no 3rd base i'm ace ♠️

[ID: Reed Erickson, a trans man with styled hair, wearing a dark suit and posing with his hands folded. END ID.]

Reed Erickson (1917–1992)

Excerpts from the podcast Making Gay History, S04E07: Reed Erickson.

“He was really accepted in society, both for his relationships with women and his transition, which is really interesting when you think about the 1960s. There were very few people who could so openly and publicly transition, let alone maintain multiple marriages.”

“The influence of the Erickson Educational Foundation cannot be stressed enough. We today would not have trans health care, period, without the funding and the information provided by the Erickson Educational Foundation.”

“It was the first organisation in the world that actually provided support and information to trans people, both through its newsletters and publications as well as an in-person office where people could call or drop in to receive information.”

“Essentially, the framework that trans rights organisations use today in terms of collecting resources by area and distributing them to trans people in need, is based off the work of the Erickson Educational Foundation. So without that, the modern trans movement as we know it would not exist.”

[ID: Three photos of Reed Erickson. In the first, he is standing with his girlfriend Daisy Harriman, wearing a dark suit while she wears a pink dress. In the second, he is posing shirtless, with his top surgery scars visible and obvious facial hair. In the third, he is posing with his wife Ailene and their daughter, in the late 1960s. END ID.]

Trans history involves a fabric of people across generations and cultures. Many trans stories have been erased, particularly trans male contributions, in favour of the myth that Stonewall rioting was the single galvanising event responsible for all progress.

Remember:

Trans men have always existed, and have always been involved in the fight for trans rights.

Stonewall was vitally important, but LGBT+ activism existed before then, too. To think otherwise is to erase the hard work done by the full spectrum of LGBT+ people.

Erasing trans male history further isolates modern-day trans men, and perpetuates the myth that we have never been involved with our own communities. Erasing cis gay and lesbian history perpetuates the myth that our communities have never overlapped, or acted as allies to one another. If you’re passionate about Stonewall, for example, I suggest you educate yourself about Stormé DeLarverie, AKA “the gay community’s Rosa Parks”. She instigated the uprising.

This surprise and excitement warms my heart! But also makes me kinda depressed! Because, if our community actually knew its history, this wouldn’t be shocking at all!

Remember…

Trans men have always been around.

Trans men have always contributed to progress.

Trans men are not a footnote.

Erickson was able to fund medical research of transition after inheriting his father’s highly successful lead-smelting company, Schuylkill Industries, in 1962. He began his transition immediately after receiving this inheritance, and reached out to Dr. Harry Benjamin in 1963 for medical care. In the following years, Erickson both directly funded Benjamin’s research and provided funding for research programs at major universities, including UCLA, Johns Hopkins, and Stanford, that would focus on the study of trans health. Furthermore, he provided critical funding for the National Transsexual Counseling Unit (NTCU), an organization that fielded letters from around the world, provided walk-in counseling, and performed on-the-street outreach work. His interest in the NTCU sparked from discussions with Dr. Benjamin, who was directly connected to the trans scene at NTCU’s San Francisco headquarters.

Dr. Benjamin actually studied trans healthcare under the man who coined much of the language and conceptualization of trans identity that we use today: Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld. In 1911(!), Hirschfeld defined der Transvestit (the transvestite) as any individual “faced with the strong drive to live in the clothing of that sex that does not belong to the relative build of the body.” He pulled the word from the latin words trans, meaning opposite, and vestis, meaning clothing. His recommended treatment for this “drive,” as he called it? To aid the patient in presenting as the gender they understood themselves as– a radical departure from existing “treatments” which aimed to shunt the trans patient back into their birth sex, Hirschfeld’s approach centered the happiness and comfort of his trans patients. As he describes it in The Transvestites:

In the apparel of their own sex the feel confined, bound up, oppressed; they percieve [the clothing] as something strange, something that does not fit them, does not belong to them; on the other hand, they cannot find enough words to describe the feeling of peace, security and exaltation, happiness and well-being that overcomes them when in the clothing of the other sex

Now, as a historian of trans life in the early 20th century, I do want to contest Making Gay History’s argument that the EEF was “the first organization in the world” to provide support for trans people in the form of newsletters and in-person consultations. While it was certainly one of the earliest organizations of this nature in the U.S., the trans community is much older– and geographically speaking, much broader– than this.

There were multiple trans-inclusive and even trans-centered magazines in Europe through the 1920s, including Die Freundin, Garconne, and Das Dritte Geschlecht, to name a few. Weimar-era Berlin alone had a thriving trans community: der Internationaler Transvestiten-Bund (International League of Transvestites) was a prominent trans-rights activist organization, and it was common to see ads for trans social clubs in the gay magazines of the time. See for example, the weekly meetings held at der Zauberflöte (the Magic Flute, a gay bar) for “women living as men,” or the Transvestiten-Gruppe (transvestite’s group) lead by the transmasculine lesbian bar-owner Lotte/Lothar Hahm).

As for more medically-focused support, Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for the Study of Sexuality) provided jobs and therapy to trans people from 1919-1933, and conducted medical research that was foundational to developing the hormone therapy and surgical techniques used today. Unfortunately, large swaths of this research was lost when Hirschfeld’s institute was burned by the Nazis, primarily due to Hirschfeld himself being both a Jewish man and a staunch civil rights activist for both gay and trans communities. 

I recognize that I’ve veered away from Erickson himself a bit, but I really want to showcase how far back the trans past stretches– even the pieces of history I’ve centered on today have focused on Western Europe in the 20th c, when the truth is that there is evidence of trans life stretching back thousands of years, across many other parts of the world (Southeast Asia comes to mind, as do the Cree and Ojibwe tribes of North America; honestly, anywhere you look, you’ll find trans people). I also send you one-thousand heart emojis for your specific focus on trans men, as too often I see our stories sidelined.

Sources:

Die Freundin. April 9, 1930.

Hirschfeld, Magnus. Transvestites, trans. Michael Lombardi-Nash (New York: Prometheus Books, 1991): 124-125.

Stryker, Susan. Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution. (New York: Seal Press, 2017): 56, 63-64, 100-105. (note: in my opinion, this book serves largely as a history of white trans women in America. however, you can find some useful leads on trans men if you’re willing to dig).

Recommended reading for more transmasculine history:

Hirschfeld, Magnus. The Sexual History of the World War. trans. Andreas Gaspar et al. (New York: Falstaff Press, 1937). See chapter 6.

Skidmore, Emily. True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the End of the 20th Century. (New York: NYU Press, 2017).

Smith, Brice. Lou Sullivan: Daring to Be a Man Among Men. (Oakland: Transgress Press, 2018).

Sullivan, Louis. From Female to Male: The Life of Jack Bee Garland. (New York: Alyson Books, 1990)

Oh, the first top surgery for a trans man was before Erikson had been born actually! It took place in Berlin in 1912. Ten years before the term transsexual was even coined. (in 1923)

And in 1945, the first full sex change surgey was preformed by Ralph Millar and Sir Harold Gilles, for Michael Dillon. He officially diagnosed Dillon with acute hypospadias in order to conceal the fact that he was performing sex-reassignment surgery. Dillon had been taking HRT since 1940 and his birth certificate changed to say Male in 1944.

He was the first trans man to get a phalloplasty and he performed an Orchiectomy for Roberta Cowell (who you probably know as the first trans woman to get srs) which was at the time an illegal procedure. Dillion was a self-trained doctor, and had yet to get his credentials as a physician. Afterwards, Cowell would get her Vaginoplasty preformed by Gilles.

Dillon and Cowell were also lovers for several years! Making them the first recorded T4T couple along with the first trans man and trans woman to “fully transition”.

so here's to everyone whose delusions make it hard to tell who they're attracted to, or can't tell if their gender experience is the way it is because of a delusion

here's to everyone whose gender fluctuates and changes due to their hyperfixation or special interest changing and evolving over time

here's to everyone who can't quite figure out if their gender is theirs, or someone else's bleeding into yours

it’s still so hard to get people to take aphobia seriously, and ‘aphobe’ is constantly treated like a joke. I get anxious about mentioning my qpp in anything, I’ve seen how far people will go to tell someone their relationship is fake or ‘cringe’. sometimes it seems like noone remembers what it was like before, when we weren’t afraid. that we came looking for acceptance, and were thrown out on our asses for being largely neurodivergent.

i think up to this point, it's already a taboo. always, ALWAYS on tv shows, women's goals are to have a partner, have children and why?

why are men's goals to save the world? and no matter if they have or are looking for a partner or not, they're always going to be the superhero !!

and women always need the power of love to be at least "good"

The Brunswick Four and the Toronto raids in Canada 🇨🇦

Queer icons like Virginia Wolf, Oscar Wilde, and Freddie Mercury in Britain 🇬🇧

Cultural revolution in Weimar Germany 🇩🇪

The drag scene in Nigeria 🇳🇬

Gay and lesbian Mardi Gras in Australia 🇦🇺

Frida Kahlo and Mexicos fraught history 🇲🇽

Gay samurai in Japan 🇯🇵

Queer narratives erased by colonialism in Pakistan 🇵🇰

The modern world’s first legal same-sex marriages in the Netherlands 🇳🇱

The honoured Mahu (transgender individuals) in traditional Hawaiian culture 🌺

Hidden queer communities in communist Poland 🇵🇱

Husbands in ancient Egypt 🇪🇬

The Athens pride festival in Greece 🇬🇷

The Homosexual Movement of Liberation in Chile 🇨🇱