“I was born a boy, raised as a girl. . . . One may raise a healthy boy in as womanish a manner as one wishes, and a female creature in as mannish; never will this cause their senses to remain forever reversed.” So writes the pseudonymous N. O. Body, born in 1884 with ambiguous…
Sass Sasot, a transpinay (Filipino transsexual woman) writer and founding member of the Society of Transsexual Women of the Philippines (STRAP), provides a firsthand account of the history of the Filipino transgender advocacy movement up to that point. This was presumably originally published on the website philippine-transgender-movement.com, which is now defunct. Uploaded here is a…
Macho Sluts is a 1988 book of erotic short stories by Pat Califia, published by Alyson Publications. Then lesbian identified, Califia had written the stories between 1977 and 1988 during a period of fierce struggle between lesbian feminist sadomasochism practitioners and anti-pornography feminists in the San Francisco Bay Area. Media scholar Carolyn Bronstein has characterized…
Amy Stone and Jaime Cantrell’s Out of the Closet, into the Archives examines the experience, in the broadest sense, of queer archival research. The editors aim to demonstrate that archival research is “not merely intellectual but also emotional, erotic, and embodied” (9). They are as interested in the personal passions that drive queer archival research…
Magnus Hirschfeld, one of the early pioneers in sexual research, details sexual “derangements” of many sorts, primarily providing case studies from his own extensive work. In the preface he discusses how he hopes his book will “fulfill the same purpose for our time that [Kraft-Ebing’s] ‘Psychopathia Sexualis’ did for his”. (Book in German)
IN THE treatment of the transsexual the clinician faces unique problems. This is especially true for the adolescent transsexual who finds himself in conflict inwardly because of the impact of pubertal development which he does not want, and outwardly because of the opposition of his family and society to his cross-gender aspirations. Problems arise for…
“Over a period of a year, I spent time in New York and London attending shows, contests, and cabarets and interviewing drag kings about their performances, their identifications, their relations to masculinity, and their understandings of different genres of masculinity. This essay represents just one piece of a book in progress on drag kings, which…
What is a drag king? Why have drag kings not been as numerous or as popular as their drag queen counterparts in popular culture? Are drag kings lesbians? The Drag King Book tells you everything you’ve wanted to know and more about the lives and performances of contemporary male impersonators. The book profiles many different…
The Intersexual Constitution is the transcription and adaptation of a 1923 speech detailing Magnus Hirschfeld’s endeavor to create a typology of queer and transgender people. It is the first time the term “transsexualism” (“transsexualismus”) appeared in print. It covers queer and transgender physiognomy, categorization, and diagnosis in his work. Hirschfeld, Magnus. (1923) ‘Die intersexuelle Konstitution’…
“Looking Toward Transvestite Liberation.” Published in GPU News, February/March 1974. Archived at the University of Wisconsin – Madison Libraries. Asserting that transvestism was one response to sex role oppression, Sullivan, employing the rhetoric of gay liberation, argued that “‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’ are not natural to anyone.” Moving from Milwaukee to San Francisco in 1975, Sullivan…