A couple of weeks ago the BBC World Service ran a short piece about Christine Jorgensen, an American who underwent gender reassignment in 1952 and returned home to a blaze of publicity. The BBC advertised this as the story of the first successful gender reassignment, which inevitably transformed into billing Jorgensen as the first ever transsexual when the story was discovered by the tabloid newspapers. Even the official UK LGBT History Month Twitter feed picked this up.
Sadly this is nonsense. Of course to a large extent it depends on what you mean by “transsexual” and “gender reassignment” (and by the way, shame on LGBT History Month for using the sensationalist and incorrect term, “sex change” — they should know better). The first historical record I know of that mentions someone who has an obvious trans personality refers to the Roman emperor, Elagabalus. People have been making eunuchs for centuries, and I refuse to believe that in all that time no one used that option to allow her to live as a woman. Making a eunuch is surgery.
Of course many societies around the world, including Native Americans, Polynesians, and most notably India and neighboring countries, have allowed people to change gender for centuries. The tradition of Hijras pre-dates Elagabalus, though I don’t think there are any specific individuals mentioned. Surgery is often involved.
There are plenty of examples in European history of people choosing in live in a gender different to that which they were assigned at birth. James Barry, who served as a surgeon in the British Army, is a well-documented example. Up until recently I would have said that the first example of actual medical treatment of a trans person would be Lili Elbe, a Danish trans woman who underwent surgery in Germany in the 1930s. The BBC documentary says that Elbe died as a result of the treatment, but this is misleading. Lili underwent five separate operations. She died following the final one. What the surgeons got wrong was to try to transplant ovaries and a uterus. This was decades before transplant surgery was perfected. Lili died of tissue rejection. The surgeries that killed her have, to my knowledge, never been tried since. The ones that she had that were similar to modern gender reassignment worked.
The first documented UK case of gender reassignment is Michael Dillon. He was an Irishman who transitioned while living in Bristol in the 1940s. Like Barry, he became a doctor, and he actually helped with the surgery for Roberta Cowell, which took place in 1951, the year before Jorgensen’s operation.
Up until today I would have been happy to accept Dillon as the world’s first case of female-to-male gender reassignment treatment. Hormone treatment and plastic surgery hadn’t been invented in Barry’s time. But today I discovered the remarkable story of Peter Alexander. According to the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, Alexander’s transformation occurred naturally. I find this a little hard to believe, and it is possible that the story was concocted as a cover for medical treatment that would have been regarded with suspicion at the time. Of course, given how weird human biology can be, it may also be true. Whatever the truth, however, here is a remarkable interview made by Pathe News in Sydney in 1937.
Woman’s Hour carried a piece this week on a cross-dressing witchfinder, although that was probably a career choice rather than gender leaning.
That’s an interesting question. With trans men people often assume that their behavior is economically motivated, and it does bring benefits, but in order to live as a man you have to be comfortable living with a man. As I understand the Woman’s Hour piece, this person lived openly as a man for some time, and was willing to torture suspected witches. That’s quite an act, if it was an act. We can never know the truth, but the “it was for the money/status” argument acts to erase possible trans men in the same way that the “really a gay man” one that Cathy talks about below does for trans women.
One of the problems is that the non-existence of trans people becomes self-confirming, with people who would almost certainly be considered trans in the West today being reclassified as gay, masters of disguise, etc. I discussed one 18th-century case here: http://www.transadvocate.com/trans-erasure-and-the-old-bailey.htm
And as you note, it is still a problem today. One of the reasons why the TDOR memorial list is so heavily skewed towards Latin America is because that’s a part of the world where trans people are recognized. There are still many countries were a murdered trans person is reported by the local authorities and media as gay.