​

1924

• Vita Sackville-West. Challenge. George H. Doran 1924. A novel, based on the affair between Vita and Violet Trefusis, with Vita’s male persona, Julian Davenport,  the leader of a revolution on a Greek island. His cousin Eve (Violet) joins him as his lover but becomes jealous of his attachment to the island. The book was published in the States only, for Vita’s father found the portrayal obvious enough to identify his family. In the real world, Julian and Violet broke up because the latter had sex with her actual husband.

1925

1926

• Oscar Paul Gilbert. Men in Women's Guise: Some Historical Instances of Female Impersonation. John Lane The Bodley Head Limited. 284 pp 1926

1927

1928

• Radcliffe Hall, with an appreciation by Havelock Ellis. The Well of Loneliness. Jonathan Cape, 1928. The cover page names the author as ‘Radclyffe Hall’, not as Marguerite nor as John.

• Virginia Woolf. Orlando: A Biography. Hogarth Press, 1928

• Havelock Ellis. Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Vol 7 Eonism and Other Supplementary Studies. FA Davis 1928. “On the psychic side, as I view it, the Eonist is embodying, in an extreme degree, the aesthetic attitude of imitation of, and identification with, the admired object. It is normal for a man to identify himself with the woman he loves. The Eonist carries that identification too far, stimulated by a sensitive and feminine element in himself which is associated with a rather defective virile sexuality on what may be a neurotic basis.” Perhaps not the very best time to publish this work.
• Anonymous. The Sink of Solitude. 1929. A lampoon in verse by "several hands", satirised both
  
  sides of the controversy over The Well of Loneliness. Its primary targets were Douglas and Joynson-Hicks, "Two Good Men – never mind their intellect". The introduction, by journalist P. R. Stephensen, described The Well's moral argument as "feeble" and dismissed Havelock Ellis as a "psychopath". The Sink itself endorsed the view that lesbianism was innate: “Though Sappho burned with a peculiar flame/ God understands her, we must do the same,/ And of such eccentricities we say/ "'Tis true, 'tis pity: she was made that way”. It portrayed Hall as a humourless moralist who had a great deal in common with the opponents of her novel. One illustration, picking up on the theme of religious martyrdom in The Well, showed Hall nailed to a cross. The image horrified Hall; her guilt at being depicted in a drawing that she saw as blasphemous led to her choice of a religious subject for her next novel, The Master of the House.

1929

• Valerie Arkell-Smith. “The Man-Woman – My Story” Sunday Dispatch, 10 March 1929.
• Elfrida Barker. “My Story: By the Man-Woman’s Wife: Mrs Barker Reveals the Truth”. Sunday Express, 10 March 1929.

• Gladys Mitchell. Speedy Death. Victor Gollancz, 1929. The first (of 66) Mrs Bradley detective novel. Explorer Everard Mountjoy is discovered dead in the bath, and to everyone’s surprise – especially his fiancée – he has a female body. Review. Included the delightful untrue story of Captain Jack Tremain who was part of the British team sent to Khartoum in 1884 to rescue General Gordon. Tremain died of malaria and a post mortem revealed his secret. He was previously Miss Wilhelmina Nash.....who wrote in a diary "to be a woman with ambition beyond that which society will allow is to endure a slow death. I was determined to live a life."
• Joan Riviere. “Womanliness as a Masquerade”. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 9, 1929: 303-313. Analyses how intellectual women in particular practice an artificial femininity as a defensive mask that is put on to hide masculinity. An important contribution to the concept of gender as social construction.

1930

Aftermath

1932

• Gerald Berniers writing as Adela Quebec. The Girls of Radcliff Hall. Privately published, 1932. A spoof which featured Berniers, Cecil Beaton and others as lesbian schoolgirls at an institution named after the famous writer. Beaton attempted to have all the copies destroyed and it became a very rare book until reprinted in 2000.

1934

• Radclyffe Hall. Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself. William Heinemann, 1934.

1935

1936

1948

1949

Things not mentioned in the video below:

In Dutch pinck means little  (cf pinkie finger).  A variety of the flower genus Dianthus  was called pinck-ooghen (little flower).  This was taken into English in the 1570s as a name for the Dianthus.

From this time pink or pinke was used for being at one's zenith, be it health or accomplishment.  'In the pink' meant strong and healthy, and by the sexist conventions of the time was applied mainly to boys and men.  This was reinforced by Thomas Pink, an 18th-century London tailor who specialised in the scarlet jackets used in fox hunting.  Here is an article from FoxHunting World on whether their jackets are pink, red or scarlet.

 "It is the very pink of hideousness and squalid misery"  wrote Charles Dickens in 1845, of an Italian town that he disliked.

"Pure white is used for all babies. Blue is for girls and pink is for boys, when a color is wished."(Ladies’ Home Journal, 1890)

"If you like the color note on the little one’s garments, use pink for the boy and blue for the girl, if you are a follower of convention." (The Sunday Sentinel, March 29, 1914)

"Pink or blue? Which is intended for boys and which for girls? This question comes from one of our readers this month, and the discussion may be of interest to others. There has been a great diversity of opinion on this subject, but the generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl. The reason is that pink being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy; while blue, which is more delicate and dainty is prettier for the girl. In later years the shade of pink has been much improved. Perhaps if we had had the delicate flesh tints when baby layettes were first sold, the rule might have been reversed. The nursery rhyme of‘‘ Little Boy Blue’’ is responsible for the thought that blue is for boys.  Stationers, too, reverse the colors, but as they sell only announcement cards and baby books, they cannot be considered authorities. If a customer is too fussy on this subject, suggest that she blends the two colors, an effective and pretty custom which originated on the other side, and which after all is the only way of getting the laugh on the stork." (The Infants’ Department, June, 1918, p. 161)


In 1922, Thomas Gainsborough's painting Blue Boy was acquired by the US magnate Henry Edwards Huntington for his art gallery in California.  He paid £182,200 (over £6 million today).  This created a huge outcry in Britain where it was a popular favourite in print reproductions.   Huntington hung the portrait in juxtaposition to Thomas Lawrence's Pinkie, and the two paintings were repeatedly associated.  The paintings were used as set decorations for many episodes of the American television show, Leave It to Beaver, (1957-63) which furthered the association.  This brought the association to those who don't read art criticism. 






















Smocked pink Polly Flinders baby dresses were popular for girls in the 1940s, as little boy blue sailor suits were for boys. 

Mid-1980s:  pre-natal testing became available and parents, family and friends bought baby clothes specifically for a boy or a girl, rather than just for a baby.




Futher reading:

• "PINK: A shockingly butch cultural history of the world's prissiest colour".  Toronto Star, Jan 09 2010'. 
• Jeanne Maglaty.  "When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink? Every generation brings a new definition of masculinity and femininity that manifests itself in children’s dress".   Smithsonian, April 08, 2011.  www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/when-did-girls-start-wearing-pink-1370097.
• J. B. Paoletti.   Pink and blue: Telling the boys from the girls in America.  Indiana University Press, 2012.   The major book on the topic.   She proposes that gender coding was inconsistent before the 1950s, but the current pink=girl/blue=boy took off after that. 
• Marco Del Giudice.  "The Twentieth Century Reversal of Pink-Blue Gender Coding: A Scientific Urban Legend?"  Archives of Sexual Behavior, 41, 2012: 1321-3.   Argues against the reversal, and concludes: "Of course, the [Pink-Blue Reversal] PBR is a big stumbling block for biological explanations of gender-color associations; but far from being an established fact, the PBR shows many warning signs of a scientific urban legend. Uncritical acceptance of the PBR may have hindered theoretical and empirical progress in this fascinating area of research."
• Lucy Waterlow.   "Too much in the pink! How toys have become alarmingly gender stereotyped since the Seventies... at the cost of little girls' self-esteem".  Daily Mail, 10 June 2013.  

ETYMONLINE      EN.Wikipedia   

__________________________________________

The Wikipedia article concludes: "The reality is that 'pink for girls, blue for boys' has existed continuously since at least the 1820s, while 'blue for girls, pink for boys' is only recorded between 1889 and 1941." 

Marco Del Giudice attempts a case that attraction to blue or pink is somehow biological.   He is what John Money called biological devout.

Even if there was not actually a blue-pink reversal in the 1950s, it being the case that the two systems were in conflict earlier, we are still dealing with a social construction in that the pink for girls was unknown before the 1820s, and that it did not rule unchallenged 1889 to 1941.

The US is the dominant country associated with the colour reversal.  It is also in the US that the red-blue political colours have been reversed.  Red has been associated with socialism and communism since the French Revolution, and now (only in the US) it is the colour of the plutocratic party.  British viewers find it nicely ironic that Trump frequently wears what looks very much like a Labour Party tie.

Over the years I have read many of the books by Colin Wilson – one of those whom the newspapers in the 1950s designated as Angry Young Men - on existentialism, motiveless murder, Jack the Ripper, the occult, ancient civilizations etc, etc., although I never read either of his two autobiographies. There is a new biography out by Gary Lachman, previously Gary Valentine who played bass with Blondie and guitar with Iggy Pop, and then moved to London where he has published a whole slew of books on consciousness and the occult.

I have recently read his biography of Colin Wilson. Reading, as I do, lots of LGBT history it is useful and refreshing to read books in other areas. However trans history does seem to pop up everywhere these days. On page 7 we find:

“another example of what Wilson called his early ‘sexual perverseness’ was one he shared with other creative individuals, like the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. As a young boy Wilson loved to dress up in his mother’s clothes, including her underwear. Authorities such as the pre-Freudian sexologist Havelock Ellis suggest that such behaviour ‘indicates a tendency to homosexuality’, as did, for Ellis, Wilson’s attachment to his mother and dislike of his father. But Wilson never observed any trace of homosexuality in his makeup.”

This perhaps sounds rather old-fashioned. Most writers today would relate child transvestity to either Richard Green’s contentious Sissy Boy Syndrome, or, more productively, cross-dreaming. Lachman gives no indication of being aware of either of these approaches. He does, later, page 262-9 summarize Wilson’s interaction with the trans activist and theorist Charlotte Bach, but a check on his footnotes shows that it is simply a repetition of what Wilson says about her in his book, The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders. There are a couple of attempts to compare Wilson to Bach’s theoretical schema: p265 “According to Bach’s system, he was a ‘normal’ male, and should therefore not be creative”; p383n27 “Wilson disagreed that the male sexual drive was to become the female, as Charlotte Bach argued. It was rather to possess her, which ultimately is an expression of will”. 

Reading from a trans perspective, several other trans persons appear or almost appear.  Kenneth Tynan – also an Angry Young Man – pops up several times, but his fondness for dressing female, and especially as the silent film star Louise Brooks is never mentioned. In 1960, Wilson and his wife went on a cruise to Leningrad. There, they sought out the palace of Felix Yusupov (where Rasputin was put to death) but there is no mention of Yusupov as transvestite. Kenneth Walker, Gurdjieffian and Harley Street urologist gave a positive review of Wilson’s first book, The Outsider, 1956 and they became friends. This was the very same time that Walker was introducing Georgina Turtle to surgeons – she had correction surgery in 1957, and then became Georgina Somerset by marriage. Walker wrote the Foreword to her 1963 book, Over the Sex Border. None of this is mentioned. 

Let us turn to Wilson’s The Misfits. Lachman tells us: 

“Following Charlotte Bach’s story, Wilson runs through a gauntlet of practices that some readers may find surprising, if not disturbing. What may also be surprising is that the people engaging in these ‘perversions’ are not anonymous case studies from Krafft-Ebing or Magnus Hirschfeld, although material from these and other sexologists appears. Wilson’s case studies involve some of the most famous creative individuals of the past two centuries. Among his sexual Outsiders we find philosophers, novelists, composers and poets, and we are treated to analyses of the intimate lives of, among others, James Joyce, Bertrand Russell, Marcel Proust, Lord Byron, Algernon Swinburne, Yukio Mishima, Ludwig Wittgenstein, TE Lawrence, Paul Tillich, Percy Grainger, and aptly enough, the pre-Freud sexologist Havelock Ellis.”

Readers of this encyclopedia will quickly realise that all the persons on this list are men. On the other hand I would contend, even if it is based on anecdotal evidence, that 45-50% of persons indulging in heterosexuality are female. Wilson seems to have almost no interest in the female experience of sex, although there is no shortage of such persons writing about it. Off the top of my head, what about Anaïs Nin, Germaine Greer, Simone de Beauvoir, Colette, Erica Jong, Leah Schaefer, Anne Rice, the pre-transition Pat Califia, Kathy Acker (more). 

In 1971 Wilson wrote a book on Abraham Maslow, the US psychologist who developed ideas about hierarchies of need, and peak experiences. They agreed enough with each other that each referred to the other in several books. Here is Lachman’s summary of Maslow on women: [Maslow] “discovered that women could be divided into three dominance groups: high, medium and low. The level of dominance influenced their sexuality. High-dominance women enjoyed sex and were promiscuous and experimental, medium-dominance women were romantics looking for ‘Mr Right’, and low-dominance women were shy and afraid of sex.” Could a woman have written that sentence? We have a 21^st century word ‘mansplaining’ – does this apply? I think so. I went googling to see if any woman writer had ever done anything with this typology. While almost all women writers did in fact fail to find any use in the typology, one writer does discuss it and use it: Betty Friedan in her foundational feminist text, The Feminine Mystique.

In reading Wilson’s The Misfits, one can see that Wilson’s readings in sexology are Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis and Magnus Hirschfeld. That is: nothing after the Second World War – no Benjamin, Green, Stoller, Money; no Butler, Halberstam, Faderman etc. And certainly no queer theory. He reports at second hand that Hirschfeld wrote a book on transvestites and found that most were not homosexual. However he did not read it. His book was 1988, and the English translation of Hirschfeld’s Transvestites did not come out until three years later. Wilson’s source was Charlotte Wolff’s biography of Hirschfeld and the volume Sexual Anomalies and Perversions, attributed to Hirschfeld but written/edited by Arthur Koestler and Norman Haire, which Wilson found for sale in what passed for a sex shop in the 1950s. He finds it an amazing source of sexual ‘perversions’ including ‘transvestism, sadism, masochism, necrophilia’. He continued to use the word ‘perversion’ even after John Money had persuaded most sexologists that ‘paraphilia’ was less offensive. 

Despite the reservations that I have expressed here, I am intrigued with Wilson’s suggestion that in the later 18^th century and afterwards there was an ‘imaginative explosion’ that we can trace in sex novels and this was accompanied by a greater variety of sexual and gender activity. He is therefore arguing for a social construction approach – although he never uses the term, nor does he mention Foucault or Trumbach who have developed competing social construction models. (In a later book, Below the Iceberg, 1998, Wilson did engage with some of the ideas of Foucault, Barthes and Derrida – he denounced Foucault as an ‘intellectual con-man’ out to deceive his readers).

• Colin Wilson. The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders. Grafton, 1989.
• Gary Lachman. Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson. Tarcher Perigee, 2016.

There is a misconception by some of those who prefer biologistic or even essentialist explanations that they therefore should reject social construction explanations.  For over 150 years now various writers have been proposing that homosexuality, transvestity and/or transsexuality are caused by some mixture of genetics and pre-natal experience, and for 150 years of effort very little has been established, especially in identifying which factors might make someone gay rather than trans or vice versa.  Every now and then some suggestive aspect of brain anatomy/chemistry such as H-Y Antigens or BTSc neurons is accepted uncritically as an explanation.  However these never seem to move on any next stage so that gender variance is as well explained as say autism or schizophrenia, or be developed to be used as a test,  and indeed attempts at replication of the original results by other scientists often fail.

Biologistic explanations have two serious weaknesses.  They cannot explain the dramatic increase in the percentage of us who are trans.  Add up all the known trans people in the entire nineteenth century and you have fewer than the transsexuals who are the newspapers in any one year in the 21st century.

Secondly biologistic factors do not at all explain the cultural changes of how trans persons are perceived and what options are available to trans persons at any time.  The biology was presumably similar for Lavinia Edwards in 1833, Charlotte Charlaque in 1930, Norma Jackson in 1931, Christine Jorgensen in 1953, Bibíana Fernández in 1977 and Jin Xing in 1995, but the social constructions in which they lived have changed enormously.

In the mid 19th century, a person whom we would now regard as transsexual was regarded as an invert, a category that also included what we now regard as homosexual.  In fact the first usage of the concept of a female trapped in a male body, anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa, was to explain male homosexuality.
In the mid 20th century persons like Jorgenson were generally described as transvestists, before the term ‘transsexual’ came into use.

Let us take a small double wave in the sea of social construction.

The HSTS/Autogynephilia distinction was developed by Kurt Freund at what was then the Clarke Institute of Psychology Gender Identity Clinic, and appears in that institute’s Gender Dysphoria: Development, Research, Management 1985, edited by Betty W. Steiner - although different terms are used.   Freund’s protégé and eventual replacement,  Ray Blanchard took the idea and renamed it with the terms that we now use.  Blanchard published papers in the Archives of Sexual Behavior (edited by Richard Green until 2001, and then by Kenneth Zucker) and similar journals that were not read by most trans persons.  However one who did and proclaimed herself to be an autogynephile, was Anne Lawrence who studied for a PhD at the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality at San Francisco.  Michael Bailey was one of her thesis advisors.  Speculations continue as to which influenced the other more.  In 2003 Bailey published The Man Who Would Be Queen, and the concept became a public controversy.

Willow Arune, Lisanne Anderson and others set up the Autogynephilia Yahoo group, and a small but significant number of trans women self-identified as autogynephiles.   The group was apparently destroyed by Jennifer Usher manipulating the Yahoo complaints policy.

There were fewer trans women self-identifying as HSTS (homosexual transsexuals).   The most prominent was Kiira Triea, which was odd in that she had previously identified as a lesbian intersex.  She was the prime mover behind transkids.us.  Others involved included Jennifer Ross, Hontas Farmer and Heike Bödeker none of whom still speaks up for HSTS.

Very shortly afterwards, in 2005, Charlotte Goiar met Diane Kearny online, and then they split and founded two competing groups both using the term Harry Benjamin Syndrome (HBS).  The term had been proposed by Tom Reucher a decade before, but they turned its meaning upside down by applying it to emotions that had been previously expressed by Betty Cowell and Margaret O’Hartigan. The concern here is that most HBS advocates took up the term ‘autogynephile’  (Rose White, the author of the only book on HBS says rather ‘autogyne’ instead implying that she does not properly understand the concept).  It was stated in the short-lived HBS-written Wikipedia page on HBS that non-HBS MTF persons who have gender surgery were either autogynephiles or possibly gay men (no self-identified HSTS woman has ever claimed to be  or to have previously been a gay man).  Kearny claimed that non-HBS transsexuals were autogynephiles and fetishists.  The vast majority of trans women who do not fit these categories were defined out of existence, just as in the Freund-Blanchard-Bailey schema the same vast majority also disappears.

By syllogistic logic, HSTS = not autogynephile = HBS.  However this never worked psychologically.   A small number of HBS persons, could, if you force the HSTS/AGP dichotomy, be considered HSTS.  Diane Kearny who transitioned relatively early and later married a man, is the best candidate.   However most HBSers were first husbands and fathers, and transitioned only later. Thus if we force the dichotomy they would be AGP. Examples include Joanne Proctor, Tabatha Basco, Jennifer Usher, Cathryn Platine.  Rose White’s accounts of her life exclude what she did between the ages of 14 and 57, and it seems reasonable to assume that she fits here also.

The link between autogynephile and HBS was kept alive by the mutual antipathyof Willow Arune and Jennifer Usher across various Usenet fora.

In 2009 the Transkids site was revived by Kay Brown, the author of Transsexual, Transgender, and Intersex History, writing as Cloudy. She also started a blog: On the Science of Changing Sex.  "I slept through the controversy surrounding the publication of The Man Who Would Be Queen. ... Prof. Bailey graciously gave me access to an online version of the book and I read it from front to back in nearly one sitting. Although I disagreed with several minor points, I felt I could have written the book myself. I agreed with each and every major point. Who wouldn't, if they knew what I know."

Of course the problem with HSTS is that it means ‘homosexual transsexual’, which is a confusing term for women who are mainly heterosexual (some are non-sexual).  It is also a very rude term in that it defines a trans women’s orientation by her birth gender.  There have been attempts to make Blanchard’s system less rude by proposing alternate terms, usually that HSTS should be called by the neutral term ‘androphilic’.  Alice Novic also proposed the terms Love-to-be-femme and Act-femme for AGP and HSTS respectively.  However these terms have not caught on.

The insistence on the term HSTS has kept away those HBSers who might have adopted it and also many others (myself included, even though unlike Triea and Brown, I am a graduate of gay lib).   The transkids.us site includes a page strongly insisting that HSTS and not androphilic is the right term.  Kay Brown/Cloudy continues the insistence in her FAQ:   “Transsexuals with this etiology are most often called, “homosexual transsexuals” (HSTS) or “early onset” in the scientific literature.  (This does not imply that they act like, nor identify, as “homosexual”.  It only means that they are sexually and affectionally attracted to the same natal sex.)” And goes on to refer to AGPs as non-homosexuals.   This is the same Kay Brown who in her Transsexual, Transgender, and Intersex History was critical of Harry Benjamin for using the term ‘male transsexual’ for a trans woman.

Anyway the tents are rolled up, and the circus has almost left town. 

• The Kearny web site and forum are derelict sites.
• The Goiar web site stands, but the forum has become inactive.
• The Rose White book caused such embarrassment that most HBS-ers declined to even mention it.  There has not been a second HBS book from anybody else.
• TS-Si which was initially proudly HBS, later removed the term and denied being HBS, and has now closed.
• Suzan Cooke, who initially labelled Women Born Transsexual an HBS site, later realized that she did not really identify with the HBSers and removed the label.
• In 2009 various HBSers wrote pages for the English, French, Spanish, Italian, German and Simple Wikipedias, but were unable/refused to include critical opinions, give a history of HBS or support their claims.
• Alice Novic has removed almost all content from her web site.
• Cathryn Platine has announced that all “trans themed blog entries“ have been removed from radicalbitch.wordpress.com.
• Joanne Proctor and Tiira Triea are no longer with us.

Charlotte Goiar, who is the youngest person mentioned here, is now 40.  I don’t think that I have seen any enthusiasm for either HSTS/AGP or HBS among persons under 40. Their time is over

• Andrea James. “Denise Magner aka Kiira Triea: fabrications and hoaxes”.  Transsexual Road Map, 12 November 2012.  www.tsroadmap.com/info/transkids/denise-magner.html
• Kay Brown/Cloudy.  “FAQ on the Science”. On the Science of Changing Sex.  http://sillyolme.wordpress.com/faq-on-the-science/
• Zagria.  “A Blanchard-Binary Timeline”.   A Gender Variance Who’s Who, 20/10/2010.  https://zagria.blogspot.com/2010/10/blanchard-binary-timeline-part-1-to.html  https://zagria.blogspot.com/2010/10/blanchard-binary-timeline-part-2-2001.html.
• Zagria.  “What is Autogynephilia?” A Gender Variance Who’s Who, 22/02/2009.  https://zagria.blogspot.com/2009/03/what-is-autogynephilia.html
• Zagria. “A short history of (Harry) Benjamin Syndrome.”, A Gender Variance Who’s Who, 24 April 2012.  https://zagria.blogspot.com/2012/04/short-history-of-harry-benjamin.html.
• “Harry Benjamin Syndrome“.  Wikibin. http://wikibin.org/articles/harry-benjamin-syndrome.html.