Toward a historiography of the lesbian transsexual, or the TERF’s nightmare

Abstract

This essay asks after the possibility of making the transsexual lesbian signify as a historical mode of sexuality, as a contribution to an anti-TERF method in trans and lesbian studies. What logics of mid twentieth century gender and sexuality are responsible for the opacity of transsexual and transvestite lesbians prior to the 1970s, despite the ample evidence that desire between femmes played a central role in trans social life? To move towards such a historiography and method, the author considers two paradigmatically difficult cases. First, Louise Lawrence, a well-known trans women in the San Francisco Bay Area who transitioned entirely do-it-yourself in 1944, and whose long term relationship with a partner, Gay Elkins, is high opaque in the archival record. Second, the essay considers the compulsory heterosexuality embedded in the medical logic of transsexuality in the 1960s, arguing that the medical ontology of the transsexual vagina was itself dependent upon the avowal of its immediate and exclusive use for penetration by straight men, making transsexual lesbians implausible despite their evident existence.

Keywords:

• Trans
• lesbian
• trans exclusionary feminism
• historiography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes

1 Rich’s term is a loaded one to invoke in 2021, for on the one hand, her notion of the “lesbian continuum” suggests a framework for the historical inquiry at hand in this essay: that what is “lesbian” is not literally genital sexual acts, but a wider social system of affectional and companionate relationships between women. Yet, at the same time, Rich’s work is increasingly read in the context of her sympathy and aid for Janice Raymond’s vicious transphobic work (Ira, 2020).

2 I am guided here by work in lesbian studies that stakes its unique place in the history of sexuality, including Jagose (2002). Of signal importance are Susan Potter’s (2019) recent claim that “women’s same-sex desires have been rendered knowable by being coded, paradoxically, as invisible, impossible, or secondary to other modes of erotic life,” including heterosexuality (6), such that “lesbianism in this respect is not opposed to or distinct on heterosexuality—however much their everyday instantiations make them seem so” (p. 3).

3 Some of this dom/sub correspondence can be found in the Louise Lawrence Collection, Series 1B, Box 1, Folder 6, Kinsey Institute, Bloomington, IN. The erotic drawings can be found in Louise Lawrence Collection, Series V, Box 7, Folders 1-2, Kinsey Institute, Bloomington, IN.

4 On the class, race, and bourgeois politics of midcentury trans autobiography and their lingering effects, see Aizura (2018).

5 Louise Lawrence to Wilma, January 5, 1953, Louise Lawrence Collection, Series 1B, Box 1, Folder 11.

6 These materials can be found in the Louise Lawrence Collection, Series A, Box 1, Folder 5.

7 Louise Lawrence to Alfred Kinsey, November 16, 1950, Louise Lawrence Collection, Series 1B, Box 1, Folder 1, Kinsey Institute, Bloomington, IN.

8 Louise Lawrence to Alfred Kinsey, August 11, 1952, Louise Lawrence Collection, Series 1B, Box 1, Folder 1, Kinsey Institute, Bloomington, IN.

9 Louise Lawrence to Dr. Gebhard, October 15, 1957, Louise Lawrence Collection, Series 1B, Box 1, Folder 1, Kinsey Institute, Bloomington, IN.

10 Louise Lawrence to Paul Gebhard, April 7, 1958, Louise Lawrence Collection, Series 1B, Box 1, Folder 1, Kinsey Institute, Bloomington, IN.

11 Lawrence to Gebhard, June 11, 1958, Louise Lawrence Collection, Series 1B, Box 1, Folder 1, Kinsey Institute, Bloomington, IN.

12 Lawrence to Wilma, January 5, 1953.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jules Gill-Peterson

Jules Gill-Peterson is an associate professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Histories of the Transgender Child (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) and a General Co-Editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quartely.