sallymolay:
“ Lesbian Power Couples From History Who Got Shit Done
Autostraddle writes:
“ Ethel Mars & Maud Hunt Squire (1894-1954)
These two American artists (top photo) met at the Cincinnati Art Academy in the 1890s and stayed together for 60...

Lesbian Power Couples From History Who Got Shit Done
Autostraddle writes:
Ethel Mars & Maud Hunt Squire (1894-1954)
These two American artists (top photo) met at the Cincinnati Art Academy in the 1890s and stayed together for 60 years, living for patches in France and in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Maud was known for her book illustrations and color etchings, Ethel for her painting, color woodblock prints and drawings. They collaborated on projects like illustrating the legendary Child’s Garden of Verses. The couple were regulars at Gertrude Stein’s salon in France (and the subject of her word portrait Miss Furr and Miss Skeene). Also, The New York Times says they “loved to behave outrageously.”
Ethel Williams & Ethel Waters (1910s-1920s)
“The Two Ethels” (second photo from top) met at the Alhambra Theater in Harlem — Ethel Waters was a popular blues singer and Ethel Williams was a dancer. They fell in love and summarily merged: Waters got Williams a job working at the cabaret where she worked, they lived together in Harlem and Waters took Williams with her on her first nationwide tour, where Williams would dance to warm up the crowd before Waters’ performances. In the touring revue Oh! Joy! they even did a little bit about being “partners” that winked at queer audience members while refusing mainstream identification. Waters’ managers at Black Swan Records manufactured gossip about Waters, once pushing a piece about how her recording contract stipulated that she couldn’t get married to explain her not having a male partner. Eventually, Ethel Williams left Waters and her job to marry a dancer named Clarence Dotson.
Harriet E. Giles and Sophia B. Packard (1855-1891)
Giles met Packard in in the mid-1850s when Giles was a student at the New Salem Academy in New Salem, Massachusetts, and Packard was the preceptor. They hit it off right away, and shortly thereafter shuttled off to Atlanta to start a school for Black women who had been newly released from slavery. Packard was the first president of the school, then known as the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary and now known as Spelman College, when it opened its doors in 1888. Giles took over after Packard’s death in 1891. The two women (third photo from top) are now buried next to each other in Silver Lake Cemetery.
Mabel Hampton and Lilian Foster, 1932-1978
Mabel Hampton, born in 1902, had a tumultuous childhood that took her from North Carolina to New York City to New Jersey and eventually to a job dancing in Coney Island just as the Harlem Renaissance was in full swing. She performed with stars like Moms Mabley and Gladys Bently and lived openly as a lesbian, eventually giving up dancing and becoming a domestic worker — for the family of the now-famous Joan Nestle. She met Lillian Foster in 1932, and they were inseparable until Lilian’s death, living together on 169th street in the Bronx and calling each other husband and wife. They were active in the Gay Rights movement, ran their own laundering business, and worked together to collect and organize a wealth of documents, newspaper clippings, photographs and books, including programs from the opera performances she and Foster loved attending, that would help form the Lesbian Herstory Archives, of which Joan Nestle named Mabel a founding member. Mabel’s oral history was preserved by Joan in the archives. (Fourth photo from top)
Sallie Holley and Caroline Putnam (1848 – 1893)
Sallie and Caroline (bottom photo) met at good ol’ Oberlin College, and the noted “anti-slavery team” became agents of the American Anti-Slavery Society immediately after graduation. They traveled on the abolitionist lecture circuit, often along with the legendary Sojourner Truth. After the Civil War, Sallie stayed up North giving talks, raising money to educate freed slaves in the South, and Putnam went to Virginia to teach freed slaves, eventually starting The Holley School, which became America’s first settlement house. Sallie then joined Caroline in Lottsburg, where they integrated themselves with the community, operated their school year-round and unlike some future suffragettes, were dedicated to enabling, preserving and protecting the right of Black men to vote even when white women could not yet do so. Sallie died in 1893 and Caroline in 1917, at which point the school was deeded to an all-Black board of trustees and continued operating for decades.
11 more lesbian power couples here!

Transgender bathroom segregation? We have been there before.

You know all those anti-transgender bathroom bills, where their supporters will force trans people to use the bathroom of their assigned gender, while expressing concern for women and children? We have been there before.

What history tells us is that people who hate use segregation in public places to harass, humiliate and control those they consider inferior.

This is not about protecting women and children. This is about protecting an oppressive way of life.

Here are some pictures from the segregated American South and Apartheid South Africa. Do you see the difference between what the haters did then and what they do now?

Exactly! Trans women and trans men do not even get their own segregated restrooms. They are to stay at home, in their closets.

Anyone who supports the anti-trans bathroom bills are committing a crime against humanity, in the same way the racist of the southern states and South Africa did when these posters were put up.

10 words that don't mean what they used to: when girls and bimbos were boys

Fascinating insight into the relationship between words and gender in the English language:

Back when the word “girl” first appeared in the language, in the Middle English period, it was used to mean “child”, regardless of the gender of the child in question.

And it gets weirder:

Derived from an Italian word for a baby boy, when [the word Bimbo] first emerged in American slang around the turn of the 20th century, it referred to a menacing, brutish bully.

The Guardian has more.

Mortal to Divine and Back: India’s Transgender Goddesses

Interesting article from the New York Times of a Hindu festival were trans women are celebrated as incarnations of the goddess.

Ellen Barry writes:

Indians who decide to live as kothis — also known as hijras, kinnars or aravani, depending on the region — are born male and typically have male lovers.
Unlike transgender people in the West, they leave a conservative mainstream culture for an equally conservative subculture. Some live in communes with a strict network of rules under the authority of leaders they refer to as “mothers” and “grandmothers.”

For the 10 days of the celebration the the trans women are treated with reverence by the villagers, who flock to see them dance without any mention of their gender identity. Walking the town’s streets the kothis are invited into house after house to give blessings.

Photos by Candace Feit.

Poem by a jewish trans woman written in 1322

protector-of-the-small:

Some trans history for trans day of visibility! Here is a poem written in 1322 by a jewish trans woman! (source and alternate translation). In case you were in need of the knowledge that yes, trans people have been around for a long, long time. [this is an english translation from hebrew]
“What an awful fate for my mother
that she bore a son.
What a loss of all benefit! …
Cursed be the one who announced to my father:
“It’s a boy! …
Woe to him who has male sons.
Upon them a heavy yoke has been placed, restrictions and constraints.
Some in private, some in public,
some to avoid the mere appearance of violation,
and some entering the most secret of places.
Strong statutes and awesome commandments,
six hundred and thirteen.
Who is the man who can do all that is written,
so that he might be spared?
… Oh, but had the artisan who made me
created me instead—a fair woman.
Today I would be wise and insightful.
We would weave, my friends and I,
and in the moonlight spin our yarn,
and tell our stories to one another,
from dusk till midnight.
We’d tell of the events of our day, silly things,
matters of no consequence.
But also I would grow very wise from the spinning,
and I would say, “Happy is she who knows how to work with combed flax and weave it into fine white linen.”
And at times, in the way of women,
I would lie down on the kitchen floor,
between the ovens, turn the coals, and taste the different dishes.
On holidays I would put on my best jewelry.
I would beat on the drum
and my clapping hands would ring.
And when I was ready and the time was right,
an excellent youth would be my fortune.
He would love me, place me on a pedestal,
dress me in jewels of gold,
earrings, bracelets, necklaces.
And on the appointed day,
in the season of joy when brides are wed,
for seven days would the boy increase my delight and gladness.
Were I hungry, he would feed me well-kneaded bread.
Were I thirsty, he would quench me with light and dark wine.
He would not chastise nor harshly treat me,
and my [sexual] pleasure he would not diminish
Every Sabbath, and each new moon,
his head he would rest upon my breast.
The three husbandly duties he would fulfill,
rations, raiment, and regular intimacy.
And three wifely duties would I also fulfill,
[watching for menstrual] blood, [Sabbath candle] lights, and bread…
Father in heaven, who did miracles for our ancestors with fire and water,
You changed the fire of Chaldees so it would not burn hot,
You changed Dina in the womb of her mother to a girl,
You changed the staff to a snake before a million eyes,
You changed [Moses’] hand to [leprous] white
and the sea to dry land.
In the desert you turned rock to water,
hard flint to a fountain.
Who would then turn me from a man to woman?
Were I only to have merited this, being so graced by your goodness…
What shall I say? Why cry or be bitter?
If my Father in heaven has decreed upon me
and has maimed me with an immutable deformity,
then I do not wish to remove it.
And the sorrow of the impossible
is a human pain that nothing will cure
and for which no comfort can be found.
So, I will bear and suffer
until I die and wither in the ground.
And since I have learned from the tradition
that we bless both the good and the bitter,
I will bless in a voice, hushed and weak,
Blessed are you, O Lord,
who has not made me a woman.

What a beautiful poem!

I found this image of Medieval women dancing. This is what her inner woman might have looked like.

(via emmarosethinkstoomuch)

sallymolay:
“Berlin was a liberal hotbed of homosexuality and a mecca for cross dressers and transsexuals“The city’s liberal years - before the rise of Hitler - are detailed in a new book, Gay Berlin.
• An uninhibited urban gay sexual scene...

sallymolay:

Berlin was a liberal hotbed of homosexuality and a mecca for cross dressers and transsexuals
The city’s liberal years - before the rise of Hitler - are detailed in a new book, Gay Berlin.
An uninhibited urban gay sexual scene flourished in Berlin, Germany in the wake of World War One
The science of ‘transsexuality’ was founded at the Institute of Sexual Science where the first male-to-female surgery was performed
German scientists concluded that same-sex love was a natural, inborn characteristic and not merely the perversion of a ‘normal’ sexual tendency
There were 30 separate homosexual periodicals
Cross-dressers found dressmakers who tailored for large sizes and singles searching for gay love could place ads
In the photos:
Top: Hansi Sturm was the winner of the Miss Eldorado transvestite pageant in 1926.
Middle: Transvestites having drinks in the Eldorado club that was not hidden away but celebrated in the golden age of the gay bar and club scene in Weimar Berlin. It was a hot spot for high society and partying until dawn was the norm.
Bottom: Transvestite prostitutes sitting on the laps of gay men in the popular Berlin gay bar Marienkasin.
Read the whole story!

Chevalier d'Eon: Early Transgender Role Model

sallymolay:

Chevalier d'Eon (Charles-Geneviève-Louis-Auguste-André-Timothée d'Éon de Beaumont) was a French soldier, diplomat and spy who publicly lived as a woman in 18th-century London.
D’Eon lived from 1728 to 1810 who appeared publicly as a man for 49 years, although during that time d'Éon successfully infiltrated the court of Empress Elizabeth of Russia by presenting as a woman. For the last 33 years, d'Éon lived as a woman.
The Chevalier d'Éon claimed to be assigned female at birth, and demanded recognition by the government as such. King Louis XVI complied, but required in turn that d'Éon dress appropriately in women’s clothing. When the king’s offer included funds for a new wardrobe of women’s clothes, d'Eon agreed.
The pension that Louis XV had granted was ended by the French Revolution, and d'Éon had to sell personal possessions. D'Éon last years were spent in England with a widow, Mrs. Cole.
Praised by feminists such as Mary Wollstonecraft, the Chevalier (or Chevalière, referring to a female knight) remained well known long after death: British sexologist Havelock Ellis coined “Eonism” to refer to transgender behaviour (Ellis lost the lexicographical battle to Magnus Hirschfeld’s “transvestism”) and the Beaumont Society for help and support for the transgender community took its name from d’Eon.
Sources: Wikipedia and The Guardian.
Illustrations:
Top: Portrait by Thomas Stewart.
Below: Fencing Match between Monsieur de Saint-George et Mademoiselle La chevalière d'Éon de Beaumont at Carlton House on 9 April 1787. Engraving by Victor Marie Picot.
Bottom: The Chevalière d'Éon by Engraving by J.B. Bradel.

19th Century American Transgender Crossdressers and Impersonators

American postcard of the actress Adah Isaacs Menken in male drag

Omar Kingsley, perfoming as Ella Zoyara, 1879

Vesta Tilley, male impersonator, 1897.

In 1871 the male impersonator Ella Wesner appeared in San Francisco for the first time, performing at the Barbary Coast music hall Bella Union.

Female impersonator, William Horace Lingard.

The pictures are taken from the Advocate article “#TBT: When Cross-Dressing Was a Crime”:

“Over 40 American cities passed antidrag laws in the late 1800s. How did that shape the definition of gender normality? [The book] Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in 19th Century San Francisco explains.”

No, I do not know the gender identity of these people. Then, as today, people would crossdress for various reasons, but researcher at the time (like Magnus Hirschfeld) tell us that many of them identified with their target sex.

Lou Sullivan, cofounder of the FTM movement, from crossdresser to trans man

pflagmom:

pflagmom:
Source: Susan Stryker PhD

Guide to the Louis Graydon Sullivan Papers, 1955-1991
[Excerpt of blog post]

Louis Graydon Sullivan, a female-to-male transsexual gay man, was born Sheila Jean Sullivan in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on June 16, 1951…
Sullivan’s intense, life-long, concern with male gender identity and male same-sex relationships began to take on greater definition in the early 1970s.
Sullivan recalled that as a child he had always enjoyed “playing boys” and realized even then that it “meant more to me than it did to the other kids.”
By his early teens, Sullivan’s diaries, poems and short stories reflected an interest in male homosexuality and questions about gender identity.
At age seventeen, Sullivan began a long-term relationship with a self-described “feminine” male lover, and play with gender roles figured in the relationship from the beginning. Both Sullivan and his partner were attracted to the gay liberation movement, and to the gender-bending aesthetic then evident in much of popular culture.
By 1973, Sullivan identified as a “female transvestite” and began a career of transgender community activism with the publication of ” A Transvestite Answers a Feminist,” an article which appeared in the Gay People’s Union [GPU] News.
Another article, “Looking Towards Transvestite Liberation,” published the next year in the same periodical and widely reprinted in the gay and lesbian press, remains a landmark article for its early investigation of the question of gender identity in homosexual culture.
Sullivan continued to contribute articles and reviews to the GPU News through 1980, and donated valuable type setting and copy editing services as well.
Sullivan identified as a female-to-male transsexual by 1975, when he moved to San Francisco and found work as a secretary for the Wilson Sporting Goods Company.
Although still employed as a female, Sullivan spent approximately 75% of his time cross-dressed and living as a gay man.
In 1976 Sullivan began seeking sex-reassignment surgery, which was routinely denied him on the basis of his openly declared homosexual orientation. Female-to-gay male transsexuality was not recognized by the medical/psychotherapeutic establishment as a legitimate form of gender dysphoria at that time.
As a result of his own frustrations, Sullivan became involved in an eventually successful campaign to remove homosexual orientation from the list of contraindications for sex-reassignment.
He pioneered methods of obtaining peer-support, professional counseling, endocrinological services and reconstructive surgery outside the institution of the gender dysphoria clinics, and disseminated this information at the grass-roots level through his booklet Information for the Female to Male Cross-Dresser and Transsexual, which is now in its third edition and is still the only practical guide for FTMs.
As a consequence of his efforts, Sullivan became one of the founders of the female-to-male transsexual community, and is responsible to a significant degree for the rapid growth of the FTM population during the late 1980s.
Sullivan began taking testosterone in 1979, at which time he also became a volunteer at the Janus Information Facility (now J2CP), a gender dysphoria clearinghouse and referral service in San Francisco.
He also became involved in Golden Gate Girls [and successfully petitioned to have “Guys” added to their name], one of the first social/educational transgender organizations to offer support to FTM transsexuals.
In 1980 he underwent a double mastectomy and began living full time as a gay man. Sullivan also changed jobs at this time, becoming an associate engineering technician at the Atlantic-Ritchfield Company, so that coworkers would have no knowledge of his previous female life history.
That same year he published the first edition of his Information for the FTM. Throughout the decade, Sullivan continued to write about female-to-male issues in the gay and transgender press, and became a popular public speaker on the topic in the San Francisco Bay area.
He [was a founder of] the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society, whose newsletter he helped edit and publish. In 1984 Sullivan started his own typesetting and word-processing business.
He also began work on a biography of Jack B. Garland, a female who lived as a man for forty years at the turn of the century. The book was published to favorable reviews by Alyson Press in 1990. In 1986,
Sullivan finally obtained genital reconstruction surgery; he also organized FTM, the first peer-support group devoted entirely to female-to-male [transsexual and transvestite] individuals. Later that year
Sullivan was diagnosed with AIDS. In his last years Sullivan devoted himself to work on behalf of FTMs, as well as the broader transgender and homosexual communities. He died of an AIDS-related illness on March 2, 1991, at the age of 39.
Full blog post here

There is one part of the truscum separatist gospel that really worries me: Their willingness to ignore and dismiss the gender dysphoria of those they call “non-binary” or “gender non-conforming”. They fail to understand that many suffering from gender dysphoria may suppress their trans identity for years before embracing it.

The following post may serve as an excellent example of this. The cofounder of the American FTM transgender movement, Lou Sullivan, started out identifying as a female crossdresser.

Indeed, those who have read his writings can tell you that the sexual fantasies of the young Sullivan had a lot in common with gender dysphoric girlfags: If you are a female to male gender dysphoric transgender attracted to men, imagining yourself as a gay man making love to a gay man makes perfect sense.

The truscum movement would not have welcomed the young Sullivan of 1973 into their version of the transgender family, although they might have accepted the 1975 version. This makes absolute no sense to me.

The truscum policy stigmatize gender dysphoric people journeying towards a clearer understanding of their true identity.

Sullivan never supported the idea that FTM crossdressers and trans men belonged to two different species, and he continued to work for all transgender people to the day he died.

See also On Lou Sullivan and what female to male crossdreamers mean for our understanding of transgender

(Source: lousullivansociety.weebly.com, via pflagmom)