The erasure of transmasculine subjects in U.S. history, at least on its surface, would seem to refer to a lack of historical records about masculine people who are assigned female at birth. But that sort of archival invisibility is only part of a much broader phenomenon. While sparse, records of transmasculine people in U.S. history do exist, and scholars have used them to produce important research on trans and queer histories (examples include True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the Twentieth Century by Emily Skidmore in 2017; Female Husbands: A Trans History by Jen Manion in 2020; and The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison by Hugh Ryan in 2022).[1]

While archival traces of transmasculine people are recoverable, records of their lives are often sparse, violent, exploitative, and produced by gender-conforming people. Prior to 1990, such records were most likely to be found in the archives of prisons, medicine, or newspapers, and they were rarely produced by transmasculine people themselves. Important exceptions include contributions by gender variant people in gay and lesbian periodicals beginning in the 1950s, and early trans publications, such as Travestia, which was in print from 1960 to 1986. Beyond these sources, traces of transmasculine people in historical records might look like a letter in which an early doctor of trans medicine weighs the benefits of phalloplasty with a colleague. Or a sensational press headline from the 1950s: “Flames Kill Woman Masquerading as Man.” Other examples might be completely opaque, such as a 1940s article about a man and woman who were arrested desegregating a Greyhound bus in Petersburg, Virginia, which does not appear to be a record of gender nonconformity at all. Other sources, however, reveal that the journalist did not know that the man was assigned female.

Using these examples and others, this exhibit highlights instances in which transmasculine people and perspectives were not recorded in ways that left clear traces of trans lives in U.S. archives, despite their presence in the past. In doing so, for the years 1940 through 1975, it adds texture and complexity to what might feel like familiar territory: the erasure of LGBTQ histories. The phenomenon of transmasculine erasure is a close sibling to lesbian erasure, which, in addition to being a sustained subject of historical research, recently inspired a popular meme: “and they were roommates.” Videos across platforms such as TikTok and Instagram have satirized past and present historians’ refusal to identify queer relationships when they see them by, for example, referring to obviously queer couples as “roommates” in a process that one might call “straightwashing.” In contrast, this exhibit focuses on instances when people in the past who were in a position to “make history” failed to document these stories in part or in whole or when those records have been lost: reporters who used sensationalized and tragic stories to sell papers, police and coroners issuing reports about trans people, physicians who donated their correspondence to academic archives, and transmasculine people themselves.

Trans and queer theorists have long questioned, or outright denied, the political benefits of gender nonconforming people becoming visible to wider society. In the 1970s, French philosopher Michel Foucault suggested caution about the concept of promoting LGBTQ representation.[2] He argued that identity categories are fundamental to surveillance, regulation, and social control by legal, religious, and scientific authorities. He worried about the tendency of communities to form around identity categories and the prospect that those communities might then replicate their historical pathologization, as occurred when homosexual men accepted some of the language of medical discourse. In trans theory, critiques of visibility politics coalesced in the anthology Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (2017). In this collection, several theorists observed that Time magazine’s identification of the “Trans Tipping-Point” in 2014 coincided with a steady increase in known trans homicides, leading scholars to wonder whether visibility begets violence.[3]

This exhibit begins with the suspicious 1951 death of Thomas Oliver Mapes, a white person who was assigned female at birth and lived as a man in rural Michigan. Mapes exemplifies the most common type of historical erasure in that a lack of records leads to more questions than answers about his life and death. At the same time, Mapes’s death itself may have been an act of self-censorship. While this project introduces his story into the historical record, it also uses the occasion to reflect on what is lost to time. Next, the exhibit considers the places where Black and transmasculine historical figures shaped their own mark on history, selectively choosing when to be seen as gender nonconforming and when to perform conformity to preserve their livelihoods and safety. More specifically, the exhibit retells how civil rights advocate Pauli Murray and jazz performer Gladys Bentley obscured their gender nonconformity to escape political persecution in the Jim Crow South and during the Lavender Scare, and how both chose historical visibility during less precarious times. Lastly, this project visits the archives of early doctors of trans medicine in search of an explanation for trans men’s relative exclusion from these records.

[1] Emily Skidmore, True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2017); Jen Manion, Female Husbands: A Trans History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Hugh Ryan, The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison (New York: Bold Type, 2022).

[2] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978).

[3] Reina Gossett et al., eds., Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2017).