History Says Trans Rights


A key rule I follow when reading academic works: follow the citations, and see if they align with their description in the citing document.

This essay contends that Rykener ought to be understood as a transgender woman because she lived and worked for periods of her life as a woman, and other people in her social milieu accepted her as such. More specifically, I argue that Rykener relied on “gender labor” — the labor others perform to inscribe gender—to place herself within the series “women” (a collective of women not reliant on biologically essentialist definitions for membership). By using the framework of gender labor to argue Rykener is a woman, I provide a new way of reading gendered subjectivity — particularly transgender subjectivity — in the archive. Indeed, the historical document — discovered at the top of a 1395 Plea and Memoranda roll at the London Records Office — gives significant space to the various ways in which Rykener lived as a woman.

Henningsen, Kadin. ““Calling [herself] Eleanor”: Gender Labor and Becoming a Woman in the Rykener Case.” Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality. Vol. 55. No. 1. Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship, 2019.

We tend to equivocate between the present and the past, projecting our own views onto historical people despite a very different lived context. Nonetheless, Henningsen makes a strong case that at least one transgender person existed in 1395, a whopping six centuries ago. This contradicts a not-insignificant number of transphobes who want to claim transgender people are a modern fad or social contagion that never existed in the past.

The year was 1948, and [Alfred C.] Kinsey and colleagues were taking sex histories in San Francisco. During one interview, Kinsey was surprised to hear Barry, a 23-year-old “boy”, express firmly and convincingly that he wanted to change his sex. Never having heard of anything like this, Kinsey referred him to [Harry] Benjamin, who was staying in the same hotel. The boy’s mother pleaded with Benjamin: “Look at this boy, he’s not a boy! You’ve got to do something to help my son be a girl!” Unable to find a urologist in the United States willing to perform surgery, Benjamin in time advised them to go to Germany for the then-known operation of castration and penile amputation. Barry was the first patient Benjamin guided to genital surgery.

One can only imagine being Kinsey and Benjamin, hearing the unique features of Barry’s history: He dressed as a boy until age 2 and by age 3, with no encouragement or role model, started to dress in girls’ clothes. As Barry continued through grade school (which included special toilet arrangements), psychiatrists reassured his parents that their bright, contented, educationally accomplished child should be left alone to outgrow this phase. When high school authorities would not allow Barry’s female dressing to continue, he stayed at home “doing woman’s work.” After reading about his condition and about “operative procedures which feminized men,” Barry pressed his parents to find a surgeon who performed such operations. When thwarted in his desires to become a female, all Barry’s emotional control erupted into severe tantrums and violence, once even causing his father to be hospitalized.

Schaefer, Leah Cahan, and Connie Christine Wheeler. “Harry Benjamin’s first ten cases (1938–1953): A clinical historical note.” Archives of sexual behavior 24 (1995): 73-93.

There is no one way to be transgender, but Sally fits a lot of the stereotypes. When treated as a girl or woman, she was happy and content; when treated as a boy or man, it caused her emotional distress. While gender-confirmation surgery was relatively new, some books on the subject had been published for decades, and it only took a bit of research for Sally to discover these texts on her own. The effect was like discovering you’d needed glasses for years, a profound shift in what you thought was possible by augmenting your body. As implied above, Sally did get her surgery, and while she didn’t keep in contact with Benjamin there’s no evidence she regretted her choice.

She was, as the citation suggests, just one of at least ten people Benjamin collaborated with until 1953. I use “collaborated” instead of “helped,” because if you read the citation Benjamin was constantly learning from his patients as well, looking for new ways to improve their lives. He wasn’t perfect, for instance he insisted that medical intervention was necessary to be considered a “transsexual,” but he was quick to give credit where credit was due.

The case of Christine Jorgensen focused attention on the problem as never before. Without her courage and determination, undoubtedly springing from a force deep inside her, transsexualism might be still unknown – certainly unknown by this term – and might still be considered to be something barely on the fringe of medical science. To the detriment if not to the desperation of the respective patients, the medical profession would most likely still be ignorant of the subject and still be ignoring its manifestations. Even at present, any attempts to treat these patients with some permissiveness in the direction of their wishes – that is to say, “change of sex” – is often met with raised medical eyebrows, and sometimes even with arrogant rejection and/or condemnation. …

Conservatism and caution are most commendable traits in governing the progress of science in general, and of medicine in particular. Only when conservatism becomes unchanging and rigid and when caution deteriorates into mere self-interest do they become negative forces, retarding, blocking, and preventing progress, neither to the benefit of science nor to that of the patient. More power, therefore, to those brave and true scientists, surgeons, and doctors who let the patient’s interest and their own conscience be their sole guides.

When I decided to write this book, with the principal objective of describing my own clinical observations of the past decade, I was well aware that I would meet opposition in various quarters and by no means only the medical. Breaking a taboo always stirs quick emotions, although attempts to rationalize may follow. …

The forces of nature, however, know nothing of this taboo, and facts remain facts. Intersexes exist, in body as well as in mind. I have seen too many transsexual patients to let their picture and their suffering be obscured by uninformed albeit honest opposition. Furthermore, I felt that after fifty years in the practice of medicine, and in the evening of life, I need not be too concerned with a disapproval that touches much more on morals than on science.

Benjamin, Harry. The transsexual phenomenon. Symposion Pub., 1999.

That last citation wasn’t in the original document, but it was too good to leave out. Oh wait, I haven’t shared the academic work I ripped the other two citations from? My bad.

Brief for the American Historical Association, Organization of American Historians, LGBTQ+ History Association, and historian scholars as Amicus Curiae, decision pending, United States v. Skrmetti, Docket No. 23-477 (2024).

Part of that document was written by Jules Gill-Peterson, who talked about it on the Death Panel podcast, which in turn pointed me towards it. That brief is a rich collection of citations that provide strong evidence transgender people have always existed, and that there’s nothing new or radical about giving them medical care. While I’ve only dipped into two citations, that brief has done a good job of summarizing them.

No matter how the US Supreme Court decides that case, they can’t stop the forces of nature, let alone prevent you from learning from and sharing written history.