Since taking office for the second time, Trump has waged all-out war on Americans. In a flurry of executive orders specifically targeting trans people, he’s banned the revision of gender markers on federal IDs, blocked gender affirming care for minors, targeted trans prisoners, and taken great strides to remove DEI programs in schools and workplaces. In his inaugural speech, Trump set the tone for his presidency: “As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female.” This promise was realized shortly after in an executive order declaring there are only two sexes, and they cannot be changed.
We’re entering a dark period in history, but we’ve lived through worse. Consider the life of Jennie June, a self-described androgyne who chronicled her time as a sex worker in 1890s Manhattan in her book The Female-Impersonators. ‘Transsexual’ didn’t come in to popular use in America until the 1950s, but people who decided to live as a gender different from their assigned sex have always existed. And the lack of a coherent category to describe trans people subjected them up to violence without any social or legal protection.
And while trans people may not have been targeted by the law in the way they are being today, the 1800s did see a rise in anti-crossdressing legislation, and we have evidence for how the legal system failed 19th century trans women, especially Black women, in the stories of Frances Thompson and Mary Jones; Frances Thompson is believed to be the first trans woman to testify in front of Congress after she was attacked by Union officers. In her book, June explores how transfeminine people were subject to blackmail, violence, police harassment, theft, murder, and suicide. And turning to authorities for aid was even more risky for trans people when it might have led to legal charges, familial disownment, and public ridicule.
June was a member of a sexual subculture in lower Manhattan she referred to as the Underworld, filled with trans women and the men who loved them: gay men, prostitutes— both cis and trans— johns, immigrants, and other people considered outcasts from mainstream society. One of the hubs of the Underworld was Paresis Hall, a gay bar and brothel near Washington Square Park.
On one fateful visit to Paresis Hall, June claims to have been welcomed into a club that seems part secret society, part activist organization, and part support group. June was invited to join the Cercle Hermaphroditos, an organization which its leader explained was founded “to defend against the world’s bitter persecution” of transfeminine people. The club maintained a room in the hall to store women’s clothes for members, so they would not be subject to police harassment or street violence on their way to meetings. There members met to dress in feminine attire and talk amongst themselves. June catalogs a sampling of topics discussed including: fashion, sexual experiences, how to be in solidarity with transmasculine people, and scientific and philosophical theories of transfemininity, among other topics.
But perhaps the most interesting dimension of the Cercle Hermaphroditos was that all members understood themselves as representatives of a marginalized political class. Even decades after June’s book was published, many trans people understood themselves as uniquely afflicted, or as among a class of people who share a certain medical diagnosis. The fact that the Cercle recognized transfeminine people as a political demographic challenges what is written about trans life before Stonewall. The women in Paresis Hall were not obedient to medical authority; they were not apolitical; and they had sophisticated understandings of their social positions.
In truth, besides June’s account of the group, we have scant evidence for the group’s existence. This could be because, according to June, the group scattered after a police raid less than a year after she joined. Or maybe the group’s activities were limited by the threat of violence. June recounts life stories of two members, one of whom was incarcerated and one of whom was murdered. In the chapter following these two narratives, June gathers and reprints newspaper accounts of murdered trans women.
So maybe it was because of the violent ends trans women were likely to meet that we don’t have concrete evidence of the group’s activities— no surviving literature, no lawsuits, no descriptions of protests, no speeches. We know Paresis Hall really did serve as a refuge for trans people. It’s possible that a trans woman, inspired by the fact that, for the first time in her life, she was surrounded by people like herself, could have imagined them banding together not just in friendship but in political action. It’s not inconceivable that she may have exaggerated friendships and conversations, building them up into a group that may have in actuality been more of a loose network of like-minded individuals.
I would love to stumble upon some trove of documents in the archive that might point to the Cercle Hermaphroditos’ broader legacy. But truly, what excites me most about the group is that whether or not it was a real organization, June’s description of it serves as a model for imagining trans liberation and the work of trans activism in dark times. The group may not have existed, but the radical dream it represented surely did, and we can trace it back to June’s writing.
June opens The Female-Impersonators with a stark description of the political situation she responded to:
My motive was humanitarian. My aim was to save thousands of innocent stepchildren of Nature from an aggregate of tens of thousands of years in prison, and bring about a repeal of the laws under which they are incarcerated, and which are still in the codes because civilized man has not yet entirely emerged from the prejudice and superstition of the Dark Ages. My second aim was to put a stop to the continuous string of murders of these stepchildren…My third aim was to save hundreds of these superlatively melancholy sexual intermediates from suicide as the result of bitter persecution by those who pride themselves on the fact that in their own case, sex has been thoroughly differentiated.
June’s book pursued the same radical aims she attributes to the Cercle Hermaphroditos. In a time of intense anti-trans violence, she worked to change her world for the better. Today, we find ourselves at the onset of what promises to be a scary time for trans people. But our situation is better than June’s. Our communities are more stable, our friends more numerous. Despair is not an option. We need to keep June’s radical dream of transfeminine safety alive. We need to take action and achieve a better world.
Eamon Schlotterback is a scholar and writer based at Northeastern University. Her work attends to the creative dimensions of trans life. She has published in Feminist Studies, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and The Routledge Handbook of Trans Literature. Schlotterback is currently at work on a book project tentatively titled The Poetics of Transition.
