The Girl Within: The Life and Activism of Virginia Prince

From 1960 to 1980, Virginia Prince, a self-identified “heterosexual transvestite” from Los Angeles, published an underground magazine for crossdressers. Prince wrote instructional and opinion pieces for each bi-monthly issue of Transvestia magazine, and hundreds of readers submitted life histories and self-photographs. In 1962, Prince organized the readership into a national “sorority”—a network of over twenty social clubs, each with a rigid screening process. Those who read Transvestia and joined the sorority were white husbands and fathers. While some ventured out in public, they usually cross-dressed privately in their homes or secretly in motel rooms. Beholden to notions of middle-class respectability, they emulated everyday models of femininity, such as the suburban housewife. A few considered cross-dressing as nothing more than a fun and relaxing hobby, or an erotic outlet. Most others, though, felt that expressing femininity permitted them to actualize an essential part of their personhood—a buried “second self.” They called this repressed being the “girl within”.

The social world that Prince and her network made in order to cultivate and normalize the “girl within” speaks to the gender and sexual politics of the mid-twentieth century. As their memories of growing up, marrying, and raising families attest, these men confronted a vastly prescriptive world—a universe of gender norms—and the dreadful specter of sexual deviancy. To counter charges of homosexuality, they aggressively maintained their heterosexuality, drawing crucial distinctions among biological sex, gender expression, and sexual object choice. They created a collective identity based around Prince’s concept of “dual personality expression,” which held that both the masculine and feminine sides of one’s personality deserved expression but “never the two shall mix.” In the magazine and sorority, the girl-within ideology became a doctrine of self-improvement and social uplift and was used to define and demarcate their cultural identity. Prince advocated that adhering to proper behavioral codes and sartorial practices distinguished “true transvestites” from other gender minorities. Unlike most transsexuals, their forays into femininity were periodic affairs. Unlike most drag queens, they shunned flashy styles. Instead, they sought to cultivate a respectable feminine appearance and comportment—to look “real”. Authenticity meant dressing from head to toe in “tasteful” women’s clothing, wearing make-up, and, for many, imitating feminine mannerisms and speech. Straddling the boundaries between the mainstream and the margins, they waged a complex challenge to dominant codes of cold war masculinity, even as their identity-work and cultural practices reinforced conventional gender dichotomies.

Featuring photographs, quotes, and copies of Transvestia, my poster will depict the social activism of Virginia Prince and other key members of the sorority from 1960 to 1980, precisely the period when waves of sexual revolution transformed America and rocked their idealized vision femininity. My work asserts Prince’s importance as a pioneer trans organizer and intellectual. It also reveals the larger story of how hundreds of crossdressers, whose formative values were shaped in “John Wayne’s America,” profoundly engaged questions of gender, desire, and identity in a later time period of upheaval, and within a social world of their making.