Others of My Kind

Transatlantic Transgender Histories

Alex Bakker, Rainer Herrn, Michael Thomas Taylor, Annette F. Timm

• Publisher: University of Calgary Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781773851242
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

From the turn of the twentieth century to the 1950s, a group of transgender people on both sides of the Atlantic created communities that profoundly shaped the history and study of gender identity. By exchanging letters and pictures among themselves they established private networks of affirmation and trust, and by submitting their stories and photographs to medical journals and popular magazines they sought to educate both doctors and the public.

Others of My Kind draws on archives in Europe and North America to tell the story of this remarkable transatlantic transgender community. This book uncovers threads of connection between Germany, the United States, and the Netherlands to discover the people who influenced the work of authorities like Magnus Hirschfeld, Harry Benjamin, and Alfred Kinsey not only with their clinical presentations, but also with their personal relationships. It explores the ethical and analytical challenges that come with the study of what was once private, secret, or unacceptable to say.

With more than 180 colour and black and white illustrations, including many stunning, previously unpublished photographs, Others of My Kind celebrates the faces, lives, and personal networks of those who drove twentieth-century transgender history.

3

“I am so grateful to all you men of medicine”: Trans Circles of Knowledge and Intimacy

Annette F. Timm

“The more medical people sympathetically interested in transvestism the better.”

“I am so grateful to all you men of medicine who have been so good to me.” These words of appreciation appear in a January 1954 letter from a 49-year-old trans woman, Carla Erskine (pseudonym),1 to the German-born American endocrinologist Harry Benjamin, whom she had first met in California in 1953 and who had helped advise and treat her before and after her gender-affirming surgery at the University of California, San Francisco, in December 1953.2 Between 1953 and 1956, Benjamin and Erskine exchanged close to 100 letters, discussing every detail of her physical transformation and her relationships with other “transvestites” (the term she generally used) in California. She was friends with Louise Lawrence, known to historians as a central figure in the network of trans individuals in 1950s America.3 The two of them were part of a close-knit group in San Francisco and surroundings, and they cooperated with Benjamin to find research subjects for Alfred Kinsey’s planned book about transsexuality – a project interrupted by his death from a heart ailment and pneumonia in 1956.4 Unlike Christine Jorgensen, the glamorous ex-GI who had become a media sensation in late 1952 after American newspapers began publishing sensationalized reports about her surgery in Copenhagen, Carla purposely and successfully preserved her anonymity. She was one of very few transgender Americans to have procured surgery – some in the U.S. but most abroad – in defiance of the rulings of state and district attorneys in Wisconsin and California,5 who had relied on an obscure British common-law statute meant to prevent the self-maiming of soldiers to describe genital surgery on healthy tissue as “mayhem.”6 Carla’s desperation led her to take matters into her own hands – with a sharp knife – an act that ultimately eased her path to receiving reconstructive surgery.7 Although she saw herself as a pioneer, she had no interest in fame. Having just visited Louise and another trans friend in October 1954, Carla wrote to Benjamin: “Couldn’t the news paper [sic] have made a sensation of the meeting of the three of us? If they’d have known. As near as we can figure we almost had a quorum. 3 out of 9 in the U.S. as near as we could think.”8 Carla later became a professional photographer, but she had no intention of sharing the stereoscopic slides that she took of her trans friends with the press.

Figure 3.1: Carla E. KILSC-HB 17. Copyright © 2017, The Trustees of Indiana University on behalf of the Kinsey Institute. All rights reserved.

Figure 3.2: One of Carla’s friends, KILSC-HB 17. Copyright © 2017, The Trustees of Indiana University on behalf of the Kinsey Institute. All rights reserved.

Hoping to help Benjamin and Alfred Kinsey with their collaborative effort to better understand what they were most commonly calling “transvestism,” Carla sent her slides to Benjamin. It was the discovery of these beautifully evocative slides in a box of vacation photos in the Benjamin Collection at the Kinsey Institute that provided part of the inspiration for the exhibition TransTrans, which I curated with Michael Thomas Taylor and Rainer Herrn at the Nickle Galleries at the University of Calgary in spring 2016. The images led us to Carla, and Carla, her friends, and their predecessors have much to tell us about the intimate and personal networks that provided the foundation for knowledge about trans identities and their medicalized definitions in the United States and Europe in the mid-twentieth century.

Harry Benjamin’s Use of Photographs of Carla Erskine

In Benjamin’s files we have copies of the releases that all of his patients signed granting permission for their photographs to be used in The Transsexual Phenomenon, including a release from Carla. These releases give Benjamin total control over where and how to use these images, under the condition that the anonymity of the signer be protected:

I ___ do hereby give permission to Harry Benjamin, M. D., to use any photographs and any materials related to my case history in any publication he may see fit to present said material. It is understood that my identity will not be revealed and that proper procedures are followed to insure my anonymity. There is to be no financial compensation to me for this permission.

Yet Benjamin did not publish these photos in the main part of his book. Rather, they were printed in a separate supplement to the book that could be obtained only by writing to the publisher on medical stationery. It is hard to say why these photos of Carla (figures 3.3. and 3.4) were published in this supplement. Benjamin’s book confines photographs of genital surgery to the supplement, but these photographs of Carla do not fall into that category. And the photographs published in the main part of the book do include nudity. Given what we know about Carla’s wishes to remain private, perhaps this was a decision to lessen the impact of their publication? In The Transsexual Phenomenon, Benjamin speaks of his “patient” with the pronoun “he,” but we will use “she” since that is how she wanted to be known and that is how Benjamin in fact addressed her in their correspondence.

In the introduction to this book, we have reproduced the color, stereoscopic slide that was used to produce the photograph of Carla sitting on the couch (figure 1.2) we see here in the leftmost image of figure 3.3. Benjamin’s use of this image here in his book, with his caption, tells a very different story than we might glean from the image itself. Benjamin’s arrangement of four images subordinate the moment of private, even dignified self-presentation we find in the original slides to a clinical interpretation. One thing that is immediately striking is that in both of the clothed photographs, Carla’s face has been blocked out – a common technique in medical photography meant to protect her privacy, but which also has the effect of depersonalizing her. Perhaps for similar reasons, the photograph of her naked body in the centre does not include her head, as it does in the original colour version. But the effect of depersonalization in Benjamin’s book is more brutal. It reductively forces a focus on Carla’s naked body – on the tattoos and male genitals – as though this were the true evidence revealing her gender, evidence that is ostensibly covered up or hidden in the photographs in which she presumably passes as a woman. What we see in this triptych, then, is a message reinforced by figure 3.4: a contrast between photos of Carla dressed as a woman and the hidden “truth” of her body – and her history – exposed when the clothing is removed.

Figure 3.3 and 3.4: Left and right pages from the special image supplement to The Transsexual Phenomenon, 1966. Caption: “45-year-old, masculine-looking male transsexual, before sex reassignment operation. Note hypogonadal state. Tattoos were acquired in futile attempt to masculinize himself. After failure to do so, he began to live and work as a woman. Conversion operation was in 1953 (at age 45). Since then, patient has led a reasonably contented life as a woman (see case history in Chapter 7, Part II).”

The caption is a further lynchpin for both this clinical framing and the power it claims to expose the truth we are meant to see. Benjamin directs us to gaze at Carla’s genitals and tells us that the tattoos are signs of a history of suffering – suffering imposed by her male body and by her attempts to make her body more masculine by getting sailor’s tattoos. But here, too, the power claimed by the caption also goes beyond this revelation. In contrast to these apparently doomed efforts of the patient, it also provides a narrative of successful treatment carried out by a doctor.

Following this narrative, the clinical framing for the larger image (figure 3.4) draws our attention to Carla’s altered genitals (also offering a justification for showing them – another defense against charges of obscenity). But perhaps what stands out most in this photograph is that Carla is wearing a pearl necklace and earrings. These pieces of jewelry are unmistakable markers of femininity and beauty that push back against the clinical framing and demonstration of Benjamin’s intentions. As objects that Carla quite intentionally chose to keep wearing despite being otherwise unclothed, they also prompt us to think more carefully about Carla’s tattoos as forms of decoration.

Several similar photographs of these tattoos, also color slides, exist in Benjamin’s papers.

As was just noted, in The Transsexual Phenomenon, Benjamin describes these tattoos as an unsuccessful attempt at masculinization. Yet one might also say that they have very feminine motifs: like the pearl necklace, they might also be read as aesthetic adornment. They are beautifully feminine and carry clear symbolic meaning – of transformation, with feminine motifs; even of feminine strength or empowerment. Acquired at a moment in Carla’s life when there were no treatment options, not for her at least, we can read this decision to decorate her body in this way as an expression of agency and a willful remaking of her body to be how she would like it. Unlike Benjamin, who reads them only as suffering and failure, we might read them as an assertive act by Carla to claim power over her own body.

Moreover, Benjamin gives no indication of why he reads them in this way – we are not told whether this is his own judgement, or that of his patient. Knowing that Carla was a sailor for a time is important information to put these tattoos in context. In one history of how tattoos entered into and became celebrated in American culture, for instance, Margo DeMello points to what she calls the “golden age of the tattoo” between the world wars, when it was primarily among sailors that tattooing became established as an almost exclusively working-class male practice, and to the period after the Second Wo...

Table of contents

• vContents
• viGalleries
• viiForeword
• xiAcknowledgements
• Introduction
• 35Das 3. Geschlecht (The 3rd sex): Illustration Practices in the First Magazine for Transvestites
• 71“I am so grateful to all you men of medicine”: Trans Circles of Knowledge and Intimacy
• 133In the Shadows of Society: Trans People in the Netherlands in the 1950s
• 177Visual Medical Rhetorics of Transgender Histories
• 219TransTrans: Exhibiting Trans Histories
• 247Trans Transatlantic
• 251Historicizing Transgender Terminology
• Bibliography
• Index