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Primers:

• A quick reference transgender usage timeline 
• The ubiquity of the Prince Fountainhead Narrative

NOTE: This research will be published in the Transgender Studies Quarterly and Present Tense journals in 2014.

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Said another way, you trashed [Virginia Prince]! You stole her linguistic contribution to the community from the community and ran down the road laughing. Lordy, lordy, lordy, you incorrigible Texans. Shame, shame shame.

I support the usage of the term “transgenderist” to mean a person living full time in a cultural gender role opposite their biological sex classification, without having altered their anatomy through SRS; “transgendered” to mean having crossed a cultural gender role perhaps permanently without SRS; and other forms of the term to be consistent with those meanings.

– Billie Jean Jones, Publisher of TV Guise, Sacramento, California, 1991

Note: Jones was working on a trans dictionary at this time.

Why and when did transsexual people begin calling themselves transgender? According to some internet memes pushed by so-called transsexual separatists, transsexuals began self-identifying as transgender due to a vast global plot by crossdressers^1,2 . According to this conspiracy, transsexuals by the millions were forced by the media³, through a cunning application of crossdresser colonization ⁴ to start using the term “transgender” sometime in the mid-1990s by a communist.⁵ The apparent solution to this imagined dilemma  is to invent a new term – or string of terms – which means transgender.⁶ This meme has survived because, until recently, few seemed to realize that transgender was decades older than many believed. Furthermore, it seems that not many are aware that transgender predates the term transgenderist – a word whose authorship is almost always erroneously attributed to Virginia Prince.

As we review the historical record, we are presented with a choice. We can choose to believe that transgender was shot from the mouth of Virginia Prince straight into the collective hearts of all transsexuals or we can take a more reasoned approach. For instance, since trans-sexed originally appeared in print to refer to transgenderists, would it not be absurd for non-transsexual transgender people to spread an internet meme that asserted a global conspiracy on the part of transsexuals to steal this identity away from transgenderists? While it is certainly absurd, this scenario is precisely what has taken place – just in reverse. In this article I will make some reasoned arguments which will attempt to shed some light on why there was a grassroots linguistic tipping point at the end of the 1980s which had trans events/institutions taking on an inclusive semantic in the form of transgender – a term which dates back to at least 1965, years before Prince used the trans+gender lexical compound.

Cultural context is important and, from what I’ve observed, is oftentimes missing in the various debates concerning transgender terminology. For instance, I have yet to read where a TS Separatist has acknowledged that nobody in popular culture referred to Christine Jorgensen as a transsexual when she came out. In fact, her famous Christine Jorgensen Reveals LP is devoid of the term. We tend to forget that it wasn’t until 1966 that the term entered popular culture with the publication of Harry Benjamin’s seminal work, The Transsexual Phenomenon. Furthermore, we’ve all but forgotten that within just 5 years of transsexual becoming the new pop-culture buzz word, Christine Jorgensen rejected that identity and instead tried to popularize a new term to describe her experience. Another nuance that is oftentimes lost in these terminology debates is that transsexual was, in fact, designed to be an umbrella term that was explicitly inclusive of transsexuals, transgenderists and crossdressers.

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To honestly review the evolution of terms trans people have both used and identified with, we must begin with opinion leaders of the day and the contextual memes they passed on.  A meme is an “idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture.” Memes are generally diffused within a culture through opinion leaders, though their meme utilization in no way implies meme authorship. These memes can take the form of jargon (or new interpretations of existing terms) and more. Memes influence the way in which groups intuitively think about what is and is not true, correct or desirable.

So, let’s set the stage:

The Early Opinion Leaders

An opinion leader is an agent who is has access to data and who interprets the meaning of that data for lower-end information consumers. For reasons which will become clear, the significant early modern national opinion leaders that interpreted the trans experience and disseminated those interpretations throughout our culture were Harry Benjamin, Christine Jorgensen and Virginia Prince.

Harry Benjamin – While Jorgensen and Prince didn’t know each other (Prince claims to have met Jorgensen once, but didn’t know her personally⁷), Benjamin knew them both quite well. He helped to popularize a number of terms such as transsexual, transsexualism and transsexualist. Additionally, he wrote what became the transsexual bible for many years to come: his 1966 book, The Transsexual Phenomenon. While Benjamin⁸ and Prince both shared the belief that one could not truly change one’s sex, unlike Prince, Benjamin felt that genital reconstructive surgery was generally an appropriate response to what was later referred to as significant gender dysphoria. The organization which sets the standards of care for the medical and psychological treatment of transsexualism named themselves after Benjamin: The Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association and consequently, for many years those standards also carried his name.

Christine Jorgensen – In her 1958 LP, the interviewer states, “You are without a doubt the world’s most publicized person. There’s the fame, the notoriety, the sensationalism… ” Jorgensen’s story has remained relevant to transsexualism for decades.⁹ No other transsexual reached the type of global notoriety that Jorgensen achieved.¹⁰  In her book, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States, author Joanne Meyerowitz writes:

“In 1952 the press discovered Christine Jorgensen and inaugurated a new era of comprehensive, even obsessive, coverage. In the history of sex change in the United States, the reporting on Jorgensen served as both a culminating episode and a starting point.”  (2004:49)

In the early newsprint reports, Jorgensen is not referred to as a transsexual¹¹.  While the term transsexual and the name Christine Jorgensen later became synonymous, it took 14 years for Jorgensen to be referred to as a transsexual in newsprint.¹² Apparently Jorgensen wasn’t exactly happy with this term being applied to her experiences as Websters Dictionary added transsex to their 1971 edition and erroneously credited the term’s coinage to Jorgensen. Later in the 1970s, she completely rejected the transsexual label and instead began to describe herself as being a transgender person.¹³

Jorgensen was well acquainted with Benjamin.¹⁴

Virginia Prince – In the 1950s, as Jorgensen was educating the public on transsexual issues, Prince began her transgenderist advocacy work.¹⁵ As such, she became the crossdressing community’s national voice for transgenderist issues.¹⁶ Prince became one of Benjamin’s patients¹⁷ and made quite an impression on Benjamin.¹⁸ She, like Benjamin, believed that transsexual surgeries did not, in fact, change someone’s authentic sex.¹⁹ She thought that genital reconstructive surgery was practically always the wrong choice to make²⁰ precisely because she believed that she was dealing with a gender issue and not a sex issue.²¹ Prince used the term gender in a way that neither Benjamin nor Jorgensen did.

Prince is credited for coining the term transgenderist²² (though Ariadne Kane and Phyllis Frye were using the term before Prince), is given credit for coining the term transgenderism²³ (though both Kane and Frye were using the term before Prince), is given credit for coining bigenderal (though sexologists were using the term before Prince²⁴) and is given erroneous credit for coining transperson²⁵ (though Frye and the UK trans community was using the term years before Prince). Prince is currently given credit for coining the term transgenderal as a term meaning transgenderist. Erroneous authorship credit for any/all of these terms is often cited as proof of Prince’s authorship of the term, transgender.

It should be noted that under the Benjamin Scale of Transsexualism, Prince is a Type 4 or 5 transsexual. Not only did Prince want genital reconstructive surgery,²⁶ she took hormones prescribed to her by Benjamin, eventually underwent surgery to make her body appear more feminine and she lived full-time as a woman. Prince rejected the term transsexual and rejected the way gender was used by people like Benjamin and Jorgensen.

Drs. Ekins and King write on page 23 of their 2006 book, The Transgender Phenomenon that Prince’s trans narrative was, “… developed largely in opposition to the two major medical stories available to her: the medicalized ‘transsexual’ story (Harry Benjamin) and the medicalized ‘transvestite’ story (Magnus Hirschfeld).”  It should be noted that while the terms were lexically different, both the Benjamin-transsexual and the Hirschfeld-transvestite were, in significant ways, similar in meaning. Both of these medical terms encompassed those who occasionally crossdressed and did not want/need/seek medical intervention as well as those who lived full-time opposite of their sex assigned at birth and who did want/need/seek medical intervention.

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The Contextual Memes

Here I use contextual meme instead of meme alone so that we remain mindful that these terms have a context that is just as important as the opinion leader’s usage. It is the context which represents the causal link to each cultural unit (ie, the memetic terms below) for opinion leaders. How, when, where and why did the opinion leader encounter these terms? While we cannot hope to answer these questions with certainty, we can (at the very least) be mindful of their uses – their linguistic environment – prior to their uptake and diffusion by opinion leaders. As we will see, all too often the opinion leader is privileged over the context through conferring authorship status of a trans linguistic meme to a single source – a fountainhead –  thereby relegating the memetic environment largely irrelevant, indistinguishable from the opinion leader and/or completely erased. As we will see, the opinion leader is often cast as being the memetic environment itself and both the trans community and academia community draws sometimes contentious nuances from this error. As this error becomes replicated – becoming itself a contextual meme – it not only affects discourse, it affects the way the community conceptualizes itself.

Transsexual – While it is now known that this term was being used in print as early as 1907, that transsex (a term which shows up as early as 1851) was used to refer to living in a cross-sex gender role as early as 1915,  Magnus Hirschfeld, a German sexologist, is sometimes given credit for coining transsexual (in German, seelischer transsexualismus) in 1923.²⁷ Later, D. O. Cauldwell used the term transsexual to refer to historical transsexuals as well as someone we may have referred to today as being a transsexual.²⁸ Caldwell, an American sexologist, is sometimes given credit for coining transsexual. In 1954 Harry Benjamin used the term transsexual and in the same paper helped popularize the terms transsexualism and transsexualist to describe people we would certainly call transsexuals today.²⁹ Benjamin is responsible for introducing the term into the pop culture lexicon in 1966 with the publication of The Transsexual Phenomenon. Benjamin is also given credit – especially by proponents of using the identity term Harry Benjamin Syndrome instead of transsexual – for coining transsexual.

Benjamin used the term transsexual to refer to transgenderists and to those who we would today take to be transsexuals. For Benjamin, a transsexual could be someone who lived only part-time in a role opposite to their sex assigned at birth and who did not want to have genital reconstructive surgery (Type 4 Transsexual), someone who perhaps lived full time opposite to their sex assigned at birth but for whom genital reconstructive surgery might or might not be appropriate (Type 5 True Transsexual) or the term could have referred to someone who lived full time opposite to their sex assigned at birth and for whom genital reconstructive surgery is always appropriate (Type 6 True Transsexual). This view of transsexualism persisted until Dr. Paul Walker (the then director of the gender program at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas) led the effort to medically classify what we currently take to be a transsexual with the publication of the 1979 HBIGDA Standards of Care and its subsequent diffusion into the professional/clinical circles during the early 1980s.

While these various types of Benjamin-transsexuals were clearly explained to the public in 1966 via Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon, pop-culture’s understanding of transsexual only seemed to include the Type 6 transsexual. Both Virginia Prince and Christine Jorgensen didn’t seem to appreciate having this term applied to their experience as both of them seemed to react by taking on other trans terms (Jorgensen, transsex in 1971 and transgender in 1979; Prince, transgenderal in 1969 and transgenderist in 1978).

 

Gender – By the 1960s, the term gender change had become synonymous with the transsexual experience. In 1964, the notion of gender identity was born.³⁰ In 1965, Johns Hopkins opened their Gender Identity Clinic.³¹ In 1966, Benjamin wrote in The Transsexual Phenomenon that transsexuals have a “gender problem.”³²  By 1967, the American Journal of Psychiatry published the article, Transsexualism and Gender Change.³³ On the cover of Christine Jorgensen’s 1967 bio, Benjamin wrote:

“Medically, Christine presents an almost classic case of the transsexual phenomenon or, in other words, a striking example of a disturbed gender role orientation.”

That same year, Dr. Harry Gershman brought attention to the idea of gender identity in a paper titled,  The Evolution of Gender Identity³⁴ and Dr Robert Stoller dedicated a chapter of his book, Sex and Gender to Gender Identity.³⁵ This idea was further popularized by John Money and Anke Ehrhardt in 1972.³⁶ By 1974, it was being asserted that transsexuals suffered from gender dysphoria – a term which is still used today to describe the transsexual experience.³⁷ By 1979, the standards of care for transsexualism was named the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association Standards of Care and by 1980 Gender Identity Disorder (GID) was entered into the DSM-III to cover transsexualism as a psychological disorder.

Prince vehemently argued for many years that gender was akin to a social costume; according to Prince, gender was a state of being within a culture and sexual identity was a state of being conferred upon one’s body.³⁸ In Prince’s view, sexual identity was only ever physiological and gender was only ever psycho-social;³⁹ for her, gender meant cultural sexual roles which involved consumes and behaviors.⁴⁰ She chided others for not knowing the difference between sex and her definition of gender.⁴¹ Prince’s notion of gender was at odds with the way in which Jorgensen and Benjamin (and most other sex researchers) used the term. For Jorgensen and Benjamin (and most other sex researchers) gender was more than just cultural sex stereotypes to be taken on. ⁴² It was, as Dr. Stoller who wrote in 1964…

Gender identity is the sense of knowing to which sex one belongs, that is, the awareness ‘I am a male’ or ‘I am a female’. This term gender identity’ will be used in this paper rather than various other terms which have been employed in this regard, such as the term ‘sexual identity’. ‘Sexual identity’ is ambiguous, since it may refer to one’s sexual activities or fantasies, etc. The advantage of the phrase ‘gender identity’ lies in the fact that it clearly refers to one’s self-image as regard to belonging to a specific sex. Thus, of a patient who says: ‘I am not a very masculine man’, it is possible to say that his gender identity is male although he recognizes his lack of so-called masculinity. – International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1964, v 45, pages 220 – 226

Jorgensen echos Dr. Stoller’s concern over the use of “sex” in terms associated with her experience saying in 1985, “I am a transgender because gender refers to who you are as a human.” In 1982, a news article has this to say:
Ms. Jorgensen, now 56, said in a speech to Fresno State University students Monday that she describes people who have had such operations’ “transgender” rather than transsexual. “Sexuality is who you sleep with, but gender is who you are,” she explained.

For most, gender and sex seems to have existed in a non-duilistic (ie, holistic) state so that gender did not exist within a mind which was somehow separate from the physicality of the body. As Drs. Elkins and King wrote:

If we combine these various insights of Garfinkel, Schutz and Giddens, we reach a position where it becomes evident that much of the ‘science’ of sex, sexuality and gender is rooted in what ethnomethodologists call the ‘natural attitude’: most fundamental and pervasively, the binary gender divide viewed unproblematically. Thus, when scientists became confronted with ‘exceptions’ that don’t ‘fit’ the binary, they typically seek to ‘explain’ the exceptional rather than problematizes the ‘natural attitude’.

Taking the insights of ethnomethodology seriously, it is no longer possible to argue that sex is nature and gender is socio-cultural. Both become seen as socio-cultural. The binary itself is a social construction. And if this is the case, the political and ethical nature of science in matters of sex, sexuality and hinder becomes more apparent. ‘Science’ has consequences and the way is open for transgendered people categorized by ‘science’, to argue for alternative conceptualizations in the name of science, as well as in the name of ethics and politics. – The Transgender Phenomenon, 2006, pp 26-27

Transgender –  The earliest known usage of the trans+gender lexical compound was a 1965 psychological usage of transgenderism to refer to transsexualism. At the time, transsexualism was seen as being an extreme subset of transvestism (which was inline with the views popularized by Magnus Hirschfeld). This 1965 usage asserted that “transsexualism” as a term was incorrect because “sexuality” (the sexual drive) wasn’t the reason behind the drive to transition; the book asserts that gender was the driving force behind the need to transition and therefore transgenderism would be a more correct term. By 1970, the term transgendered showed up in the TV Guide referencing a supposed transsexual movie character.⁴³ By the early 1970s, the term showed up in books referencing transsexuals⁴⁴ and was used as an umbrella term inclusive of all types of non-cisgender experience and expression in print and at a 1974 trans conference.⁴⁵  By the mid-1970s, the term began showing up in pop culture (eg, referencing the rock star Alice Cooper,⁴⁶  used as an adjective,⁴⁷ etc). By the mid-1970s, regional trans leaders were rejecting transsexual by using variations of transgender.⁴⁸ By the close of the 1970s, Jorgensen publicly disavowed transsexual in favor of transgender.⁴⁹  Throughout the 1980s, the term was used to refer to transsexuals.⁵⁰ However, by 1983, I found that the term transgenderism seems to have been shortened to transgender⁵¹ even though that same year the transsexual classic, The Uninvited Dilemma explicitly supports the use of transgender over transsexual⁵². By 1984, the term was again being used as an umbrella term which was inclusive of both transsexuals and crossdressers.⁵³ By the mid and late-1980s, the term became interchangeable in common usage so that a transsexual and/or crossdresser might be transgender.⁵⁴ This continued as a strictly grassroots trend until trans events, organizations and publications began to also embrace transgender in the late 1980s and early 1990s. When In Search of Eve was published in 1987, the book used transgender to describe the transsexual experience.⁵⁵  In 1986, the Transgender Archives was founded and transgender was used as an umbrella term.⁵⁶ When the first international trans event took place in the early 1990s, the event used transgender in its name as an umbrella term and event literature provided a clear definition of what the term meant, making clear that transgender and transgenderist were not the same thing.

Currently, the creator of this term is unknown.

Transgenderist – The earliest known usage of this term occurs in an early 1975 trans newspaper, FI News and while Ariadne Kane’s and Phyllis Frye’s usage of this term was years before Prince’s usage, credit is still given to Prince for coining the term in 1978. Indeed, in 1991 Prince herself asserted that she coined the term. Phyllis Frye was using the term in 1975 and credits FI News, a newspaper edited by the national director of the United Transvestite and Transexual Society for introducing her to the term.  It should be noted that when Prince was 81 years old, she said that she the thought she might have said the term transgenderist at a conference in 1974 or 75;⁵⁷ however, around that same time, she also told Leslie Feinberg that she coined the term transgenderist in the late 1980s⁵⁸. In all of Prince’s copious writings – right up until 1978 – Prince did not use the term transgenderist once; not even when she attempted to explicitly classify the various types of trans people in 1977.⁵⁹ What we do know is that the earliest usage of transgenderist we know of found in print is in 1975.

A June 2, 1979 article of the Radio Times states “It is estimated that about one person in 2,000 is a transgenderist – someone who feels an overwhelming need either to dress in the clothes of the opposite gender, or . . . to ‘change sex’ completely.” Days later on June 6th, Claire Raynor, on the BBC 4 radio show Crossing Over explained the term this way: “Transgenderists – the rather clumsy label that has been devised to cover both transvestites and transsexuals.”⁶⁰ The 1979 on-air usage was used in the same way transgender had been used in 1974: as an umbrella term.

The term saw a steady increased  usage throughout the 1980s, but saw an enormous spike in usage between 1991 and 1996.⁶¹

Currently, the creator of this term is unknown.

Transgenderal – Thus far, Prince’s use of this term is the earliest yet discovered in print.  If she did indeed coin this term, she seems to have repurposed Benjamin’s popularized term (transsexual) and in 1969 and wrote transgenderal (trans+genderal –  genderal was a term Prince commonly used⁶²) once in her 1969 magazine.⁶³ She never again used the term in print.⁶⁴ After the 1969 usage, I’ve only found (HT to Dr. Rawson!) three other early uses: one from 1977 that’s used to mean transsexual, one from 1978 that’s used in a manner consistent with Prince’s use and then one from 1980 where it’s used as a synonym for the German word, übergeschlechtliche⁶⁵.

Transgenderism – Prince claims to have coined transgenderism to specifically refer to the transgenderist experience in 1978. However, Phyllis Frye was differentiating between transgenderism and transvestism in 1975 and in that same year, trans groups were using it as an umbrella term. Ariadne Kane was using the term in 1976. As noted above, the term seems to have become conflated with transgender by 1983.⁶⁶ By the early to