OTHERS of MY KIND: Transatlantic Transgender Histories
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University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository University of Calgary Press University of Calgary Press Open Access Books 2020-10 OTHERS OF MY KIND: Transatlantic Transgender Histories Bakker, Alex; Herrn, Rainer; Taylor, Michael Thomas; Timm, Annette F. University of Calgary Press Bakker, A., Herrn, R., Taylor, M. T., & Timm, A. F. (2020). OTHERS OF MY KIND: Transatlantic Transgender Histories. University of Calgary Press, Calgary, AB. http://hdl.handle.net/1880/112845 book https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca The print and ebook versions of this book feature full-color, high-resolution images. This Open Access version of the book includes low-resolution images in black and white only. press.ucalgary.ca OTHERS OF MY KIND: Transatlantic Transgender Histories by Alex Bakker, Rainer Herrn, Michael Thomas Taylor, and Annette F. Timm ISBN 978-1-77385-122-8 THIS BOOK IS AN OPEN ACCESS E-BOOK. 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Acknowledgement: We acknowledge the wording around open access used by Australian publisher, re.press, and thank them for giving us permission to adapt their wording to our policy http://www.re-press.org 1 Introduction Annette F. Timm, Michael Thomas Taylor, Alex Bakker, and Rainer Herrn The stories this book tells follow the guiding premise of transgender studies by turning traditional medical-scientific The era that is the history on its head.1 We draw on the pioneering efforts of focus of this book scholars like Susan Stryker, Aaron Devor, and Ardel Haefele- Thomas to insist upon treating trans individuals themselves, can be regarded as rather than the scientists and doctors who studied them, as the primary agents of change in the story of how various a kind of birthplace societies have come to accept that the gender one is assigned at birth should not be considered definitive or unchangeable.2 of modern trans In exploring a network of individuals who profoundly shaped transgender identities between the turn of the twentieth identity. century and the 1950s, the book documents the driving role that trans individuals played in shaping transgender histories. It reconstructs connections that unfolded across the Atlantic, and it tells the story of how trans individuals created photographs and other images and sent them to magazines or doctors for publication, creating communities and making visible these individuals’ identities in public and private. As a history of sexuality, the very categories and terms of identity of the stories we tell – primarily “transvestite” and “transsexual” – were coined by doctors and scientists, and it was such men (and they were virtually all men) who developed and controlled access to the evolving medical treatments 1 desired by many (but not all) of the trans We tell this story primarily through individuals who approached them.3 As with investigations of historical images. This other histories of sexual identities, those focus arises partly from the origins of who adopted these labels appropriated and our joint research project, which began transformed – and later rejected – them, not as a search for material for a scholarly meaning that the terminology of the past is monograph but for a historical exhibition. often uncomfortable for trans people today. TransTrans: Transgender Histories Between The last chapter of this book discusses Germany and the United States, 1882–1966 these etymological and taxonomical was staged at the Nickle Galleries at the conundrums, and we recommend that University of Calgary in May and June anyone concerned about these issues read 2016, and it was restaged and reconfigured that chapter before proceeding. Here we will for a European audience at the Schwules simply state that we approach this subject Museum (Gay Museum) of Berlin as as historians who believe that historical TransTrans: Transatlantic Transgender understanding cannot be achieved without Histories between 7 November 2019 and revealing the language, categorizations, 2 March 2020.5 Focusing on images makes and even misunderstandings of the past logical sense when one is presenting history and that doing so is not a repetition but to the public in a museum/gallery setting. an explanation for ways of thinking But there is a deeper justification for this that we might today find misguided practice, which is the crucial role that or disrespectful. The stories we have images play in any representation of one’s reconstructed have implications for own sexual subjectivity and particularly transgender history and for histories of in the objectification of transgender sexuality that go beyond this interplay individuals. This is a historical fact but of agency and authority.4 They offer also one that remains omnipresent in our direct evidence for how trans individuals own world today. For this reason, we have influenced and participated in developing supplemented the book chapters with a medical concepts and treatments and in series of image galleries. fostering supportive communities for Concretely, our project began as we those seeking affirmation of their gender attempted to trace a connection between identities. Our aim is to follow the example the most prominent figures in this history, of the pioneers of trans history by moving Magnus Hirschfeld, the innovative early away from a vertical history of discovery twentieth-century sexologist, gay rights by experts to a horizontal history in which activist, and founder of Berlin’s Institute trans individuals often create their own for Sexual Science (in 1919), and one of his experts and instrumentalize them as former mentees, the endocrinologist Harry mouthpieces for self-articulation – precisely Benjamin, who emigrated to the United because this path of medicine or science was States, collaborated with Alfred Kinsey, the only path available to them. and wrote the first scientific investigation of what he called “transsexualism” in 1966.6 2 1 | INTRODUCTION Exploring this relationship also brought lost when texts written by trans individuals to light a connection between seminal about themselves are published by other moments in twentieth-century histories authors. of sexuality, and between Europe and The images often resist or disrupt the the United States, that had been lost to aim to generalize that characterizes most public memory. But what we found in the medical-scientific literature. At the same archives was much more compelling and time, we are very conscious of the problem thought-provoking: not only photographs that the images can also pander to and feed that vividly illustrated these life stories voyeuristic and sensationalist impulses and and offer a poignant window into private intentions – both for those who published moments of self-creation, self-presentation, them and for us as we look at them today. and self-disclosure, but also ethical These issues are especially acute when it questions for us about how to tell these comes to trans history – for which so much stories. The questions concern historical archival evidence is fragmentary or of a method and our own curatorial practice, problematic nature (criminal, medical, but most importantly, they touch upon ephemeral, not personally identifiable). The our ethical quandaries and our feelings of images we found reflect the fact that the responsibility for how we might look at, archival record of trans histories is neither reconstruct, and witness the very personal objective nor simply incomplete, but that it stories that the archival traces document. actively reflects “silences and exclusions,” For it was images of individuals that as K.