Not Here in River City, Part II: A Short History of Repression of Trans People

Note: What I envisioned as a three-part series of articles has now grown to four. Part II, as described in the first article, is now Part III. My apologies. I thought it important to include this history. Part I

There has always been pushback against the identities, bodies, and personal freedoms of transgender and nonbinary people. Sometimes we move ahead three small steps and are forced to move back two, and sometimes the forces marshalled against us move us significantly backwards. Over the past four or so decades, our trend in the United States and the West in general has been toward increased acceptance and legal protections for differently gendered people. In the past few years, however, concerted and coordinated efforts by Christian fundamentalists, right-wing politicians, trans-exclusionary radical feminists, irresponsible social media sites, and powers hostile toward the United States working on social media to spread disinformation have fomented what feels like an extinction-level event. Under the second Trump administration we, like immigrants, have been branded public enemies and targeted. We are to be suppressed, driven into a state of fear, silenced, rounded up, and erased. After a decade of slow buildup, things are happening at breakneck speed; this is driven by and mobilized by the Administrative branch of the Federal government, and the Legislative and Judicial branches are unable and largely unwilling to use their constitutionally-mandated powers to maintain the long-held and long-cherished Constitutionally-mandated balance of power. As I write this, our democracy has in essence become a dictatorship. If this doesn’t scare you, it should.

This is not the first time that powers-that-be have repressed us. Here is a short and selective history.

Many tribal and Asian cultures have established social roles for non-traditionally-gendered people, and so, too, did some ancient civilizations in Europe and Africa. I daresay things were most likely not ideal, but there was at least acknowledgement of our differences and room for us to exist and sometimes thrive. Unfortunately, our treatment in the west has been uniformly horrible and bloody over the past half millennium. We all know about the burning times, when people who were different in any way (character, beliefs, appearance, speech, behavior) were singled out and drowned, burned, or dismembered as witches or heretics. One of the victims was none other than Jean d’Arc, who was put to the torch not because of her military exploits, but because she refused to wear women’s clothing. She has since been sainted.

On the front cover of the Spring 1994 issue of the journal Chrysalis Quarterly, I reproduced a 1594 woodcut by Belgian engraver Theodor de Bry, depicting forty male-bodied indigenous Cueva Panamanians being eaten alive by dogs set upon them by Vasco Nunez de Balboa. Their crime? Gender transgression. According to trans historian Jenny Beemyn, Balboa considered them sodomites because they were living and dressing as women. Nice folks, those conquistadores.

Nazis were worse. Under the political leadership of Adolph Hitler, transgender people, along with gay men, lesbians, communists, disabled people, Gypsies, political adversaries, and, above all, Jews were rounded up by the millions and sent to work or death camps. Few survived.
By the early twentieth century, many American cities and towns had laws that were designed and/or used to intimidate, harass, and arrest transgender people. In an effort to protect the public from disputes between landlords and their tenants, New York passed a state-wide anti-masking law in 1845; this was apparently used as a model for later laws. A century later, some states and many cities passed a flurry of laws and ordinances in reaction to activities by the Ku Klux Klan. Unsurprisingly, enterprising policemen were soon interpreting these laws creatively, in particular by arresting crossdressed men and women.
Even before the passage of such laws, police in the United States had targeted those they recognized as crossdressed. In the 1990s, when I was running the national clearinghouse American Educational Gender Information Service, I collected newspaper articles to that end. In 1893, for example, The Chicago Herald ran an article about a woman who continued to wear men’s clothing despite having been frequently arrested for doing so.
As I write this, an exhibition of photographs by a freelance New York photojournalist known as Weegee is on display at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan. Weegee, in actuality Arthur (Usher) Fellig [1899-1968), worked the police beat, documenting every sort of crime, and some things that should not have been considered crimes. His photographs of arrested drag queens and crossdressers in paddy wagons are iconic. In 2012, I went with my friend Jan Brown to a previous Weegee show. Most of the photos showed the subjects, shamed and embarrassed and covering their faces like the two men in the accompanying image, but I really liked the I don’t give a damn attitudes of the drag queen and smiling young man shown here.

Drag queens were well aware of anti-masquerading laws. They were targeted by police, who would arrest them for arriving or leaving night clubs while crossdressed. This harassment led to the “two articles of clothing” folk belief: if the suspect wore two or more articles of clothing of their birth gender, they would not be arrested. I have no idea if this was ever actually true, but it was certainly widely believed.

Transgender activists crusaded against these laws, which lasted in some locations until just before the turn of the century. Phyllis Randolph Frye, who eventually became an associate judge for the Houston, Texas Municipal Courts and is now retired, was successful in getting that city’s anti-crossdressing law removed from the books. With Jan Brown, I have written on this site about pilot and crossdresser Felicity Chandelle, who, after being arrested in New York for being crossdressed, fought her case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Courageous people, Frye and Chandelle!

Christine Jorgensen’s sex reassignment in 1952 generated a great deal of publicity worldwide and sparked an interest in cisgender people to the idea that sex was apparently not immutable. This and the announcement in 1966 by Johns Hopkins University that it was opening a gender identity clinic perhaps contributed to the end of arrests of transgender people for merely being on the street. By the 1990s this rarely happened, but trans people have always faced discrimination in work, public housing, and health care and were routinely insulted, assaulted, and murdered for the simple act of being themselves. This of course continues today.

Dedicated enemies of transsexualism and transsexual people emerged in the 1970s. Most of them knew diddly-squat about transpeople, and that was apparent to me, but not to much to the cisgender public. In 1979, Catholic theologian and psychiatrist Paul McHugh, who is still active today, contrived a methodologically flawed and almost certainly fraudulent study that resulted in the closure of the Hopkins gender clinic, which itself resulted in the closing of the more than forty other university-based gender clinics in North America (except for a couple which went private). The most illogical and most irate critic was Janice Raymond, whose polemic The Transsexual Empire claimed “All transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves” (p. 104). Raymond would go on to lobby against gender-affirming care; she’s the main reason transition-related procedures, counseling, and sometimes even routine medical care were denied by most insurance companies until well into this century.

Throughout the second half of the twentieth century and even today, politicians and selective fundamentalist and right-wing readers of the Bible liked to quote Deuteronomy 22:5, claiming it is a biblical condemnation of crossdressing (it’s not), while violating other proscriptions about stoning adulterers and young women with non-intact hymens to death and admonitions about the consumption of pork and shellfish. This is rampant hypocrisy, of course, but try convincing them of that!

By the 1990s crossdressers and transsexuals had formed community of a sort and were exploring language and identity; previously these two groups had been kept separate by policies of the gender clinics and the “no transsexuals, no gay or bi crossdressers” policies of the groups started by Virginia Prince. I have roundly criticized the former (1992, 2025) and, Virginia, although she and I were friends and always cordial, for her insistence on her separatist membership policies (1996, In Press). With barriers down, the word transgender soon emerged as, first, an umbrella term, and then an identity, and the male-female binary came under fire; it was in fact out of the latter energy that today’s nonbinary identities began to emerge (see Boswell, 1991, 1997, 1998).

This century began with increased hope and new liberties and civil protections for transgender people. We could legally marry. We could serve in the military. We were protected from discrimination in many states. We were finally allowed to contribute to our own medical literature. As we know, though, this began to change, at first as rumblings from the far right and soon as North Carolina’s infamous bathroom bill and challenges to the rights of transgender athletes to compete. The center held for a decade or so, but as the Western world turned toward fascism, the dam eventually broke. The past half dozen years have seen hundreds of anti-trans bills advanced and many passed in the various states. Our rights to marry, to serve in the military, to hold jobs, to compete as athletes, to make decisions about our children and for that matter our own bodies, the language we use to describe ourselves, and in fact, our entire existence are on the chopping block at both state and federal levels.

Stay tuned for Part III.

Works Cited

 Author unattributed. (1883, September). In male attire. Chicago Herald.

Beemyn, Jenny. (2014). Transgender history in the United States. In Laura Erickson-Schroth (Ed.), Trans-Bodies, Trans Selves. Oxford University Press. https://web.archive.org/web/20190218071514/https://www.umass.edu/stonewall/sites/default/files/Infoforandabout/transpeople/genny_beemyn_transgender_history_in_the_united_states.pdf.

Boswell, Holly. (1991-1992, Winter). The transgender alternative. Chrysalis Quarterly, 1(2), 29-31.

Boswell, Holly. (1997). The transgender paradigm shift toward free expression. In Bonnie Bullough, Vern Bullough, & James Elias (Eds.), Gender blending, pp. 53-57. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Press.

Boswell, Holly. (1998). The transgender paradigm shift toward free expression. In Dallas Denny (Ed.), Current concepts in transgender identity, pp. 55-61. New York: Garland Publishing.

Brown, Jan, & Denny, Dallas. Felicity Chandelle (1908-2008), Pilot and Crossdresser. (2023-10-16). Transgender Forum. https://tgforum.com/felicity-chandelle-1905-2008-pilot-and-crossdresser/.

Denny, Dallas. (1992). The politics of diagnosis and a diagnosis of politics: The university-affiliated gender clinics, and how they failed to meet the needs of transsexual people Chrysalis Quarterly, 1(3), 9-20. Reprinted in Transgender Tapestry, Summer, 2002, 1(98), 17-27.

Denny, Dallas. (1996, May). Heteropocrisy: The myth of the heterosexual crossdresser. Chrysalis: The Journal of Transgressive Gender Issues, 2(3), pp. 23-30. Reprinted in The Flip Side, July, 1996, 3(7), pp. 7-12, and ConncecticuTView, September, 1996, pp. 3-8.

Denny, Dallas. (2025). Blinded by the binary: Gender clinics in the United States in the mid-twentieth century. In Wolf-Gould, Carolyn, Denny, Dallas, Green, Jamison, & Lynch, Kyan (Eds.), A history of transgender medicine in the United States: From margins to mainstream. New York: SUNY Press.

Denny, Dallas. (In Press). No brief candle: Virginia Prince, in her words and mine. Victoria, B.C. Transgender Press.

De Bry, Theodor. (1594). Attacking the Indians (Woodcut). https://www.meisterdrucke.us/fine-art-prints/Theodore-de-Bry/110828/The-Dogs-of-Vasco-Nunez-de-Balboa-Attacking-the-Indians.html.

Joan of Arc’s Life—Brief Overview. Joan of Arc Archive. https://archive.joan-of-arc.org/index.html.

Long, Michael G., & Tuttle, Shea. (2022). Phyllis Frye and the fight for transgender rights. Texas A&M University Press.

Meyer, Jon K., & Reter, Donna. (1979). Sex reassignment: Follow-up. Archives of General Psychiatry, 36(9), 1010-1015.

Raymond, Janice. (1979). The transsexual empire: The making of the she-male. Boston: Beacon Press.

Category: Transgender Opinion, Transgender Politics