Pride Month: Gender Transitions are not new

Hello everyone. Happy Pride Month! To celebrate, I want to look at different aspects of queer history.

This week, I want to focus on transgender history. Recently, I hear people in the media talk about transgender identity as though it is some new fad. Transgender identity is not new, nor is gender affirming care for transgender people. Below, we are going to look at two aspects: Gender-affirming surgeries and social transitions from around the world. Through these two aspects of transgender history, we can see how gender identity is more complicated than a simple binary. If you are interested in this topic, I recommend Transgender History by Susan Stryker. It is an excellent book.

History of gender affirming surgery

Surgery for gender transitioning became available in the early 1900s. Some of the earliest pioneers include:

• Lili Elbe, an artist who received gender-affirming in Germany in 1930. She was the subject of the book The Danish Girl, which was also a movie in 2015. Unfortunately, Lili died due to complications from her surgery.

• Dora Richter received gender-affirming surgery in Germany in 1931 after spending a few years being one of the first people to receive hormone therapy. One of the first people to receive this surgery, she unfortunately disappeared during the attack by the Nazis on the Hirschfield clinic

• Michael Dillon was the first person in recorded history to take testosterone for gender affirming care. In 1942, after meeting a sympathetic plastic surgeon, he received gender affirming surgery. He wrote about his experience and philosophy in his book Self.

• Christine Jorgensen became famous in the 1950s for undergoing gender-affirming surgery. She is probably the first modern transgender celebrity, getting a lot of attention due to her successful gender affirming surgery. She became a fixture performing in Las Vegas, along with doing talks around colleges on transgender equity.

Though medical gender transitions have only been around for the past 100 years, transgender identity and, therefore, some sort of social transitions have existed for a very long time in different cultures. There are many different third gender, nonbinary, or transgender in cultures around the world. This map, from PBS, provides some of the different types of gender identities that exist across the world. So when people argue that transitioning is new or experimental (as discussed in the Cass Report), we can show that this has been available for almost 100 years. As states are trying to make it harder (or even illegal) for transgender people to get gender affirming care (though this past week, a judge struck down Florida’s ban on gender affirming care for youth), it is important for us to have facts on the history of gender transitioning at hand.

Happy Pride!