Be Trans, Read Virginia Prince
This is the seventeenth entry in a series I’m writing on gender. Equal parts personal narrative and transgender studies I hope to explore topics that have, by-and-large, been nagging at me for some time, but that I haven’t taken the time to write about. Who gets to define what transgender means and what does transgender mean? What do Tumblr, lexicographers, and transtrenders have in common? Why should anyone care about the personal stories of a girl from small town rural Georgia? This series hopes to cover all of this and more. Have a topic you’d like me to write about? Leave a comment or tweet me @JessieRaeFisher.
Virginia Prince was born in 1912 in Los Angeles (Ekins & King, 5). A sexologist and organizer, Prince thought and wrote prolifically about gender, and the need to separate sex and gender out as distinct phenomenon. One does not need to agree with her ideas or ideals to appreciate her place in transgender history.
In a forward for the book Virginia Prince: Pioneer of Transgendering by editors Richard Ekins and David King, Susan Stryker writes that “... if there is an unheralded founder of the transgender community in the United States, it’s Louise Lawrence,” (Forward, Stryker, xi, AN: I suppose a “Be Trans: Read Louise Lawrence” piece may be forthcoming).
Of Prince, Stryker writes, “Prince’s sexological writings on transgender phenomena should be as widely known, and as well regarded, as Benjamin’s” (Forward, Stryker, xii).”
As was noted in “Be Trans: Read Leslie Feinberg” Prince coined the term transgenderist. She started with the term transgenderal (a gender compliment to transsexual). A favored word throughout her writing that never caught on was femmiphile. Prince also wrote of femme-personators, “... one who “personates,” that is, makes a real person out of, and brings life to, his feminine self. This cannot be done by a male garbed in the usual male attire - his inhibitions against expression anything gentle, graceful or pretty in his ordinary role are too strong. To give life to his inner urgings he must of necessity brings his body into apparent conformity, from the point of view of appearance, with those persons whom society permits to express grace, beauty and gentility. Thus the transsexual and the transvestite both attempt to remove the incongruity between their exterior appearance and their inner feeling, but one does so on the physical-anatomical level and the other on the psycho-social level,” (Prince, 23-24).
Ekins and King write in the introduction to Virginia Prince that Prince’s “major contributions have been twofold,” (Introduction, Ekins & King, 1), “In the first place, as a staunch promoter of heterosexual transvestism since the late 1950s, her activities have had a major impact on the whole transgender community. She was the first person to establish a systematic organizational structure that provided a safe setting in which “transvestites” and “transsexuals” could come together and “come out.” In the second place, her advocacy of a “transgenderist” position since the late 1960s constituted a major conceptual and identity innovation,” (Introduction, Ekins & King, 1).
The book, both in Ekins and King’s introduction and following essay “Virginia Prince: Transgender Pioneer,” as well as in Prince’s essays throughout, goes on to note that as a “staunch promoter of heterosexual transvestism,” Prince and the organizations she helped found were careful to not accept “... “bondage or masochistic people, amateur investigators, curiosity seekers, homosexuals, transsexuals or emotionally disturbed people.” In addition to the emphasis on keeping out those who were not seen as “real” transvestites, great emphasis was placed on maintaining members’ privacy and secrecy,” (Virginia Prince: Transgender Pioneer, 8).
For these positions, Prince has been taken as homophobic by her critics, a not unfair criticism, as she was attempting to build a picture of a respectable transvestite.
For her part, Prince took a very narrow and strict idea of what made one transsexual. She thought that of 100 people who might wish to pursue “sex reassignment surgery” that 90 of those people wouldn’t qualify. She wrote of “sex reassignment surgery” as a “communicable disease,” (Prince, 37) arguing that, “... susceptible transvestites are seduced - by the publicity given to the topic - into thinking it is the solution to their problems (Virginia Prince: Transgender Pioneer, 8). She writes about transsexuals and “pseudotranssexuals” in her essay, “Transsexuals and Pseudotranssexuals” (1978).
In calls that might sound familiar in our contemporary moment, Prince encouraged that if people had the chance to express and be comfortable with their trans- gender, they would see that they wouldn’t need to trans- their sex.
Prince also felt that society, “... “does have a right to protect itself from odd appearing and uncouth acting ‘pseudo women,” and that therefore the FP who goes out in public should “know how to look authentic, to behave properly and to just melt into the feminine world without notice” (Prince, 1971: 135),” (Virginia Prince: Transgender Pioneer, Ekins & King, 9). This too, may sound familiar to transgender people today.
Perhaps Prince’s greatest contribution, besides the etymological contributions, was the work she did to encourage the distinction between sex and gender, “By recognizing that sex is an anatomical and physiological affair, that gender is psycho-social in nature and that they have only a small area of overlap where there is a direct and necessary relationship, we would be able to study the latter independently,” (Prince, 24). One of the essays included in Pioneer of Transgendering is Prince’s essay “Sex vs. Gender” (1973).
For Prince, in the last essay included in the collection, 1978’s “The “Transcendents” or “Trans” People,” Prince writes that there are “... three classes of such “trans” people, generally called “transvestites, transgenderists, and transsexuals.”,” (42).
In this essay she defines transgenderists as those who, “... have adopted the exterior manifestations of the opposite sex on a full-time basis but without any surgical intervention,” (43).
In Prince’s categorization of transgenderists as “male women” we find another critique of her work, and the work of her predecessors and contemporaries, that her work didn’t consider what we might could call “female men,” “mascphiles,” or “masc-personators.” She does address this briefly in “The Expression of Femininity in the Male,” (1967) where she writes that Women’s Liberation had basically settled issues of suppressed or oppressed gender expression among women, “The effort of Women’s Liberation is to make people understand, particularly the men, that women are people too, that they have the same potentials, the same capacities to go places and do things that men have and should not be limited by the fact that they are potential mothers,” (31).
Even given all the criticisms of Prince, generous and nuanced readings of her work, and deeper understandings of it and of her, provide a deeper and fuller understanding of transgender history that can aid in current conversations about and within transgender communities.
This title is a play on the popular “Be gay, do crimes!” and is not in any way meant to suggest that if one doesn’t read Virginia Prince that they aren’t transgender or that they’re less trans. This “Be Trans, read —” series-in-a-series will return.
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