingly militant resistance on the part of transgender street people” emerged in the cities (Stryker cited in Currah 2008b, 96). For example, during the summer of 1966, an organization of queer, disenfranchised San Francisco youth called “Vanguard” began organizing to improve the social climate of their local community. Vanguard staged public protests, held social functions, and published a magazine featuring poems, essays, and political writing meant to mobilize queer individuals and reach out to young sexual and gender minorities. Members of the group often met at Gene Compton’s Cafeteria—a local hotspot for gays, drag queens, street queens, and transgender sex workers. In August 1966, law enforcement raided Compton’s, yet its patrons banded together and fought back, collectively resisting the recurring pattern of police brutality and oppression that haunted their lives. The incident has since been named the “Compton’s Cafeteria Riot,” an early touchstone of transgender political history.3

      Three years later a similar act of resistance occurred in downtown New York City’s Greenwich Village. The now famous 1969 Stonewall riots also brought together disenfranchised queer people in an act of political rebellion, and street queens were again on the vanguard of this uprising.4 Young, poor, trans people of color such as Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera were leading protagonists at Stonewall, and would continue to be throughout the Gay Liberation Movement. Talking about Stonewall and the role transgender individuals played in the gay liberation movement, Sylvia Rivera (2007), a Latina activist, sex worker, and lifelong advocate for trans people, recalled, “We were front liners. We didn’t take no shit from nobody. We had nothing to lose” (118). However, members of the gay community did not always return the favor and advocate on behalf of their trans allies. Trans individuals were not always welcome in gay bars and gay rights organizations, specifically those organized around white, middle-class concerns. Following the Stonewall rebellion, Rivera and Johnson decided to provide structures of support and care for their own community, which led to their founding of STAR, the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, in 1970 and creation of STAR House, a refuge for homeless NYC transgender youth.5

      Meanwhile, alongside the growing political consciousness and mobilization of transgender people, the 1960s saw another historic development: the publication of Harry Benjamin’s (1966) book The Transsexual Phenomenon. A critical and thoughtful polemic, the book turned conventional wisdom regarding gender on its head. It argued that transsexualism cannot be cured; that transsexuals should seek psychiatric help; that in some cases hormonal therapy and surgery may be necessary; and finally, that medical professionals have a responsibility to help transgender people achieve self-realization. Benjamin (1966) suggested that in a modern, technological, and scientifically advanced society, the male/female gender binary was inadequate. Instead, he argued that what we think of as “sex” actually encompassed numerous entities. He advocated thinking about individuals as exhibiting different kinds of sex, such as “endocrine sex,” “anatomical sex,” “psychological sex,” “social sex,” “sex of rearing in childhood,” and “legal sex” (3–9).

      While transgender individuals were not necessarily the target audience for books like Benjamin’s Transsexual Phenomenon, many read them and learned about current scientific developments and discourses (Meyerowitz 2002). For Amanda St. Jaymes, a trans woman living in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District during the 1960s, Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon was “a guidebook for us” (Silverman and Stryker 2005). The book delineated a transsexual identity and taught Amanda and her friends about the language of gender variance. Armed with this discourse, they were able to articulate their wishes for identity and transformation to family, friends, and doctors using the language sanctioned by the medical field.

      The 1960s also marked the beginning of the first transgender advocacy organizations with national and international reach, and the start of a print culture that spoke directly to trans communities. In 1960, Virginia Prince, a pharmacologist, medical researcher, and transgender advocate, spearheaded the first trans-themed publication, Transvestia: The Journal of the American Society for Equality in Dress. In 1962, she founded the “Society for Second Self” or “Tri-Ess,” a support and social organization for cross-dressers still active today (Stryker 2008). Geared toward heterosexual cross-dressers, the magazine started off small with a mailing list of only 25 people, and was eventually sold via subscription and in adult bookstores (Ekins and King 2005). Published bimonthly from 1960 to 1980, Transvestia featured articles, photos, life stories, fictional narratives, and letters from readers. Within its pages, Prince, along with her writers and readers, theorized cross-dressing and developed various taxonomies for emerging trans identities. Notably, Prince and her staff sought to distinguish more “respectable,” mainly heterosexual “full-time transvestites” from other gender identities. They created distance between themselves and, for example, part-time cross-dressers, transvestites, drag queens, kinky clothing fetishists,