Virginia Prince was perhaps the best known spokesperson of transvestite activism in the twentieth century. However, an investigation of her life reveals a mixture of achievements and failures stemming largely from an anxious wish for respectability and the desire to disassociate her own kind from what she regarded as similar but less respectable groups. This biography, built largely from the author’s encyclopaedic history of gender variance at zagria.blogspot.com, bares Prince’s strengths and inadequacies by positioning her against a backdrop of interesting, relevant social events and psychological developments which coincided with the different periods of her life and work, in a chronologically sequential narrative. Following the biographical narrative, a historical analysis of transgender jargon associated with Prince will resolve widespread controversy over the jargon.
Virginia Prince: A conflicted life in trans activism
By Zagria Cowan, 2013
