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Historicizing Liberal American Transnormativities: Medicine, Media, Activism, 1960-1990

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Historicizing Liberal American Transnormativities: Medicine, Media, Activism, 1960-1990 Historicizing Liberal American Transnormativities: Medicine, Media, Activism, 1960-1990 by Nicholas Matte A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of History University of Toronto © copyright by Nicholas Matte 2014 ii Historicizing Liberal American Transnormativities: Medicine, Media, Activism, 1960-1990 Nicholas Matte Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of History University of Toronto 2014 Abstract How did trans people emerge as a minority group in the United States between 1960 and 1990? Trans people and advocates have been articulating ways to improve the social lives of trans people throughout the second half of the twentieth century by drawing on discourses of American liberalism. “Historicizing Liberal American Transnormativities” provides insight into the norms, definitions, expectations and tactics developed by trans advocates in social and cultural conditions not of their choosing. It draws on trans-centric primary sources including conference proceedings, newsletters and magazines produced by, for, or about trans people, as well as mainstream media coverage of trans people and issues. These sources enrich existing accounts of pathologization, gay liberation, employment discrimination, sex activism, and other topics of broad concern. The first two chapters show that the Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF) worked with trans advocates and “helping professionals” in fields such as medicine, law, religion, and social work to promote social acceptance on the basis of medicalized notions of transsexuality, gender dysphoria, and various diagnostic and treatment options. The third chapter looks at the iii worlds of female impersonators, transvestites, and the Queens Liberation Front to argue that trans people like Lee Brewster and Sandy Mesics developed their politics in the contexts of commercial and entertainment cultures, gay liberation, feminism, and pornography. The final chapter looks at a series of cases in which a number of white transsexuals, including Paula Grossman, Steve Dain, Joanna Clark, Karen Ulane, and Bobbie Lea Bennett, each fought against the discrimination they faced in employment and health care. They asked the courts to apply the Civil Rights Act and the Rehabilitation Act to their situations and they became galvanizing public figures in social debates about the nature of gendered participation in American economy and society. Overall, “Historicizing Liberal American Transnormativities” shows that American liberalism has been central to trans advocacy and the formation of trans people as a minority group in the United States between 1960 and 1990. Keywords: transsexual, transgender, transvestism, gender dysphoria, female impersonator, queen, liberation, gay, feminism, fetish, pornography, allies, rehabilitation, Reed Erickson, Erickson Educational Foundation, Virginia Prince, Joanna Clarke, Steve Dain, Paula Grossman, Karen Ulane. iv Table of Contents Introduction 1-26 Chapter One: Progress and Pathology: Establishing Medical Expertise and Authority, 1964-1975 27-87 Chapter Two: “No Fault of their Own”: Rehabilitation, Helping Professionals, Transsexual Representatives and the EEF’s Education Campaigns, 1971-1976 88-146 Chapter Three: The Social, Economic and Sexual Politics of “Transvestite Liberation” in the 1970s 147-220 Chapter Four: Sex, Disability, and Economic Discrimination: The Rearticulation of Liberal Transnormativities through the 1980s 221-273 Conclusion 274-282 Bibliography 283-307 1 Introduction When Laverne Cox recently appeared on the June 2014 cover of Time magazine, she was introduced as “one of 1.5 million transgender Americans” and part of “the next civil rights movement.” Cox has become widely recognized for her role on Netflix’s streaming program Orange is the New Black, particularly because she is the first trans woman to play a trans woman character. In the series, she plays an African-American trans woman who lives in a women’s prison after robbing a bank to pay for her sex reassignment surgery. Her character is presented as facing relatively few insurmountable problems as a transgender woman (aside from a brief and quickly-resolved storyline in which her access to hormones is potentially threatened). She is accepted by inmates and prison authorities. Cox’s character is widely lauded as being a positive and respectful portrayal of transpeople, especially in contrast to more derogatory or stereotypical caricatures, such as that of “Rayon,” played by Jared Leto in the 2013 film The Texas Buyers’ Club. Beyond her character in the show, Cox has also become an important spokesperson for transgender rights in the mainstream media.1 Aside from the fact that she is quoted in the article identifying herself as “a proud, African-American transgender woman,” race is not explicitly mentioned either on the cover or in the story. As a representative of “the next civil rights movement,” Time presented Cox as primarily as transgender, and incidentally as African-American. The story itself further narrated transgender as the “next civil rights movement” in terms of the history of same-sex marriage in the United States, rather than a history of racialized civil rights activism or trans activism. Cox might appear to be at the nexus of mainstream American celebrity culture, the 1 Katy Steinmetz, “The Transgender Tipping Point: America’s next civil rights frontier” Time, June 9, 2014. 2 fight for civil rights for transgender people, and prison justice campaigns for African- Americans, but Time magazine identified her only as a trans woman and civil rights crusader, and neither of which were described in racial terms. This represents several of the legacies of the racialized civil rights movement, including a liberal inclusion model whereby individual members of minority groups can participate in social, media, and political campaigns to better themselves and their group’s social position. Cox’s Time cover has been seen as a victory amongst left-leaning liberals and radicals, and has flown in the face of conservatives who refuse to recognize civil rights protections for trans people. Cox’s Time cover in many ways exemplifies the triumph of what I refer to as “liberal American transnormativities” throughout this dissertation. She represents an ideal of gender and racial minority inclusion as being both “in progress,” and as having already been achieved in American society. It may be tempting to see Cox as part of a progress narrative that culminates in a celebration of the present moment or terminates with current political goals. Indeed, much has changed in recent decades for many trans people in the United States. However, as this dissertation will argue, this progress narrative of liberal inclusion renders invisible that present gains may be understood as both partial and limited in that they rest on histories of difficult compromise and liberal inclusion in social, cultural, institutional and legal contexts. These liberal ideals are not equally beneficial and do little to radically transform systems of inequality, but rather simply shift some of the conditions of inequality and marginalization to benefit particular groups under specific terms. Between 1960 and 1990, cultural associations between trans people and liberalism in the arenas of medicine, media, and various forms of social and legal activism were essential to defining, legitimizing and gaining a certain measure of social acceptance for trans people in 3 the United States. Notions of self, gender, sex, and trans expression were shaped by liberal American ideas about such factors as personhood, equality, embodiment, social subjectivity, race, sexuality, disability and capitalism. This dissertation looks at a series of influential examples, cases, and discussions to demonstrate how trans-centric discourses during this formative earlier period presumed and entrenched a socio-cultural association between trans people and American liberalism. The primary contribution of this dissertation is to demonstrate that discourses of liberal American transnormativity made it increasingly possible to be recognized as trans in the United States between 1960 and 1990. While the relatively recent term ‘transnormativity’ has a variety of context-specific potential definitions, I use it throughout this dissertation to highlight trans-centric discourses that produced expectations and assumptions about who would be recognized as trans and what that would imply. I use “transnormativities,” to focus on discourses that represent efforts to ameliorate social conditions for trans people. These discourses have been part of a wider socio- cultural context in which transphobia authorizes the systemic oppression of trans people and gender diversity while hegemonic cis-centrism animates the pervasive assumption that most people “are not trans,” thereby containing and shoring up an oversimplistic (albeit always contested) binary division between trans and non-trans (“cisgender”) people.2 Specific, dynamic, ever-changing norms that defined and redefined what it would mean to be trans in American society were developed by and about trans people over decades and established often unrecognized cultural norms operating on many levels, including the personal, social, 2 See A. Finn Enke, “The Education of Little Cis: Cisgender and the Discipline of Opposing Bodies,” The Transgender Studies Reader 2, ed. Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura (New York: Routledge, 2013), 234- 247; B. Aultmann,
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