Vice Versa: Female to Male Transsexuals before Transgender Liberation

A 1973 article titled “Transsexualism,” begins with a quote, “Surgery and hormone treatment can help a person end the conflict of having ‘a female mind trapped in a male body’ – or vice versa.” This type of representation was quite common, with the leading examples and primary associations of transsexualism centering around male-to-female transitions. Female-to-male stories were diminished as ‘vice versa,’ seemingly unworthy of individual focus. Transgender men have been underrepresented in many arenas, ranging from mainstream society to transgender history itself. Despite an increased awareness of LGBTQ+ identities in U.S. history, trans-masculine stories remain elusive before the 1980s. Trans men in the 80s and 90s saw increased community networks and the emergence of, as Leslie Feinberg coins, a “Transgender Liberation” movement. While the formation of communities for trans men and movements of transgender activism were hugely influential, scholarship tends to unfairly neglect those who had been undergoing female-to-male transitions in the decades before. So, we must ask, why are these absences perpetuated? My research locates female-to-male stories within the early decades of transsexual history, building on current transgender histories such as Susan Stryker’s Transgender History and Jules Gil Peterson’s Histories of the Transgender Child. Despite the perceived absence of trans men from this era, archival evidence proves otherwise. These individuals existed in both mainstream and gay, lesbian, and trans subcultures; they were spread across the United States, as I searched through collections from outside of the queer hubs of New York City and San Francisco. The main collections I used to locate these stories were the Tretter Collection at the University of Minnesota, the William Way Community Center Archives in Philadelphia, and the Digital Transgender Archive. Based on my findings, I utilized ArcGIS to create a map of U.S. gender professionals who saw female-to-male patients in the 1970s. Along with the map, my poster highlights visual examples and bullet points related to transmasculine representations in the archives. Finally, I included a brief contextual timeline of important moments in trans history from 1965-1992. This poster, and my research, aim to counter the belief that trans men were absent from early medical and social trans histories.