Joseph Gamble
This article is part of the NOTCHES series on The Languages of Queer History.
In the fall of 1969, the newsletter of the Erickson Educational Foundation, a philanthropic organization largely focused on queer and trans issues, published a short item under the heading “Information Pleases.” The newsletter reports that “editors of dictionaries in America and England are expressing appreciation for the definitions of transsexual, transsexualism, transvestite, and transvestism, recently sent to them.” Those definitions were prepared, we learn, by Drs. John Money and Harry Benjamin, two of the most (in)famous sexologists of the twentieth century. In 1965 Money had helped establish the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic; in 1966 Hopkins would become the first clinic in the U.S. to perform what they called “sex reassignment” surgeries. His word-defining collaborator, Harry Benjamin, was an endocrinologist who was perhaps most famous for having cared for Christine Jorgensen, the mass media celebrity whose incredibly public medical transition in 1952 fueled national interest in transness. In his work with trans patients, Benjamin also claimed to be one of the first to differentiate between transsexuality and transvestism, a distinction he publicized in his 1966 book The Transsexual Phenomenon, and which he and Money would help codify in a variety of dictionaries in 1969, as this newsletter so exuberantly reports.
Though Money and Benjamin prepared these new definitions of trans words, it was the Erickson Educational Foundation that actually mailed them out to “105 medical and lay dictionaries and encyclopedias to update incorrect or obsolete definitions.” The EEF was established in 1964 by Reed Erickson—a wealthy trans philanthropist who was one of Harry Benjamin’s patients in the early 1960s—with the mission of “provid[ing] assistance and support in areas where human potential was limited by adverse physical, mental, or social conditions, or where the scope of research was too new, controversial or imaginative to receive traditionally oriented support.” Given that they took the time to solicit, distribute, and then advertise Money and Benjamin’s trans definitions, it seems that the Foundation saw lexicography—the practice of compiling a dictionary—as an important part of alleviating the “adverse physical, mental, or social conditions” that were limiting the progress of trans life.
A little over twenty years later, though, at least one trans person was not so pleased by the information that Benjamin, Money, and the EEF had helped to codify in the institutions of the English language. In 1992, Billie Jean Jones, the editor of TV Guise (a 1990s trans newsletter later renamed GenderFlex), announced the beginning of a “Dictionary Project” intended to develop more trans inclusive definitions of a few key gender terms, including “transvestite” and “transsexual.” Both in her newsletter and in a cheeky flyer she circulated at the 1992 convention of the International Foundation for Gender Education, Jones made the case for specifically targeting dictionaries as a site of trans liberation. Jumping playfully between registers, Jones wrote: “Definitions are a lotta fun, ain’t they? I mean look at all the fun folks are having ‘assaulting’ the DSM—way wacky stuff.” The DSM, of course, is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the publication of the American Psychological Association that codified various mental illnesses into diagnoses and symptoms and which had long been the target of queer and trans activists for, at first, its pathologizing description of homosexuality as a mental illness and, at the moment of Jones’s writing, for its diagnosis of gender identity disorder. Why target this scientific text, Jones asked, when “only a few thousand DSMs are ever printed”? “Seems like ya could get a lot more ‘bang for the buck’ if ya altered the dictionaries and thereby influence the educational system and future generations,” she suggested. Slipping from this folksy voice to a more formal argumentative register, she goes on to write: “The Dictionary Project proposes to enhance the definitions related to gender found in the ‘manuals’ of our ‘literary language.’” Why focus on the specialists when you can go straight to what she calls “the majority of people”?
Interestingly, Jones’s call was restricted to revising definitions of words already found in “literary manuals,” rather than adding new terms that had emerged from trans communities. While she notes in a parenthetical that “by the way, the term cross-dresser is not found in most dictionaries, so a person who desires to check the definition, hopefully to increase their understanding, will not be able to do so,” she nevertheless immediately goes on to claim that “The Dictionary Project proposes to deal only with the few [words] that have been placed in our literary manuals.” Jones seemed particularly invested in wrenching the notion of “opposite sex” out of definitions that claimed that the word “transvestite” named “a person who gets sexual pleasure from dressing in clothes of the opposite sex.” “Even the most liberal definition[s],” she writes, contain “the error that clothing has a sex.” “There is a simple test to distinguish sex from gender,” she tells us. “If I leave my male clothes in contact with my female clothes, will I eventually have baby clothes? If not, then my clothing has no sex.”
Remarkably, Jones’s proposed “Dictionary Project” sought to target precisely the terms whose definitions had been supplied to dictionaries by Money, Benjamin, and the EEF only twenty years earlier: “transsexual” and “transvestite.” In the span of two decades, definitions that had been distributed by the country’s leading trans-affirmative philanthropic organization were deemed to be lacking by trans people themselves. These two flashpoints of trans lexicography suggest that dictionaries have been an important (and historically underrecognized) site of contestation for trans self-determination.
Indeed, the history of transness and dictionaries stretches back far beyond the twentieth century. As I have shown in a previous article, two words for gender transition, “transfeminate” and “transexion,” were coined by the English physician Sir Thomas Browne in his “myth-busting” book Pseudodoxia Epidemica(1646). Though these words almost completely fell out of use after Browne coined them, they nevertheless survived in dictionaries for hundreds of years. They also, importantly, changed over time. For instance, when Thomas Blount first records “transfeminate” in the lexicographic record in his Glossographia (1656), he defines the word as “to turn from woman to man,” a definition that is repeated until 1883, when Charles Annandale inverts the word’s definition, writing that it means “to change from a male to a female” (Ogilvie, John. The Imperial Dictionary of the English Language, edited by Charles Annandale, vol. 4, London: 1883, 414). Far from being merely “objective” repositories of linguistic information, dictionaries have thus actively shaped the history of these words; they have served both as an index of the shifting possibilities of the sex/gender system at the end of the nineteenth century and as a driver of those shifting possibilities—all of this precisely the moment at which German and British sexologists were theorizing notions of “sexual inversion” that described both homosexuality and transsexuality.
Jones is thus not wrong to think that dictionaries might have been, and might still be, one powerful place to advocate for more expansive notions of transness, and an important archive for all of us to attend to. While trans historians, specifically, would do well to look to the history of lexicography as we work to tell the history of transness across the longue durée, all of us who are interested in the history of gender and sexuality would do well to turn to the multiplicity of gendered and sexual possibilities encoded not in a mythic, singular repository that we sometimes call “the” dictionary, but in dictionaries: the plural, contested, and ultimately human-made objects that help shape the language we use to understand ourselves and others.
Joseph Gamble is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toledo, author of Sex Lives: Intimate Infrastructures in Early Modernity (U Penn Press 2023), and co-editor, with Gillian Knoll, of The Kinky Renaissance (ACMRS Press 2024).
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